The Amazing Thing About Chestnut Seedlings

I believe that chestnuts are one of the greatest trees in the face of the earth and I believe it has been an absolute tragedy that so many were killed off in the chestnut blight of the 20th century I am trying to grow as many chestnut trees as possible that's why I use a very simple straightforward method to grow my own chestnut trees here at our farm a lot of the original trees that I planted out back were trees that I had purchased from a nursery last year I tried to sprout a whole bunch of chestnut trees in my refrigerator my stash of chestnut trees ended up getting in an attack but I think a raccoon or maybe a bear but regardless of that I'm here in 2019 ready to try this all again last fall I buried a bag of chestnuts you know just the nut the seed in a bucket with a whole bunch of wet sand I checked on them the other day and it looks like they are ready to be planted so what we're gonna do in today's video is I'm gonna take out all of those chestnuts that are sprouted and I'm gonna get them set so that they can start growing even though it's starting to warm up it still gets down into the 30s and below at night here and so I want to make sure I give my chestnut trees the best possible head start and so what I'm gonna do is put them in a little seedling flats to get started and let the stem and the root grow ultimately this is where all the chestnut seedlings are gonna go this is gonna be the nursery I'll end up putting them in here in late June early July and they will stay there until fall of 2021 and when I'll pull them out when they go dormant and then I'll plant them back in the pasture all right let's unearth this bucket huh Lil Barn Cat is just a little bit over a year and she has been so happy that all the snow has been melting she has been on a tear getting moles and voles and mice and chasing lots of insects to look at her that right there is some barn cat ridiculousness so to give these chestnuts kind of their interim space what I've got are just these simple black plastic flats the cheap ones these are actually left over from last year when we bought seedlings from somebody so don't spend too much time money or effort on these then the thing you do want I'm a standard potting soil we generally get the organic stuff you don't want to go all the way to the top but you want to be pretty full get it nice and level nice and easy just like that so then what you're gonna want to do is carefully go through your bucket of sand and seeds I will often take it and just discard the sand in another bucket because you're gonna want to be very careful here in this step all right see so the nut you see is gonna be covered in sand so what I usually do is just tuck in just a little bit of water wash off the sand it doesn't have to be perfect you just want to get it clean so this is the important thing to know about chestnuts right is that when they're sprouting the stem comes out of the same part of the nut as the root sort of like that traditional chestnut shape this is where that point always was and so that's where everything's sprouting out so what you're gonna want to do is you place your your chestnut in the tray here it's put it flat just like this you know and as you're unearthing them you're gonna notice like this one it doesn't look any good like it didn't yeah it feels almost you got snow good so I'm just gonna set that one aside keep looking for good nuts here yeah now the reason you want to be so careful is this tail that comes out is very fragile and can snap if you do that you're gonna kill the seed I mean again like I said that's both the root and the stem coming right out of the nut so you want to be so careful with that so as you put it in there just like I actually just like that and this is sort of where the repetition sets in but you know what's farming without repetition Pablo's taking a nap look at him good that lazy barn cat so you can see here make good progress one two three four five six seven eight nine we've got about thirty six sprouted chestnuts here there were three bad ones in the batch so far and I'm not even halfway through the bucket it's kind of crazy actually they have an entire forest in a single plastic five-gallon bucket yeah so when you fill up these trays again you don't have to make them too thick and too deep the trees are only spending a couple weeks in here sort of like your opportunity to really get their legs and put them out there and out-compete any weeds that I might have in the bed the other nice thing is with that black landscape fabric I've got covering it up that'll make sure I've got most of the weeds kind of killed off and grass is killed off by the time I'm ready to plant these things you know you could probably do something like this if you were like trying to grow your seedlings on a patio I actually last year started a whole bunch of seedlings when I was still living in an apartment in Washington DC it came out pretty well actually the they started to grow pretty well but uh like I said eventually some sort of animal got to him when I left him outside oh darn it so I just inadvertently snapped the kind of the end of it being broken that's unfortunate why you got to be careful I have a friend buddy by the name of Akiva silver he's the one who actually taught me a lot of these things that