Efforts to Restore the American Chestnut in Virginia, Setbacks, and Progress: An Ivy Talk

i am very excited to introduce our speaker today mr tom wilde tom grew up in the tidewater area he his previous career was in geology working for 25 years for chevron specializing in downhill technology interpretation research and teaching he and his wife moved to charlottesville in 2008 where he has worked as a consultant for oil environmental firms and the u.s geological survey today he is fully retired and involved with numerous nature organizations including ivy creek and the chapter of the virginia chapter of the american chestnut foundation and he's currently serving as their president and we are very excited to learn from him all about what is happening with the american chestnut so without further ado um mr tom wilde okay first the correction i am not currently the president i am currently the secretary john stravani who is john cervani who is also on here is currently the president so just that little clarification um all right let me see let me see if i can share my screen uh where'd it go there it is all right can everybody see that yes that's working okay good all right so um for the talk today i'm gonna cover well a lot of topics there's a lot going on with this uh with this effort and with this tree i'm going to start with a little bit of history and i'm going to talk about different restoration strategies and then i'm going to talk about what's working what's not and what we hope is going to be going on in the future so that's kind of my plan um i'm kind of i assume many of you have heard some of the story of the american chestnut so i'm going to spend tons of time on the history part but i'll double check when i finish up there and make sure that there are any questions about that i can get those answered before we move on um the american chestnut um was a east coast tree this item here shows the um here let me get a laser pointer excuse me this shows the range of the the original range of the american chestnut tree um in the dark green is where it was quite prominent and the lighter green was uh more of its extended range um so you can see we're we're sort of right in between uh depending on whether we're on the hills on the hillside or whether you're more to the east it was a pretty common tree in this area and it extends all the way from maine even up into canada um down into georgia and there are even a few examples of chestnut trees that probably were down in florida um just to give you an idea of how prominent this tree used used to be i often give have given this talk and there's almost always someone um an older person in the audience who's in their 80s or so and will come up to me and tell me that as a child they remember looking up in the mountains and seeing what they called snow in summer or snow in june um this is a picture up in shenandoah national park um near stoney man right near the big meadows area and all these trees this is from 1912 and all these trees that have sort of this whitish haze to them these are american chestnut trees if we zoom in on an area like that it probably looks something like this this is a little cheating this is obviously a modern photo and i'm not 100 sure it's an american chestnut but when these things flower especially when the flowers are quite new they're quite white and so it can all look like a snow covered area so i suspect they were very popular very common and you could look up in the in the mountains in mid-june and see what looked like snowfall um they were also common in the piedmont um and in our area um and to bring it a little closer to home these are actually some pictures from ivy creek um there is there are numerous signs of chestnut stumps around ivy creek in tom diroff's report from 2015 where he did a forest survey and for a study he references nine or ten different chestnut stumps here's a picture of one of them from his report so this would have been a tree that the cars and greers knew about they would have known about chestnuts for the wood properties and also for feeding livestock and for eating chestnuts themselves um there's actually also a living american chestnut this is out on the peninsula it's a small seedling but it's still out there and if you're really interested in where it is i think we got this location from mary lee epps and i'm sure she can point you to it there's also a few hybrid trees that have been planted at ivy creek and we can talk about those in just a little bit so a little bit about the american chestnut um it's from the family fugacia which means closely related to oaks and beech trees um it's in that same um family it was a pretty abundant tree or at least locally i won't say all across its range it was this high but there were certainly areas where it where it made up a significant part of the canopy it would have taken the place of probably oaks in its day it's a tall tree can get up to 75 or 100 feet it's fast growing so it probably would have competed well with a tulip tree um in the right environment um they can be quite large uh in diameter and other things of note the mast the amount of nuts that they they can produce is quite quite amazing um very high in protein very high in carbs so it would have been a very important uh wildlife tree it was also a very important tree for um early settlers the lumber is outstanding it's a fast growing tree it's extremely rot resistant and it's quite light um this is what some of the parts of the tree look like if you haven't really taken notice of it um the the leaves are quite spectacular they're quite large they have this toothed