What kind of chestnuts are there

The tree is often found planted in towns. The American buckeye trees are also in this family. American Chestnut — If your tree has long toothed pendant leaves like this, it may be a member in the chestnut family. The American chestnut has long canoe shaped leaves with a prominent lance shaped tip, with a coarse, forward hooked teeth at the edge of the leaf. Once you have decided that you have a Chestnut, the second step in deciding if your tree is American chestnut is to distinguish whether it is pure American, or if it has some non-American chestnut parentage.

Most of established Chestnuts are Chinese, and they have a very distinctive apple tree shape, rounded with multi-stemmed trunk see next column. The leaf is spade shaped, with a rounded bottom and is characteristically wider in the other third of the leaf. It is glossy and heavier than American leaves. But fortunately, each species of chestnut as a pure species has a definite kind of glandular hair on the back of the leaf than can be seen with a good dissecting scope.

This is generally the safest way to confirm identification of a pure species. American Chestnuts in Kentucky. Learn More. Unless you are of recently European or Asian heritage, chestnuts have become lost in our memory.

Americans have not grown up with chestnuts as part of their food culture. Today, we at Chestnut Hill Outdoors, have cultivars of chestnuts that allow the establishment of an American chestnut industry, and access to unique products made with chestnuts. We are at a time of rebirth of chestnut as an important food and wildlife tree for North America again. Chestnut has been called the Bread Tree — it has a been staple in the diet for people all over the world for thousands of years.

It is a very high quality food source, with the nutritional makeup of a grain, yet grows on a tree, without annual tillage of the soil, and can bear crops for s of years. Chestnuts are very low in fat and have no cholesterol. The protein is very high quality, with an amino acid balance similar to milk or egg, both of which are considered the perfect protein. They contain high amounts of Tryptophan, Isoleucine, Lysine, linoleic acid and sulfur-containing amino acids.

Chestnuts are also gluten free, and can be incorporated into many foods as a gluten free flour substitute. For more information on chestnut nutrition, click here. The American Heart Association promotes a high carbohydrate, low fat, low sodium diet as a principal defense against heart disease. Until the introduction of the potato and maize from the New World, entire communities depended on chestnuts as a primary source of food and carbohydrate.

It was a staple in their diet, being eaten fresh after harvest, then the stored ones were consumed, then the dried chestnuts, and finally the sweet tasting flour, added to soups, stews, polentas, and made into cakes and breads. Dried chestnuts will last a year, providing food all the way to the next harvest.

They were also fed to animals, and the rot-resistant wood was used in building everything from fences to vineyards to houses and barns. Chestnut was survival for the peasants during bad economic times. After the fall of the Roman Empire, during the Middle Ages, and during the Great War and World War II, chestnuts were critical for the people of the mountains, providing a very valuable source of carbohydrate.

It is only recently, with the movement of families into the industrialized cities, that the dependence on the chestnut tree and its culture has declined. Traditionally, chestnuts were harvested by hand, raking the nuts and burrs into piles in the mountainside orchards. The nuts and burrs were transported by mule and cart to the homestead. Placed on the cool north side of a building, the nuts and burrs were covered with a layer of green chestnut leaves, where the nuts could be stored for several months.

To dry the nuts for longer storage, the nuts were placed on a raised ventilated floor of special buildings, where a chestnut wood fire was kept lit below, and the warmth and smoke from the fire slowly dried out the nuts. Once dry, the shells could be easily removed. To cook with these nuts, they simply had to be re-hydrated again by boiling in water. The dried nuts were also ground into flour with stone mills.

The smoky sweet flavor is excellent, as the carbohydrate turns to sugar as the nuts dry. Chestnuts were also an important food for livestock. The nuts were fed to hogs and cattle during the winter, and the animals were put out into the orchards after harvest to clean up the rest of the nuts.

The sweet nuts impart a sweet flavor to the meat, and chestnut-fed pork is considered a delicacy in Spain and Italy. Chestnut leaves were also nutritious fodder for animals, and dried leaves were used as bedding for livestock during winter. Chestnut forests also provide other delicacies. Honey made from chestnut blossoms is not very sweet, but has an intense, distinctive and astringent flavor. It is considered an aphrodisiac in Italy.

Beekeepers depended on chestnut, as the trees flower late after many of the other tree species have finished. This makes the wood extremely rot resistant. Chestnut trees, especially when grown in forest settings, grow straight and make excellent lumber which were cut into durable straight-grained planks or could be split easily for fencing and posts. Robert Dunstan described how you could put a chestnut fence post in the ground for 50 years, pull it up, turn it over, and get 50 more years out of the other side!

