American chestnut | Hacker News Reader

American chestnut

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Related threads. Others?

The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26441593 - March 2021 (85 comments)

The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26363660 - March 2021 (1 comment)

Blight wiped out the American chestnut. Scientists are close to bringing it back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21846891 - Dec 2019 (2 comments)

American chestnut poised for return to America's forests - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13855137 - March 2017 (1 comment)

American chestnut trees are “technically extinct” - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13478910 - Jan 2017 (120 comments)

I've been so frustrated they refused to sell me the seeds with blight resistance. They wont sell it because it's immune to roundup.

Is that true? I thought that you couldn't buy Darling 58 because the petition to sell it to the public hadn't been approved by the government.

There are three separate petitions underway. Last I heard only one of the three was fully submitted, the rest are in varying stages of preparation. The individual doing the lions share of the labor on these petitions just defended his PhD (of which the petitions themselves made up a large component of his dissertation).

Sorry Dan, wasn't trying to post duplicative content! Will do a better job looking for similar threads in the future.

It's ok! those links to previous threads that I post are just for curious archive-combers. When a post is an actual dupe, we bury it.

It's true that the American Chestnut had a major thread less than a year ago, but the line that srcreigh quoted from the FAQ says "or so" to give us a few months' worth of interpretive wiggle room.

> If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Adding to this, if you post a re-post you will be redirected to the old thread instead of your new one. So you will know that you're reposting!

(I was a little embarrassed when this happens to me at first, but I have gotten over it now. It's nice to have a computer fact check me. Even if it means my clever titles have to be thrown away!)

A forester friend found a sizable American chestnut on a survey and collected a fair number of seeds. My back yard should be an ideal environment for one, so we are planning on trying to germinate some this year.

Your friend should report the location to the American Chestnut Foundation. They can monitor the tree, get it gene sequenced, learn more about it.

Every survivor is another set of genes that maybe lead to the revival of the species.

This is fascinating. From a web search, the American Chestnut Foundation has a formal process for submitting a sample.

On their request for samples, and why [0]: "Please let us know if you think you have found an American chestnut by submitting a Tree Locator Form and leaf sample. We are always looking to expand our inventory of chestnut trees across the native range. [...] "TACF is continuing its breeding program to make further gains in disease resistance and forest competitiveness, as well as forest health and restoration in general."

On how to submit a sample [1]: The foundation has developed a procedure where you can submit a twig, leaf, and photos to one of their representatives, to verify if the samples came from an American chestnut tree.

[0] https://acf.org/resources/faqs/

[1] https://acf.org/resources/identification/

I took the lazy route, but you provided all the details I ought to have. Thanks! I hope someone reads it and reports a tree this way.

Thanks for sharing! It’s likely I never would have learned about it otherwise.

I checked, they did.

Please tell your friend to report it. If it survived and is still producing seeds, then that has a good chance of having blight resistant genes! There are a lot of people working really hard on bringing the species back, and the benefits could be enormous!

You can always cross your fingers but the destruction was so widespread that it's unlikely that any indigenous immunity existed. If it did we would certainly know by now.

But every surviving chestnut might have resistances to something else, like other diseases, stressors or environmental conditions, and we are going to want to cross breed the resistant plants with every other chestnut we can get our hands on in order to create a robust population. Otherwise you end up planting a bunch of trees that die in the first drought, ice storm, or are only happy in one section of the former range.

If it's really accessible, it might be worth trying to do an air layer propagation on it.

If you or your friend is selling any, let me know (feel free to PM, see my profile).

For those in the SF Bay Area, there is actually a 100-150 year old chestnut orchard in the Santa Cruz mountains that contains American, Asian, and European chestnut trees. The orchard is open every fall to the public and you can go and collect the nuts. It's a fun family activity. Google Skyline Chestnuts. The interesting thing is the presence of American chestnut trees -- the trees don't seem to be affected by chestnut blight.

Not quite the same, but when I was a kid there was an abandoned homestead in Western Oregon (I'm thinking south of Salem, just west of I-5) that had a few living trees. My dad's theory was they were planted there and were isolated enough that the blight never reached them.

Anyone who's remotely interested in trees, or literature, should read Richard Powers's fantastic Pulitzer-winning work of fiction, "Overstory: A Novel". I can't recommend it highly enough.

I am growing a batch of Dunstan chestnuts from seeds that I overwintered from https://chestnutridgeofpikecounty.com/. It's fun to see how much interest the American Chestnut has garnered in the last 20 years. I may have 20-30 seedlings this year and plan to plant them around Evanston, IL. Rogue forestry in the dark of night.

What's the major differences between Dunstan chestnuts (a hybrid) and 'true' American Chestnuts? Or do we even know, given how long its been since the American Chestnuts died off?

https://chestnuthilltreefarm.com/learning-center/dunstan-che...

Personal peeve: the chestnut is not very nutty. And I love nuts of almost all sorts.

It's really more like a small potato.

And yet, the chestnut is one of the very few commonly eaten botanical nuts (along with the hazelnut and some acorns) -- nearly all other culinary nuts are otherwise (drupes, seeds, legumes, etc).

