Comment by mattegan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattegan | Hacker News Reader

Cool to see this here and people talking about it. I volunteered with the American Chestnut Foundation during my summers in high school. Usually spent a few weeks on the Meadowview research farm collecting catkins off trees, “processing” the catkins to bottle the pollen, bagging trees to prevent uncontrolled cross pollination, and pollinating trees by hand.

My uncle and I also usually took hikes in NC to try and find remaining trees with pollen in the wild. From what I understand, the pollen from these few remaining living trees is used to help re-introduce regional biodiversity into the backcrossed American/Chinese hybrids.

Highly recommend going and helping out on the farm if you can spare a week or two, or joining your state chapter if you’ve got one - or sending your kids!

It's too late this year but would they want me to mail catkins from a chestnut producing survivor up in NJ? I also have chestnuts collected from prior years and 2 seedlings growing from some of the prior collected ones that were planted.

The survivor has 2 branches coming out of trunk each roughly 42" in circumference, it is not as tall as the one in the article but it's probably got similar girth. The tree is at least 70 years old, I'll confirm with the landlord whether he planted it or if it survived from before his time (he's been here approx 90 years, and I know one red oak and an eastern red cedar is older than he is). We do have Chinese/Japanese chestnuts on the grounds here that are more prolific and it's likely the seedlings I have are hybrids, but who knows?

One interesting thing I noted from the American vs. Chinese/Japanese chestnuts is the chestnut weevil does not appear to infect the nuts.

From the sound of your description, I would get in touch. You can probably find an email by googling.

I grew up on a farm near Media, Pennsylvania. We had quite a few American Chestnut trees. One of my first childhood memories is picking up the nuts off the grass. I doubt those trees are still there. I should go back sometime and see.

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