I know about trees he insists on trying to do this like as soon as the snows melted and you can access the nuts and even sometimes they'll dig to get him because he's always afraid he's gonna snap the really long tails on on some of these nuts which gotta say makes a lot of sense I should probably done that so you always run the risk to of having mold this one got it really bad this one which actually looks like a good seedling seems to have a little bit of it too so I'm not gonna use this seedling so I'm gonna toss it out there are some who might say that I might as well just get rid of this entire bucket but well then I wouldn't have any chestnut seedlings so well there's probably even greater mould precautions I could be taking right now I'm just doing the best I can you know when you think about like the actual design of a chestnut it's kind of ingenious the way nature works the way these seeds sprout they sit in the cold for several months you know much like any sort of North American winter and it sends out this little telescope one keeps looking for sunlight and sort of getting up past the leaves and debris and whatever else it's covering on the the floor of a forest and that's how it sets its course to make a tree I mean it's just incredible how inside this tiny little package you have the potential for a massive tree so like I was saying earlier it's like a real tragedy what happened with the American chestnut the chestnut tree for the eastern part of the United States was just this massive influential food staple back in the day it was like at the same level of status as the apple tree I mean could you guys just imagine the apple tree just up and vanishing the way the chestnut tree did and I mean the chestnut tree it's in and of itself is just such this powerful tree that provides an amazing beautiful piece of timber but then also this you know great food product I mean the chestnut has a food I mean it's I think nutritionally people say it's almost the equivalent of like brown rice part of why I'm so motivated to grow these things is the idea that you have this perennial tree in your backyard that each year produces pounds and pounds and pounds of a food crop that's easy to store and gives you a lot of your basic nutrition and you know particularly in a climate here where it's harder to grow annuals perennials like that is just incredibly powerful to me you know if you look back and find old pictures of you know American chestnut trees you know you can find some of those trees that back in the day they were like a thousand years old and they were just massive in gigantic like awe inspiring trees pen and they're all gone now and in what we're left with are you know some pockets of various mixed genetic trees around even beyond the benefits of the timber and the benefits of the nuts themselves trying to create more more chestnuts in more and more diverse chestnut genetics it has value we want to bring this tree back it's gonna take a lot of different people growing these things and I mean heck that's even one of the main reasons of making this video is that somebody out there is gonna see me doing this and see how easy it is to start your own chestnut trees and you're gonna plant them around your farm or homestead or I don't know like if you live in the city maybe out with like a public garden somewhere more chestnut trees will be a good thing for this world and please don't forget that well this is a little embarrassing I've actually run out of planting flats and if I look in the bucket here I'm still I don't know I probably still have another fifty to a hundred seeds in there by my account it's a just a little shy of 200 chestnut seedlings here so I mean that's like hundreds of seedlings out of that one five-gallon bucket look at that there's maybe about a dozen nuts that didn't take or it rotted or had a lot of mold on them it was probably about three or four that I broke myself I have never been this successful in trying to sprout chestnuts as I've been right here I mean look at this this is awesome give it a nice little covering not too much it's really light covering it you're gonna want to spread on so now I'm gonna basically let them just do their thing and grow I'm gonna probably actually end up keeping some of them outside as a little bit of a trial leave them on the porch and see how they perform the others I'll bring inside and grow under grow lights I'm gonna see which grows faster and which does better if you want to see how I actually prepared the bucket and put the chestnuts in the bucket to sprout take a look at this video I covered it all in there or if you're curious about our permaculture orchard let me give you a tour down in this video don't forget to subscribe and I will see you guys in the next video

Channel: Gold Shaw Farm

Views: 246,064

Rating: 4.9024858 out of 5

Keywords: gold shaw farm, duck farm, permaculture orchard, chestnuts, chestnut seedlings, starting chestnut seedlings, how to plant chestnuts, chestnut ridge of pike county, chestnut tree, american chestnut, seed starting, chestnut seed, how to plant chestnut seed, vermont farm, why i start chestnut seedlings, start chestnut seedlings, chestnut seeds for planting, chestnut trees from seed, lake erie chestnut

Id: Lzy6YMH0Glo

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Thu May 09 2019