arrangement um and uh when they they like i said again quite large these are the the growth habit of the tree often has a very thick trunk and can have quite a regular spreading canopy these are the flowers this is both flowers on it these small little flowers here are the female flower and these are the large male catkins much like oak trees and then this is what everybody knows a chestnut for is the burrs which is that encasing structure with the needles and the nuts inside and the american chestnut almost always has three nuts to a burr as i said it was an important timber tree one of the things that makes it so significant as i said it's rot resistant and very light but it's also incredibly easy to split and this is what you hear when people talk about split rail fences these were almost always chestnut trees because they were very easy to split the the fibers are very linear and very long it was often called a cradled grave tree because you did everything with it from from building a cradle to your to your coffin but it was also used for shingles fences flooring siding any kind of uh structure where you needed big flat long flat sheets um this was a great tree for that purpose it was also a cultural thing obviously you know about chestnuts roasting on an open fire here's a vendor roasting chestnuts on the street people used to write songs about it and it was something people did they went out and harvested chestnuts um this one always this is a wood carving here from uh uh from philadelphia i know this park fairmont park in downtown philly and it's quite amazing to me that it had large chestnut trees and everybody went out and parked and picked chestnuts in the fall but it was a it was a thing to do i also said this is an important uh tree for wildlife and for livestock so farmers would have known about chestnut trees and often um feed chestnuts to to themselves and to their livestock but is an enormously important tree for wildlife as well you can well imagine obvious bears and squirrels but all kinds of birds fed on chestnuts as well it was it was apparently a important food source for the passenger pigeon when it was around and then came the chestnut blight cryphenectria parasitica it was first described or identified however you want to put it in 1904 in new york which at the botanical gardens there which is now the bronx zoo um and it's kind of hard to imagine that's really the first occurrence of it because importing plants from the orient was a common thing to do from the late 1800s on but this is where it first was really identified and noticed it has it presents itself as girdling cankers on the tree um and it then the good thing is that it attacks the bark and not the roots um no well that's i'll say that's a good thing we'll talk about that in a minute it's spread quickly um it functionally wiped out the chestnut as an overstory tree by the 1950s and it's it we lost depending on how you estimate it probably billions of trees um between that in that 50-year time span um one model sort of shows the initial infestation as it's called as i said it probably came from more than one place this is probably not the only place it started but it did start sooner in the north and march its way south so in our part of virginia these trees were dying in the 1920s and 1930s and were essentially gone by 1950s here are some rather horrifying uh pictures from stands up in shenandoah national park showing you areas where chestnut was predominant and essentially looked like a like agent orange went through here and wiped this out so there were numerous downed trees and areas that took a long time to recover and these were probably mostly replaced by oak up in this area the park um i say here as i said brights the blight spread extremely quickly and it was probably hastened by the fact that people knew it was coming um they tried to isolate the blight by cutting down essentially breaks areas where they cut down all the trees to try to stop the blight also people who had large tracts of land with chestnut on it knew how important the lumber was and so they probably harvested it before the blight hit their areas so um people probably harvested the deforestation due to the blight so what's left well we have a number of large trees you can find them i know where some are in albemarle county this happens to be one um that we call the amherst tree down in amherst county um and they survive they're not doing well they have the blight they are covered in cankers from from uh fighting this off um but there there are still a few around um also if you go up in the mountains go through shenandoah national park or walk any any area you will find young chestnut trees and these are seedlings that are still sprouting from the original root stock from the original roots as i said this blight does not harm the roots so they're still alive and new seedlings will pop up from time to time and these trees will grow um if they're very lucky they'll grow to maybe to maturity and be able to flower but eventually the blight will get them and they will succumb as well but there are still many many thousands of these trees up in the mountains i i love this this way of describing it's it's a common tree but it's functionally extinct that is to say you can find many of them but there aren't many mature ones and the ones that are mature don't get to uh to openly pollinate and breed and the blight is still around the blight is still here uh it lives on many species um in particular you'll find them on oak trees this is a scarlet oak many people refer to this structure on a scarlet oak as a swollen butt and this