Spring came early this year to the West Coast, especially California, with temperatures in March approaching and surpassing 90 degrees. This encouraged the chestnuts and other crops to break dormancy early, so we've been almost full-on farming since early March. While it's exciting to see the trees break dormancy, especially after such hard pruning through the winter, replants and the tiny Okei pollinators have clearly struggled with the early heat.
The pictures below give you a sense of the pace of this spring's ramp to summer.
March 11th - Buds pushing
March 28th - 4-6" of new growth
April 4th - Growth elongation and flowers
April 23rd - More growth and flowers (same tree as above)
May 12th - More growth and flowers (same tree as above)
We've been very surprised to see flowers on trees that were planted ~14 months ago.... more on that below.
Voles: Going on Offense
Those of you who followed along through last year's chestnut demonstration orchard journey, know that the biggest problem we had was with voles eating the roots of our newly-planted trees. You can learn all about our lessons learned from last year in our fall 2025 post.
To prevent this from happening again, we began terminating the cover crops and weeds much earlier this year, with our first mow pass in March instead of late May. We still see lots of vole holes, but expect the birds we'll keep them in check this year with much less cover to hide in.
We then weed-eated the berms a few months later, once the rains stopped.
An unexpected benefit of this early season mowing is that it allowed for a second push of cover crop in the tractor rows. What came back was a more diverse mix of the native flowers that we'd seeded last year than grass (which was the bulk of what grew through the winter). Below you can see some California poppies, other flowers, clovers, and soil-building cover crop species that re-grew in the tractor row in April and May.
Chestnut Flowers
As teased above, we've been surprised at the number of flowers we're seeing develop on these young trees. Our orchard is 100% tissue culture trees, the oldest of which were planted in January of 2025 - less than a year and a half ago. Most of the trees grew at least 8 ft last year, so we had concerns that that amount of vigor would delay the production of flowers and therefore fruit. We also wondered if tissue culture trees would produce fruit later than seedlings or grafted trees because tissue culture trees are very juvenile.
What we're seeing this spring is a push of a few flowers, especially on the trees that we pruned the least. For example, on the row that we planted on 10-foot spacing between the trees, used 2-foot-tall tree tubes, and left unpruned this winter, approximately 70% of those trees already have flowers. This is the row we call the "U-pick" Row because the trees are much shorter than the rest of the orchard. You can read and see more about the pruning on that row here.
Below are a few pictures of flowers on trees in this row. I suspect we'll see more flowers appear as the season progresses. There are flowers on trees in other rows (that were pruned heavily this winter), like the flower images shown at the top of this post, but there is a clear correlation between the less pruning & more flowering.
High Density
Another thing that's becoming clear on this U-pick row is that 10 ft between the trees, especially if left with an open V-style shape, closes up very fast. Below is the shot from the side of this row, taken on the second week of May. You can see that there's only a couple feet left before the trees' branches are touching. We expect that gap will close this year.
We have some thinking to do here on how to best manage this row. Conventional wisdom is that when the trees begin touching, they'll start competing for light, and you need to remove some of them. However, the vigor of the trees and the fact that flowers are produced on each year's new growth is making us consider keeping this row high density and doing a heavy prune each year to push maximum pounds off small, tightly-spaced trees.
Lest anyone thinks we're particularly creative, this is how chestnuts are produced in other parts of the world. The trees are kept small with a couple of main scaffolds that are pruned back heavily each year. I've not personally seen a chestnut orchard managed this way, but if it works, it's easy to imagine getting significant yield improvements and ramping several years faster vs. what U.S. growers expect.
Overall, A Better Start Than Last Year
All of the trees that survived last year have added 2-4 ft of growth by the middle of May. The newly planted trees have added 1-2 ft of growth, but the tiny Okeis we planted are struggling. We will keep a close eye on them as the summer warms up, we think they are going slowly because they got damaged by the heat in March. We do see them pushing a little growth, but some of their early leaves appear to be burnt. Our hope is that they've been developing roots and will start pushing more vigorously over the next month.
Here's a glamour shot of one of the trees that looks particularly strong heading into the core growing season.
Happy farming!