It's In My Nature

The American chestnut tree was an iconic species to the Appalachian ecosystem; known for its rapid growth, high yield harvest and quality of timber. Chestnuts are an important keystone species to hardwood ecosystems because of the nut abundance and their nutritional value. Chestnuts also had a very economical importance because the wood is highly rot resistant. This made chestnuts very popular for building structures such as log cabins and railroad ties. At the start of the twentieth century, it was said that one in every four trees in Pennsylvania was an American chestnut. In the 1920’s, the chestnut blight had found its way to the United States from the Chinese chestnut and had begun to move through the landscape. By the 1940’s, the American chestnut had been removed from the Appalachian forests due to the devastation of the chestnut blight. Biologists suggest that this one of the greatest ecological disasters in history. Today, groups such as the American Chestnut Foundation, the U...

Jim Walizers chestnuts are proving to hold very similar characteristics of a true American chestnut with fast growth, high nut yield, and timber-like growth characteristics. His trees average 8-16 inches of growth in a year and by year three are mature enough to produce nuts. This is a perfect example as to why oaks were unable to replace the loss of chestnuts from the ecosystem. Chestnuts will have high fruit yields consistently every year, will produce nuts by year five and are extremely fast growing. Oaks on the other hand, are super slow growing and are commonly outcompeted because of that and they do not have consistent fruit yields. Oaks need to be at least 20 years old to produce acorns and only once every 3-5 years will have high harvest yields. The other years will be small and low acorn harvests.  In the early stages of Walizers research, he had planted one of his successful blight resistant chestnuts. The first-year growth was not straight and was simply not th...