is chestnut blight cryphenecta or parasitica on an oak tree and this is the way the oak tree fights it off it builds up these same kind of woody structures these cankers um and but it lives through it so not as susceptible as the american chestnut to the blight so there are um there were probably nine or ten different species of castania around the world and the major ones i have here on this map um we're talking about castenia dentata which is here in the eastern united states and this is the leaf of castaneda dentata but there are other sources of castania another one you'll hear a lot about is the european chestnut um also called the sweet chestnut or the spanish chestnut that's castania sativa um the the light probably came from either samples of chinese chestnut which is melissima which is this is its uh leaf structure it's a little thicker and a little more oval or it came from japanese chestnut um which is this thinner leaf over here these are all um both the chinese and the japanese chestnut were probably brought in to this country as ornamental trees as was going on with many different ornamentals in the late 1800s early 1900s and this is important this this little leaf up here is also this is an allegheny shinkapen which is also part of the castania line so shinka pins are also related and they also get the blight so we lost the american chestnut um functionally and some people might say well why not just grow chinese or japanese chestnut well they're not the same kind of tree the american chestnut um it was a forest tree a canopy tree and also for all intents and purposes a lumber tree for uh for it from its use point of view um it grew tall um it had a straight trunk um and it could compete in the forest with many of the other trees that we have here locally the chinese and the japanese chestnuts are essentially orchard trees some of them take more of a a forest habit and can be grown that way but they have been used and and propagated in china more as a an orchard tree and for that reason we could bring them over and you can grow them in your yard and in many places they grow quite big if you've ever been out to tufted farms there are two very large chinese chestnuts right in right at the opening right in the parking lot of tuftin um but they could not compete in the forest and that's the real reason why replacement um if you want to grow a chinese chestnut or you want to grow it for the nuts that'll work just fine but if you want to take the cha the chestnut and bring it back to the forest we need a a a canopy or a forest tree so chinese chestnut is resistant to the blight the american chestnut is not but the chinese chestnut can't thrive in our forest so that's a little bit about why we're talking about trying to bring back the american chestnut so different restoration attempts and controls um when the blight first hit um folks tried lots of different things obviously if you have a fungus that's attacking your tree your first thought is maybe fungicides work but apparently they have relatively little effect there is a new generation of fungicides which is being tried now but that's still nothing we can do on a forest level that has to be treated tree by tree people tried cutting the the blight out that doesn't work they tried segregating the blight by cutting out forest gaps and making barriers to it but it's a an airborne fungus and it found its way um so that that didn't seem to work um there are a number of breeding attempts which have been tried um there is uh people tried and some of this effort still going on to cross breed the living american chestnuts to try to see if they can promote the blight resistance in just american chestnut alone other groups tried hybridizing the trees um crossing chinese and american chestnut or japanese and american chestnut our group has a more extensive hybrid back cross program which i'm going to talk about in just a minute i'll mention hyper virulence and then there are some genetic methods that are being tried i'm going to talk about a few of those the american chestnut foundation started some 30 40 years ago now and it was started a program was started by dr charles burnham and a number of others and the goal of this group is to restore the chestnut to its native range we don't just want to grow a resistant chestnut for the sake of doing it we want to be able to grow it and grow enough of them to get them back in the forest and that involves a fairly complicated breeding program and this this is this involves selective breeding which means we're going to um not allow open pollination we're going to select the flowers and put the pollen we want on them and then grow them out in orchards and then we test them for resistance and that's what these slides are here we actually we isolate the flowers we pollinate them ourselves we grow them out in orchards here they are growing out many of you have been down to fortune's cove which at one time looked a lot like this and then at some point we inoculate the trees with a small amount of the fungus and we see which trees get the fungus and which do not and if they get the fungus then we get rid of them and that's uh for some people that's a very hard part of our process we grow the trees we decide which trees fight the fungus well like this raiding one and which do not and if they look like this we cut them down so that's how we go through that's our unnatural selection process we breed the trees and we look for resistance um this is kind of many of you have seen this program um where we cross the where we do a series of what we call back crosses we start with a hybrid tree of a