Also, fwiw basically everything you know about the chestnut tree is a lie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TksLHWB9Wbk

A clarification for those watching the video dominance is generally defined in terms of biomass not numbers. The American Chestnut could grow quite large, which changes some of these comparisons.

There was one in the city I grew up in, there was no other trees anywhere near it. Once per year chestnuts would be everywhere.

But it died before I became a teenager, me and my friends use to love sitting under it. Shows how easily that disease spreads.

I'm the Nevada City area.

There are quite a few large chestnut trees here. Last November, in my walks around the city, I gathered buckets or pockets full of the nuts and wound-up with 4-5 jars worth in my refrigerator. I still have half a jar left. They're tasty and easy to cook if you quarter them with a serrated knife and fry like potatoes.

Edit: I assume all the trees here were planted or spread from planted trees since this California. With each Chestnut tree group separate, the ability of blight to spread is somewhat limited (but not impossible, still I hope it doesn't).

Depending on the type of chestnut, you can "fry" them in a pan with the skin still on. I think that that's the "roasted chestnuts by the fire" thing in the Christmas song. All you have to do is to cut a small slit in the skin (I was told as a kid that otherwise a chestnut would explode but I don't know how true that is as I have never seen one explode myself). After you have scored them, you can just "fry" the chestnuts in a pan on a stove or an open flame. The traditional roasting pans were made of sheet metal and had holes in them to let the heat and flame in to speed up the cooking. I have found that a cast-iron pan cooks them well enough even if it's slower. You know that the chestnuts are cooked when the skin becomes dry and it breaks off easily from the chestnuts. If they are undercooked, you will still see the "fuzzy" second skin sticking to them and they will taste very bitter. Cooked ones will be golden in color and their skins (both the outside one and the fuzzy one) will just peel off. My favorite thing is to give peeled chestnuts to someone you care about while you eat them. They will appreciate it because peeling chestnuts inevitably burns your fingers.

Keep in mind that roasting chestnuts is appropriate only for some types of chestnuts. the roasting kind have a "square" bottom with two long, parallel sides. Wild chestnuts (which usually are smaller and have a bulgy side) do not roast well at all. Instead, you will want to boil them in salt until they are soft. To eat them, you bite and split them in the middle with your teeth and "suck" out the pulp. The pulp is somewhat sweet and not bad. They are good for a snack as they are easy to carry around and last a few days. Roasted chestnuts are only good while warm and they become very hard to eat after they cool off.

If you can make (or find) some chestnut flour, there are recipes for chestnut cake, chestnut pancakes, or fried chestnut dumplings. All of those taste very unique and weird (I never got used to it) and are way worse than anything "modern" made with regular white flour. I really got to eat them when visiting "old school", cheap relatives for Christmas. I heard that people used to make chestnut bread but I never had that.

Chestnuts are also perfect for a Winter risotto. The undertones of cooked down shallots with the texture of Arborio rice and the flavor of chestnuts are a perfect combination.

I've blown up a number of them. Kind of reminds me of exploding a hard boiled egg- if you get unlucky, the inside turns to powder which is now all over your oven/ house

My mom exploded a chestnut once. It sounded like an m-80, blew a few of its neighbors off the cookie sheet, and the inside of the oven was spattered with fluffy bits of flesh.

I know of at least one additional American chestnut tree not listed in this article, in Oak Glen, CA. I was apple picking there and met a wonderful old man from Brittany who made a pilgrimage there every year to pick chestnuts for traditional dishes. It was sad to hear from him that in his youth chestnuts grew in abundance, but today they are few and far between.

The chestnuts themselves are tasty and very fun to gather, with their interesting and spiky seed pods.

Darling 58 in your polyculture orchard folks, maybe the US can catch up to Chinese chestnut production by the 23rd century.

Can you actually buy these? I've wanted to plant them for a while, but as far as I can tell they're not actually publicly available in any way.

maybe you can recreate them? otherwise https://acf.org/ny/how-you-can-help/ get them in a couple years

Quite a few of them in Oregon apparently. I didn't realize that we're considered more or less blight-free.

A bit off-topic and I don't know whether anyone will find it as interesting as I did, but today while reading the source code of npm I stumbled upon a word called "arborist" (which means "tree surgeon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arborist)), and there's an npm package @npmcli/arborist whose stated purpose is to "inspect and manage node_modules trees".

I have neither directly used this package nor have anything to do with arboriculture (what arborists engage in), I just thought that someone chose a very fitting name for an npm package.

After seeing this HN post I couldn't not share this finding.

One prevailing thought at the time to fight chestnut blight was to cut existing trees down to prevent the spread.

A counter thought is that this action reduced the odds of finding trees that had natural immunity.

I am certain that a lot of crocodile tears were shed about having to cut down all of those trees. If there's a profit to be made - or lost - some people will take any excuse.

If you cut down the trees before the blight got bad, at least you got one more warehouse full of wood before the party was over. I'm sure it was a bit like the run on toilet paper two years ago.

