Two of the Chinese Chestnut trees started ripening their nuts a week ago. Those trees have by now dropped almost all their nuts. It only takes a week for them to fall, once they start. Until about 100 years ago here in the American Midwest, the forests were mainly American Chestnut trees. Then the chestnut blight found its way to North America, and within a couple decades they were almost all gone.
The Chinese Chestnut trees seem to be quite resistant to the blight. I planted a half dozen of them over 25 years ago, and they have been producing nice crops of nuts every autumn for the last 8 or 10 years now.
While the American Chestnut trees were tall, majestic giants of the forest with single trunks, the Chinese Chestnut trees are bushy, having several trunks and reaching a height of only 15 to 25 feet.
The Chinese nuts have a pretty good "chestnut" flavor, but it depends very much on which tree the nuts come from. The three trees I got from Millers or Stark Brothers nurseries have large nuts with very good flavor; the squirrels love them. The trees from the National Arbor Day Foundation produce much smaller nuts with either no flavor or a somewhat bitter taste. Even the squirrels will not eat them.
We cure the fallen chestnuts at room temperature for a week to 10 days, partly to improve the flavor and partly so we can see which ones are going to be wormy. Before we started spraying the chestnuts trees in summer, most of the nuts were wormy. Now, usually only a few are wormy. You apparently have to spray past the chestnuts' flowering time in mid-June to stop the worms. The "worms" actually look to me like the larvae (maggots) of some sort of fly (Diptera).
After they have been culled and cured, we score the skin with a sharp small knife and freeze those we aren't going to eat right away. Chestnuts do not keep well in a refrigerator; they get moldy very quickly in the fridge. On the other hand, they keep for years frozen in zip-top plastic freezer bags.
You can fix chestnuts, whether imported Italian nuts or home-grown Chinese nuts, in a variety of ways. My favorite is freshly roasted. Regardless of how you cook them, you have to score the shiny brown skin before you heat them. Otherwise, the moisture in the nuts turns to high pressure steam and the nuts can explode! That is very messy, at best.
Besides freshly roasted chstnuts, you can boil them for later use in chestnut dressing or stuffing, or added to vegetables. While brussels sprouts are not usually my favorite vegetable, when cooked with chestnuts and well seasoned, they are actually delicious. Boiled chestnuts are also good added to red cabbage. This is an area well worth some exploration and experimentation.
As a dessert, boiled chestnuts are pureed and then served with whipped cream, meringues, or other sweets. You might try the puree with chocolate sauce and then whipped cream. In Europe, it is served as vermicelli after having been pressed out through some sort of sieve.
We also have some Carpathian ("English") Walnut trees, which sometimes produce a useful crop of nuts. They are very sensitive to late spring freezes, and we had such a freeze this past spring. So it looks as if our Carpathian Walnut trees are completely barren this year. By the way, the English apparently refer to these trees as Persian Walnuts. Our trees came from a nursery, perhaps Millers, and were grown from trees found in the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe. They seem to be fairly hardy here in Indiana.
We have some regular native Black Walnut trees, and some of these are heavily loaded with nuts this year. I will leave most of those to the squirrels, if a diet of soft, easily eaten chestnuts has not spoiled them for tougher fare.
We have a pair of selected Shelbark Hickory trees, whose large nuts are just as tasty as pecans, but much hardier here in our cold winters. The shells are however very thick and hard, and you need a hammer or a special black walnut cracker to open them. The weather this past spring seems to have affected the hickories badly, as they have very few nuts this year. Hickory nuts are also susceptible to what look to be the same worms we find in unsprayed chestnuts.
Hazelnuts or filberts also grow here, and they can have nuts. You need at least two bushes for cross-pollination, and we have quite a few more. The hazelnut bushes we have seem to be very variable as to nut quality, and only one of the several bushes has both heavy crops and large, tasty nuts. Squirrels love these too, and will start harvesting them in August, long before they look ripe to human eyes. Some years, they get almost every single decent hazel nut. The squirrels of course ignore the nuts on the bushes that we don't care for.
We have tried hybrid American-Chinese chestnuts, but the small trees available did not survive even one summer in our field. We tried butternuts and heartnuts (both related to walnuts), but neither survived here. We tried a hardy pecan, and lost it the first winter. There have been a lot of interesting nut tress that we were not able to grow here, for one reason or another. Still, it's a great feeling when you start harvesting your own nut crops in autumn!
Good gardening,
Jim