chinese and american and then we continue to breathe back in americans and this first part of the breeding program is what we call a series of back crosses where we breed in americans and get up to 15 16 american and then we do a number of intercrosses where we cross different lines in order to promote genetic diversity and by the time we get to this end stage we will have planted hundreds of thousands of trees and killed just about that many too and selected only the the best trees um so this is done over and over again with different lines from different parent chinese and then we cross many different american trees to try to promote um diversity and and avoid inbreeding um and we're pretty much getting to the end stages of this process here and you might ask well how well did that work um and we're right now at the point of realizing that it did not work that well um so why when the initial breeding program was put in place the genetics the limited genetics that they had at the time suggested that this was that resistance was conferred by two or three genes in the genetic makeup of the chestnut and what we're coming to find out now is it's probably a lot more than that and so the original program with the number of trees that had to be crossed um was sort of based on that three gene model and now that we find that it's a lot more than that we're finding that we are not conveying enough resistance um to do what we want to do um here's a graph just a simple cartoon showing american genes versus resistance and this yellow bar here is like an american chestnut population and this is a chinese chestnut population and our hybrid you know 50 50 cross would be somewhere in here and our population of trees is something like this red cloud well that's not very good that means that the more resistance i have the more chinese the tree looks and i said i wanted an american looking tree if i want to be able to put it in the forest our goal was to breed it breed resistance in but not have a lot of chinese traits and this is where we wanted to be and this is sort of where we are right now so not as much resistance as we had hoped for and also the more resistance the more the chinese more chinesey the tree looks that's not where we wanted to be so as a result in our population we have way fewer trees that have the resistance that we wanted to have so from that point of view we have a lot of trees some of them are quite resistant but we can't let them continue to pollinate each other and continue on because we're not getting the direction we want to get which is more american and more resistance so we have embarked in the last um year and moving forward with a program we sort of are leaving this uh back cross program and moving to something we're calling best on best which is to now that we have some genetic um testing capability to see what kinds of genes we have in our plants um we are trying to isolate the trees that have the best resistance and the most american character and we're just going to work on breeding those and not worry so much about the diversity we can handle that later but we need to find and breed an american looking tree that has some resistance so that's that's what our focus is now on what we call best on best and here the sources of the trees we may be looking for are what we call lsas large surviving americans we may take the best trees out of our breeding program and not move that forward in the way we're going to and we have other sources um uh things that come from the other organization the accf which is the american chestnut cooperatives foundation um i said they were working on breeding just american trees we may work with their their trees um the forestry department has also been working um on a breeding program i'll talk about that here in just a second just a little bit about the virginia chapter the virginia chapter is one of 16 different chapters for the american chestnut foundation they're mostly states or pairs of states ours was started in 2006. and these are some of the the main activities that we'll start here in charlottesville and you can see we have orchards all up and down the appalachians here many of you have been out to fortune's cove which is a really important orchard for us although it doesn't have very many trees at the moment our chapter office is down here at the rockfish gap community center we have a number of orchards up north including our what was what was to be our final stage orchards at blandy which is the state arboretum sky meadows and banshee reeks which are uh uh state forests um the other also around town there's middle mountain and freed farm these are these are close to town out near white hall whitehall and [Music] i'm going to talk a little bit about a resource we have which is really quite remarkable which is called wasan state forest if you've not been out there the sun is a about 400 acres that's maintained by the virginia department of forestry and these this orchard was started orchard forest however you want to categorize it was started um the land was donated um for the purpose of um maintaining the chestnut breeding strategy and a lot of these trees were brought down from an agricultural experimentation experimental station up in connecticut and those trees were planted and this was um in the in the 70s and some of those trees are quite large now but forestry has maintained the original stand and used some of the seeds from that to do some of their own crossing so there is um it's not exactly this it's more open pollinated than the trees we have used in the in the american chestnut foundation breeding program but