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Comment by ponector | Hacker News Reader

Street vendors with roasted chestnuts are common all over Europe, especially at Christmas markets

Those are a different type of Asian / Chinese chestnut. Smaller, less flavorful etc etc.

Those shells are no joke either.

When I collect the nuts from around my property even leather mittens don't work. The spikes on them (both Chinese and American) are intense. I don't know how the squirrels can handle it, but they do (though they go after them after the nut has fully open and fallen to the ground. I imagine the spikes are the trees way of discouraging the rodents from taking them until they're fully ripe and fertile)

What the heck you write about, back home we have chestnut trees being up to 500 years old (thats the local record setter in one tiny eastern european country).

No chinese products around, not sure if you actually have any real experience of stuff you comment on.

These are the chestnuts I know, that are sold as street food: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castanea_sativa

Native in Europe and Asia.

There also is a different kind of chestnut commonly found in parks, along roads, that is not edible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesculus_hippocastanum

"a different kind of chestnut commonly found"

Sometimes called horse chestnut, but not actually a chestnut, completely unrelated. North American native, though I understand it's been introduced into Europe.

They are a third sort, European chestnuts. They are generally held to be better flavor than the Asian varieties, but not as good as the nearly extinct (but not quite) American Chestnuts.

do the European / Asian versions survive and grow in America? Are they being grown?

This is a good question, and I'm struggling to find a clear answer.

The Asian varieties are generally blight resistant and grow in the US, but they aren't as good for nuts or lumber. The European varieties are slightly less susceptible to blight, but are definitely susceptible. There are European/Asian crosses that are more resistant, but they don't seem to be widely grown here. Maybe they aren't as cold tolerant as the native American varieties, and thus more restricted for where they can be grown?

The parallel question is why Europe doesn't seem to be having as many problems with blight if their trees are susceptible. I think it's partly that the disease just isn't as prevalent yet, and partly that there are some "odd" biological controls being used there that for some reason don't work as well in the US: https://portal.ct.gov/CAES/Fact-Sheets/Plant-Pathology/Prote...

would it be possible to cross the plants the other way? Make the European/Asian ones big and tasty like the American ones. I am sure there are people thinking about this full time and would have much better ideas, but just wondering.

Yes. The American Chestnut Foundation has been working on that for several decades; not quite there yet, but it's probably possible.

More at https://tacf.org/

While American chestnuts are often more flavorful, they are almost always smaller than the commercial Chinese and Japanese varieties.

American chestnuts are actually smaller still than the Chinese variety.

The varieties grown and sold in Europe are larger than the Asian.

I have an American/Chinese F1 hybrid here on my hobby farm and its nuts are smaller than the Chinese. Which aren't very large.

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