FAQ

What is tissue culture? 

Around the world, the science of Tissue Culture has been used to create huge quantities of identical plants, from tiny pieces of those plants. The process requires the same set of rooting and growth hormones used in propagating cuttings, just in ‘micro’ doses suspended in a nutrient jell. The ‘cuttings’ used in Tissue Culture (TC), can be as tiny as a few cells from the mother plant, but in practice is usually a bud, or a small cutting.

 

Why tissue culture chestnuts?

In permanent orchard or vineyard plantings, having identical plants is a large advantage for harvest and production. When a farmer grows identical plants, all the nuts, apples, grapes etc. are ripe at the same time, of the same size and shape, and have the same eating qualities. Most of these permanent crops, except chestnuts, have been propagated via tissue culture for years.

One of the things that has held chestnuts back from large scale production is the variability among sibling groups of seedlings, and the cost/difficulties of grafting or rooting Chestnut cultivars, which is the traditional way of producing identical plants in horticulture. Tissue Culture (TC) solves those problems. 

 

Why don't you have more varieties of chestnuts available?

Tissue Culture is an experimental science. For most plant species there is not a recipe, and for species that there is a recipe, different varieties will have different requirements for media that spurs the plants' growth.

Hazelnuts, for example, are frequently propagated by TC, but each new variety released has slight adjustments needed to the media. The plant material, age of tree, where the trees are grown, day length cuttings were taken at, and reproductive phase the plant is in at that time are all different. Therefore, every new variety requires a new media mix to begin propagation - and hazelnuts have been produced through TC for decades. We're just at the beginning of this style of propagation of chestnuts.

 

How do you choose chestnut varieties to propagate?
Generally, we...
  • Talk to industry and nursery leaders as to which varieties might sell in large enough volumes to justify the time required to get a new variety into TC.
  • Work to get access to plant materials. Some varieties are not available on the west coast, or we don't have them here yet, so we have to graft new varieties at the nursery, and then take samples from the new growth.
West Coast Chestnut is not trying to have a complete collection of every possible variety of Chestnuts in Tissue Culture, just some varieties and their pollinators that make the most sense for commercial production across the U.S.
     
We have a half dozen varieties that we're working on to get into tissue culture and are working with the USDA and various other industry partners to get more started. The trees available for purchase on our store are those that we've successfully propagated via tissue culture. We'll update the store as soon as we have additional varieties available.

 

How do you recommend planting?

Today, most chestnut growers farm fewer than 10 acres. For these plots on traditional spacings, between 35 x 35 ft and 50 x 50 ft, it makes sense to plant by hand. When planting larger plots and/or higher density plots consider using a machine like the one in the video below.