there are some spectacular trees down here which look quite american um and some of which have a lot of resistance and this is a state forest so if you ever get the opportunity um it's not very far from uh devil's backbone brewery if you ever get the opportunity to go down there especially in middle june i'd encourage you to do this because this is a really spectacular place to see what chestnuts um in the wild might have looked like there are some some really nice trees here um that sort of takes me to where the american chestnut foundation is in its overall strategy um they they refer to their overall strategy as the three bur strategy which involves breeding which is what we've been talking about bio control which i'm going to mention here and biotechnology which is essentially the genetic program that's going on i'm going to mention this i'm not going to just going to do one slide on this just so you've heard the term um this is um an interesting feature um or an interesting method for controlling the blight it is referred to as hyper virulence the blight is of as i said was a fungus and fungus can be infected by other things including viruses just like we can be infected by viruses and we all know about viruses these days this is there are viruses that will infect cryphenectria and if they are infected it slows down and hinders the growth of that fungus and gives the tree a chance to survive unfortunately it has to be applied to the tree so this is probably not an overall cure that we can treat on a forest basis but um here's an example of a chestnut tree that's been infected with chestnut blight and here's an example of another tree where that blight has been treated with a cryphonectorius strain that's been infected with a virus and the virus slows the growth of the cryphonetria down to the point where the tree can heal over um another difficulty with using this technique is we have lots of strains of the blight here in the united states that means you'd have to create variants of the virus just like we're hearing about in the news that match each of those uh cryphonectria strains and so that makes this a fairly complicated technique to use although it does seem to work well a place where they do use this and you is in europe i haven't said anything about the european chestnut um or the sweet chestnut but um it is very very important tree there as well as the american chestnut was here it's also tall it's a forest tree and there um it also gets the blight and it is and their forests have been affected but not to the same extent that we have here in this country and some of that has to do with it being slightly more resistant um also many of the forests are what we would maybe call managed forests because chestnut is such an important crop um they've managed to maintain the trees um and they use this technique of treeing many of the trees with a hypovirulent form of the fungus um and so you will find if you go across europe uh in italy switzerland spain france you will find stands of chestnuts that are looked after and one of the things they use to help treat the fungus is this hypovirulent form now moving a little bit on into transgenics and into the genetic things we can do if we knew about the genetics of the tree um we could identify the key genes and maybe figure out how to um test or we could do genetic studies and figure out which trees have the best blight resistant characteristics that's being worked on but we yet at this point in time do not know exactly which genes are required for blight resistance we have some clues but it's not well mapped out right now it may be so complicated that we're not going to get a good picture of it but we know it's more than two or three genes um that are involved in conferring resistance so that's one of the hopes that we'll be able to get to that point but we're not there yet and really mapping out what makes a tree resistant to the blight but we are at a point where we've actually been able to do something for the tree um this is a program you've probably heard about it that's been in the news a fair bit it's been on ted talks and things like that um there is a group um at uh at suny um environmental um sciences department headed by william powell and he has been working on a transgenic american tree now that sounds really quite scary when you think about it you know we think we use the term gmos for things that are genetically modified but this is probably the most benign form of genetic modification you can think of um he has looked at the what goes on when when the blight hits a tree and one of the things that has been noted is that when blight infects the tree and the tree starts to get diseased there is a lot a buildup of oxalic acid which is eating away at the ligament and making the tree more vulnerable and among many things they've they've looked at they they know certain enzymes that might be able to control it and one of the things that they tried is looking at what is called the oxo gene which is uh which codes to an enzyme that breaks down oxalic acid it's naturally occurring it's widely um used in other plants other plants use this mechanism bananas strawberries cocoa wheat all of those this chemical reaction does not do anything to hurt the fungus it simply neutralizes the oxalic acid that it produces and lets the tree fight back or overcome the the presence of the blight um so with knowing about this chemical reaction and looking into this technique they developed and i say developed i'd make this sound like this happened over a year or two this has been going on for uh 15 years up there they have been working on