Our family's chestnut journey began a couple decades ago as we planted and grafted a few dozen trees on the family farm near Salem, Oregon. Five years ago, we doubled down by taking the first few steps toward getting Colossal chestnuts propagated via tissue culture. The next chapter in the story is our planting a 10-acre orchard of tissue culture chestnuts near Sacramento, California.
We're going to share all the details of this chapter here in the hope that it helps other growers take the leap and begin farming chestnuts as well.
I am certain we're going to do many things wrong, that we're going to regret early hard-to-change decisions, and that we'll be called crazy for some of the things we're going to try. I'm also committed to sharing all the details here so that others have a chance at learning from our mistakes.
In exchange for our transparency, we'd greatly appreciate input from those of you who've gone before us growing chestnuts. We'll read every comment and do our best to respond to as many as possible. You're questions, ideas, and other contributions, will not only help us improve our farming plan, but also inform others who stumble across this blog years down the road as they consider planting chestnuts.
The Purpose
Our intent for the farm is to develop and operate it like a modern "commercial" orchard. This means we'll use practices that could be done at a much larger scale. For example, instead of hand-digging tree holes, we'll disk, deep rip, berm, and then plant in the berm like is common for other tree nuts. We'll use drip irrigation, take regular soil and tissue samples, tune the fertility plan to what we're seeing in the field, manage the orchard floor with equipment, plant known cultivars, etc.
We'll consider the orchard a success if we're able to provide solid data to help answer questions like the following:
- What yield does cultivar X produce at maturity?
- How long does it take to get a first crop?
- How close of tree spacings is too close?
- How much irrigation do chestnuts need in Zone 9?
- Does one type of grow tube out-perform the others?
The Design
Below is a the general layout of the orchard, as designed in Propagate's Overyield tool. The folks at Overyield gave us access to their tool to help us design our planting, which is great, because as you can see, we've got lots of things going on compared to a "normal" commercial orchard. The tool also has some cool financial projection & management features, but for now, we'll focus on the farm design functions.
The orchard is split into two blocks, a North Block and a South Block, and has five different cultivars in both blocks. The difference between the two blocks is the intra-row spacing. The South Block has 20-foot wide rows with 20 feet between the trees within a row. The North Block has 20-foot wide rows with 10 feet between the trees within each row.
You read that right. We're doing 20 x 10-foot spacings on chestnuts. I told you we were going to try some crazy things!
Both blocks will have four European X Japanese (Castanea Sativa x Crenata) hybrid chestnuts; Colossal, Gillet, Bouche De Betizac, & Torakuri and one complex Chinese (Castanea Mollissima) hybrid, Szego. We'll also plant a fifth European X Japanese hybrid, Okei, known to be an effective pollenizer for Colossal throughout the orchard. We're not sure if we'll have full rows of Okei, or if we'll plant them within the rows of the other varieties like is common for hazelnuts and pistachios.
Initial Soil Sample
Before we plant anything, we had the soils analyzed. The pH looks pretty good (most of what we read online says that chestnuts prefer 4.5-6.5 pH) so does the texture. However, the soil definitely has more than 13% clay in some places so I'm interested to see how it rips & disks for planting.
Hopefully we can get that organic matter up as we mix up the soil layers, plant the trees & cover crops, and start irrigating.
What's Next?
We'll share updates every couple of months as we develop and farm the orchard. We've got basic some foundational work to do now (like putting up a perimeter fence) and lots of decisions to make ahead of the planting this fall.
Thanks for coming along for the ride!
2 comments
Hey Sam – Good question. The short answer is, we don’t know. Some people have planted (even in the U.S.) as close as 5 × 20 for breeding programs or becuase they expected blight to kill some. Our hope is to get 3-5 harvests before we need to remove the 10 foot spacings, so that’s maybe 8 years until the chestnut trees are really competing for light and we need to remove them.
How long do you think before you’ll need to thin out those 10 by 20 Rows? Or are you planning to prune them, like I’ve seen in China?