Because of this rot resistance, chestnut wood was used for ship-building, bridge timbers, railroad ties, exterior siding, barn and house posts and beams, flooring, doors, windows, exterior trim and any other area that was exposed to the weather.

Chestnut was also made split rail fences, fence posts, vineyard trellises, water well-casings, wine casks, barrels, baskets, furniture and caskets. Chestnut is truly a tree that carries people from cradle to grave.

Chestnut trees were coppiced for various uses. When the tree is cut, the stumps send up multiple sprouts very readily this is seen today in America, where the roots survive the blight underground, and send up shoots again and again, to become re-infected with the blight. The coppice shoots were harvested at various cycles depending on the use. Vineyard trellises and stakes were cut after only years, fence posts after years, whereas saw logs were cut on a year basis.

Today there is still a strong demand for chestnut timber as an alternative to chemically treated pine for exterior uses. In Linville NC, chestnut bark was used as shingles for siding many of the houses in this community. This was a traditional Appalachian building technique, and many buildings survive today, including the beautiful All Saints Episcopal Church, in which the entire building- beams, rafters and siding, was made of chestnut in the Unfortunately today, years later, there is no more chestnut wood left, so Tulip Poplar bark has become a substitute, but it does not have the rot-resistance of chestnut.

Tannin is extracted from the wood for use in the tanning industry for dyeing silk and leather and in the production of varnish and other products. The wood was finely ground and the tannin leached from the wood by soaking in water. This traditional industry was common in the mountains of northern Italy, but is declining due to the use of substitute materials. The Greek father of pharmacology Dioscourides and the Roman Galen reported on the medicinal qualities of chestnut.

Teas made from the leaves are a cure for respiratory diseases such as whooping cough, and mixed with thyme makes a powerful medicinal syrup that is used to treat cough, diarrhea, backache and intoxication. Tea made from chestnut flowers is supposed to cure sinusitis. Many small shoots of trees that were alive formerly still remain. American chestnut trees are deciduous trees that grow rapidly.

They can grow to be as tall as 30 meters. A rapid growth paired with a large number of annual seed crop resulted in the large population of these trees before the attack of blight. Some morphological traits distinguish the American chestnut trees from other chestnut species that are similar.

The leaf shape, nut size, and petiole length are some of the distinguishing features. The leaves are shorter and broader as compared to those of sweet chestnut. They are about 14 to 20cm in length and 7 to 10cm in breadth. American chestnut is monoecious. It produces small, pale-green colored make flowers which occur tightly long catkins. The female parts of the flower are present near the base and appear later in Spring to early summer.

American chestnut trees are self-incompatible which means that two trees any member of the genus Catenea are required for pollination. The nuts of this tree are a distinguishing feature, as mentioned earlier.

They are enclosed in a tan velvet lined burr that is spiny and green in color. The burrs open and fall to the ground near the first frost of the season. The nuts are an important resource. They are edible and are used to treat ailments such as heart conditions, whooping cough, and chafed skin. The flowers of the predominant chestnut species in eastern forests before the early s bloomed so beautifully that it appeared like a sea with white combers plowing across a surface naturalist Donald Culross Peattie.

Unfortunately, in when a blight that came with imported Asian chestnuts resulted in the exuberance to fade. By the s, the destruction was so widespread that only a dozen American chestnut trees survived out of billions! However, after so many years there finally has been a ray of hope. Several hundred chestnuts were planted and this historic planting has completed their first season of full growth in North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee.

Chinese chestnut trees are native to China, Korea, and Taiwan. The scientific name of these trees mollissima has been derived from young leaves and the softly downy shoots. They grow best in zones 6 through They can survive cold winters in northern parts of the U. They are deciduous trees, growing to a height of 20 meters. They have a broad crown. The leaves are arranged in an alternating fashion. Leaves have a toothed margin. Flowers of Chinese chestnut trees are produced in catkins that are 4 to 20cm long.

The female flowers are located at the base while male flowers occupy the rest of the catkin. The fruit of Chinese chestnut trees is a cupule which is densely spiny. It contains two to three brown colored nuts that are glossy in appearance. The nuts of Chinese chestnuts are edible. They are sweet and considered the best tasting of all chestnuts.

Nuts serve as an important food source for wildlife. European chestnut trees are flowering trees that are native to Asia Minor, Southern Europe, and are widely cultivated throughout the temperate world.