a process to convey the oxo gene into a chestnut and this is actually the technique they use is called mediated transformation and is actually a technique technique it's a process that happens in nature pretty regularly the many many crops that we eat like corn this is how um many different traits have been added to corn over the years there are some entirely natural um uh plants like sweet potatoes that have evolved by this by this methodology and they have made it um a little bit uh they have found a mechanism to take use of this make use of this and the way they do it in the lab is they take um an embryo from a chestnut seed and they grow they they are able to get a few cells and they grow a little culture of embryonic cells and then at some point when they have a number of them they they use what is called an agrobacteria this is the same naturally it's a soil bacteria it's responsible for the galls that you see on trees it's the same bacteria and it has the ability to take a gene um and move it into another cell and once that happens then they will take these embryos and grow them out and i don't make mean to make this sound trivial this took them years and years to figure out how to do this process but from this we can create a chestnut that carries this oxog something that it doesn't have right now um something that is like i said natural relatively naturally occurring and the result is a tree that can fight against the blight this is a essentially a brother and sister pear two trees one that carries the oxo gene um and here both of these were given a small nick and the blight was introduced into it the tree on the left heels over this has the oxo gene the tree on the right didn't have the oxo gene and eventually the blight just totally infected the whole stem so this is the the process that that has been developed one of the things that's actually very remarkable about the uh about the group up in sydney is they have uh because this is being done as a more a science project and an ecology project they have an army of people there who are army of grad students looking into the ecology of the tree and they have done hundreds of different kinds of tests to see if there is any difference between their transgenic tree or the new tree they've developed and the original american tree and even comparing it to all other kinds of trees in the forest they have done uh growth tests of tadpoles that have eaten the transgenic leaves they feed bees the the pollen from the transgenic trees they have looked at the nutritional of nuts they study caterpillars that feed on those leaves so they have done all the ecology tests that one might expect that you might be interested in seeing and consistently they have found no differences between the tree that they have inserted this gene into and the regular american chestnut tree so um that that's really quite remarkable that they've gone that they've gone through this these steps now i will say that they're gonna have to go through these steps because because this is a genetically modified tree if this is ever going to be used in our program or any other program um it needs to have government regula government approval and this is unlike any other tree that's ever any other plant that has ever been looked at because it's not for profit it's going to be released and given away for free and and all the government agencies don't really know how to deal with that um but these are the government agencies that are involved the epa the fda the usda um all need to approve the use of this tree so that if we are ever going to use it in a population um and release it um they will have to approve it it's currently under usda approval uh process they've had an open comment period and it's still probably a year or so before this will be approved um i i always laugh whenever i see this part the epa also has to approve for this and according to the definitions of the epa even though this thing this tree does not harm the fungus in any way it is by their technical definition a pesticide because it is a substance which which is intended to prevent or repel or mitigate any pests and so in that regard it's technically a pesticide even though it has none of the properties of a pesticide um how will we use this transgenic tree in the future um we don't know yet um that will have to be up to our chapter in order to decide we are doing some experimental crosses with this tree right now but eventually we can't just use a transgenic tree it will have to be introduced into a population and its genetic diversity will have to be very well expanded in order for us to use it and exactly how we'll do that whether we cross it with american trees or whether we cross it with some of our or the hybrids from our back cross program we're not sure yet but that's all in the planning stage and these are sort of the things we're doing um uh as a group here in virginia we are establishing orchards to preserve american chestnuts 100 pure american chestnuts having nothing to do with the transgenics or anything else we just want to preserve them because little by little even though these trees are still sprouting in the forest they're slowly dying away and we need to preserve their genetic diversity if not for this program for some other program in the future our traditional back cross program we think is phasing out we don't think it's living up to its expectations but we hope some of these trees make it into our best on best selection breeding program we're waiting on this possible approval for the transgenics um and uh and uh we'll use that with our regional american trees or with the