If you live in the UK and would like to help protect sweet chestnuts from the same fate, please consider participating in the "Check a Sweet Chestnut" citizen science project run by the RHS and Coventry University: https://www.rhs.org.uk/science/help-our-research/check-a-swe... .

The species was devastated by chestnut blight, a fungal disease that came from Chinese chestnut trees introduced into North America from East Asia. It is estimated that between 3 and 4 billion American chestnut trees were destroyed in the first half of the 20th century by chestnut blight after the blight's initial discovery in North America in 1904

That's sad.

Similarly, American ash (white ash) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraxinus_americana

I grew up in a neighborhood full of beautiful mature Ash trees. In the past 20 years, almost all of them have died and been cut down due to the emerald ash borer.

There are also the closely related Ozark and Allegheny chinquapins that have had varied success surviving the blight.

Yes! I’ve not yet seen a surviving mature American chestnut, but there’s (what I’m pretty sure is) a C. pumila specimen in a churchyard not far from where I live. Fairly cute tree; it produces nuts but I have not tried them.

I'm from Maryland. I'd often see chestnuts while walking in the woods. They (and their trees) looked just like this. Were these likely another variety? Or was I seeing these? It's weird to think that I normally saw an endangered tree but on the other hand I often saw bald eagles.

American Chestnuts are very different from horse chestnuts (likely what you were seeing)

Thank you!

There's a GMO chestnut awaiting FDA approval that, with some luck, will be wholly immune to the blight and could prove to be the comeback generations have been waiting for. Unfortunately, this requires a rather long, painful bureaucratic process.

(On my phone, otherwise I'd find some links.)

There are also groups crossing American and Asian chestnuts and then back-crossing them. Some are just exposing the offspring, and I think another is testing for the right genes.

I don't think anyone's mentioned using the wood for furniture and flooring. There's a market for it:

https://www.chestnutfloors.com/

Something weird going on with this tree. I've seen in posted on reddit and hackernews all around the past couple of weeks.

Funny how knowledge spreads on the internet.

Stretch explanation: in popular culture the chestnut tree served as a major plot point in Richard Power's 2018 novel The Overstory, which won several major awards. His most recent novel was published in late September, so to some extent his name and plots are back in the news.

Stretchier explanation: Frequency illusion, also called Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. Per Wikipedia, "a cognitive bias in which, after noticing something for the first time, there is a tendency to notice it more often, leading someone to believe that it has a high frequency of occurrence"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

It's probably Baader-Meinhof plus an actual increase in frequency, which can happen if people see an interesting link on NH and then share it socially on other sites (which then gets shared further). Interesting topics seem to be fairly "bursty" among various social networks.

Yeah, I've been aware of the demise of the American chestnut tree for years now, but I'm just seeing it in heightened frequency lately. You're right that social networks can get bursty.

Kids today just call it 'viral'

I'm currently reading the The Overstory and that plot point is why I clicked the link!

It was mentioned here in a comment[1] the other day on an an article about another attempt to recreate the aurochs and reintroduce it in Europe.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30327583

I figure, somebody saw that and read a bit more about it (as I did) and decided to share.

I'd suggest that it's due to a lot of folks reading "The Overstory" by Richard Powers which talks a bit about the loss of the American Chestnut.

I think it might be very simple. It only takes a couple of votes for a story to hit the front page. Those votes could have come from people like you who are on both sites. Once something hits the front page here, people seem to take it more seriously, which is a bit of a shame since so many quality submissions just slide off the new page because they fail to get the 2 or 3 necessary upvotes.

The responsible upvote on /newest was probably mine. I always upvote the chestnut things I see because I greatly admire it as an example of long-term thinking/projects and the benefits of selective breeding & genetic engineering, and of course the history angles are just cool.

If this is the same Chestnut Tree that was on our street, it's a very messy tree for an urban environment (massive tree). It would rain baseball sized pods down on cars parked underneath it. It would leave a huge mess on the sidewalks and road every year.

Huge messes and baseball-sized pods are characteristic of black walnut trees. Chestnuts are much smaller.

Unlikely unless you’re over 70, 80 years old and these are childhood memories.

Chestnut trees did not die out completely. We had one in the middle of the school playground when I was a kid.

I know. But that chestnut was probably not an American one.

I think those are horse-chestnuts, different tree and not directly related to the American chestnut. We used to make little figures and animals out of the nuts and some matches in kindergarten.

Note that horse chestnuts (aka "buckeyes"), besides (as you say) being unrelated to standard chestnuts, are toxic. Just handling them is not a problem, but eating them is definitely bad news. Native Americans used to grind them up and use them to stun/kill fish.

Not to be confused with buckeyes made from peanut butter and chocolate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckeye_candy

Very bad news Indeed! Upvote for the PSA word of caution. I had a neighbor years ago who used just a few pieces of one as garnish on a soup. Made him horribly horribly sick; he survived without medical treatment, but attributes that mostly to the very tiny amounts he ingested.

They do make really nice finishes for guitars and basses.

https://www.sevenstring.org/threads/share-your-buckeye-burl-...

Wow, I had no idea! I nibbled on them because I thought they were the same as the edible ones but that was a one-time experiment.

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