best crosses and we're also starting to do restoration trials we're going to have to figure out how we put this tree back in the wild even if we had a perfect tree i don't think we know how to reintroduce it into the wild do we plant seeds do we plant seedlings do we plant in open areas like strip mines or things like that or do we try to plant them in the forest where they have to compete so all studies that are that are ongoing and these are just some volunteer opportunities we love to have people come out and help us look for chestnuts there's going to be a big push for this um in the late spring and early summer we really want people who want to go out and hike and while they're out look for trees we have lots of data collection opportunities we have lots of planting opportunities and certainly there'll be chances to do pollination and harvesting so all of these are things we we'd uh we're going to be doing a lot over the rest of the year and with that i'm going to wrap it up because i talked a little longer than i thought and give people a chance to ask questions so tom there's some questions in the chat box do you oh okay let me see if i can find the let me see if i can find the chat box yes i do okay just oh thank you john john is pointing i definitely should put uh put on here that um there's lots of information on our website which is acf.org va you can find a lot of information uh from the from the american chestnut foundation um let's see would the micro risi networks of standing blight resistant american chestnuts be responsible for some of the resistance we see wow that's a really good question instead of it just being all genetics um boy i might need your help john um i would say since the fungus is is an airborne fungus and has little to do with the root system um i would guess that that would not be the case but it certainly may be a function of why some of our large surviving americans um have done so well um i it might be that mycorrhizae um could play a role in how and how well they survive i'm not sure i'm sure the answer to that let's see and someone else answered that same question orchards have certainly certainly some orchards do better than forest sites it's a really interesting thing the chestnut is not the easiest tree to plant and i think that's because um the tree is an opportunistic tree it grows like oak trees grow which is to say the tree gets rooted in it grows very slow at first in the forest setting and waits for an opportunity a fallen tree or a fire or something like that and then it takes off so it's growth habit the way it grows in an orchard is not exactly the way it grows in a forest so um let's see marjorie asked is anyone working with crossing trees oh in michigan that seemed to have survived the blight unfortunately even the trees in michigan now have the blight it's taken longer to move up there but but blight has um has found them as well but yes people have been trying to cross anything that think they think might be blight resistant um to try to bring it into the program let's see are we still looking for tracks of land to plant under some circumstances right now um um probably that's not our biggest priority let's see let's talk next question okay and the last question here from carol is there any way to test for resistance earlier on oh good question yes yes there is i didn't really talk about some of the leaf assays and the small stem assays we are working on testing trees very young in their life we refer to it as small stem assay work where after um a year or where while it's still in a pot we will test the trees for blight resistance and that way we don't have to grow them out for seven or eight years and so we are pre-testing a lot of trees in the pots before we plant them let's see and let's see uh even when pl even when planted is saplings deer are attracted to the saplix absolutely deer browse is probably one of our biggest challenges whenever we plant an orchard we have to put them not only we have to put them in tubes we have to put fences around them because deer deer will nip off the tops of the trees so deer fencing is probably our biggest in most of our orchards it's our biggest expense um so yes dear brows is truly a problem and what do i think of dunstan chestnuts well dunstan chestnuts are hybrid cherries um if you want chestnuts to eat and want to grow them in an open area which is like an orchard or near your house there's nothing wrong with dunstan dunstan's they won't work for our purposes which is to try to bring the tree back into the forest but nothing wrong with using them you know for your own purposes they do work they do grow nuts let's see i think those are all the questions happy to entertain any others if anybody wants to unmute or well tom i'd like to thank you for this very interesting talk today um and i'd like to thank everyone that attended for spending time with us today we hope that you enjoyed the talk and learned a lot i definitely learned a lot and enjoyed it very much um we will be sending out a survey after this talk and we would really appreciate it if you all would fill that out and give us your feedback for future ivy talks as always if you enjoyed these talks and what the ivy creek foundation does for our community please consider going to our website and becoming a donor today and i want to thank you all again and i hope everyone has a great day thanks so much you

Channel: Ivy Creek Foundation Public Videos

Views: 7,158

Keywords: Ivy Creek, Ivy Creek Natural Area, Ivy Talks

Id: lX6h7-Glftg

Length: 56min 9sec (3369 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 26 2022