The Hemming Chinese Chestnuts

E. SAM HEMMING, Easton, Maryland

The bearing record of our row of 18 Chinese chestnuts has attracted so much attention that I thought the Association would be interested in seeing some slides of these trees, also of our experimental orchard, as well as the large quantity of small trees we grow in our nursery and the manner in which we raise them.

You will see a number of slides of chestnut trees and hear a lot about the bearing qualities, but you won't see a single nut, for unfortunately all these slides were taken between December 1946 and July 1947. You will just have to let the numerous little trees attest to the fact that these trees bear. We have 50,000 trees in our nursery.

These trees are now nineteen years old and have borne rather remarkably since 1937. They are spaced too close—an accident—but I believe that helps thorough pollination. They are now 12 and more inches in diameter, some are 30' high and the spread is at least 35' where they have the room. All but No. 14 are spreading in character; spreading character and good bearing seemed to be connected.

The bearing record of these trees has been given before but I will summarize them by years again: 1937—118 pounds; 1938 (no records); 1939-463 pounds; 1940—250 pounds; 1941—564 pounds; 1942—658 pounds; 1943—749 pounds; 1944—678 pounds; 1945—250 pounds; 1946—1,100 pounds; this year's crop will probably run 700 to 800 pounds.

The trees seem to bear much the same, with No. 14 the poorest and No. 19 the best and, like many other tree crops, they tend to alternate good and poor crops on each tree. The nuts are of good size, averaging 40 to 50 per pound (green) with No. 6 and No. 19 bearing the smallest nuts. They ripen in September with the exception of No. 19 which is a month later. Mr. Reed likes No. 16 which has a wrinkled shell. All the nuts are medium sweet to sweet and all of them fall free of the bur. I think the most significant thing is that at least 12 of the trees have nut characteristics so near alike that they are about indistinguishable, which certainly makes them a good source of seed.

The similarity of the nuts brings up the controversial subject of the seedling raised tree, and I will make some remarks in defense of this method.

1. All our parent trees are good bearers.

2. There is no extraneous pollen in the vicinity.

3. I will present as a question: Has the Chinese chestnut, like the rose and the apple been hybridized out of all semblance of the wild form?

4. The seedling tree should bring chestnuts to the average householder's table 30 years sooner than grafting will.

5. We now produce a 3'-4' tree for a very reasonable figure.

6. All varietal forms at present are as yet unstabilized (most varieties of 10 years ago have been discarded). There will probably be some duds in seedling trees, but we've had no local complaints and I wonder if they will exceed the "troubles" found in the grafted tree. We have had customers brag about what their 2 or 3 or 6 trees bore.

To prove our faith in this method we planted a test orchard. When the trees were 3 years old from 2 year transplants they bore 25 pounds. Next year, 1944, they bore 800 pounds or an average of 1 pound per tree. Right then and there we thought that we would have a real story to tell, but we had misfortune in another direction. Three years in a row we have had frosts when 6 inches of new growth were on these trees (the orchard is not as well situated as the parent trees in this respect). So we had no crops worth mentioning but neither did we have strawberries or similar fruits. This year the orchard was frosted 2/3 the way to the top so we will get quite a few nuts, maybe 500 pounds. Incidentally, we have been here 25 years and we've not had frosts like these before.

We use all of our good nuts for seed purposes, grading out all small or damaged nuts. In raising these trees, even from seed, we've had our troubles. We let them cure several weeks then plant them in well fed soil in a narrow trench about 2 inches deep. We place the nuts 5 or 6 inches apart; we fill the trench with sawdust level with the surface. We mound the soil over this about 4 inches until spring. Then it is removed. This method lets the shoots through, otherwise they tend to send 3 or 4 stems. The nut sends down the root very early in the spring. We have some trouble with the mole-mice combination; for this reason heavy soil and sawdust is better than sandy soil. As you know neither the nut nor the tree likes wet soil.

In raising the young tree the principal difficulty is in getting a trunked upright tree. A seedling, especially when transplanted the first year, flops all over like a flowering shrub. To get them up we plant them fairly close, prune them, and feed them. Our 1 year trees are usually two feet high and 2 year trees are 4 to 5 feet high. We wholesale our trees mostly to mail order nurseries and the largest had a 5% request for replacements.

There are troubles in growing Chinese chestnuts just as there are in most fruits and nut crops and, in a way, I am glad there are because I am of the opinion there is no such thing as harvesting without cultivation. For instance, if you plant them and let nature take its course—it will. It will on an apple, too.

We have found a few small lesions of chestnut blight which were removed by pruning and then painted with pine tar. They usually occurred at a previous point of pruning. Some of the transplanted seedlings have developed a twig canker at a bud, but I've never seen them kill one and even when we don't prune it out, the tree overcomes it by new growth.

The Japanese beetle attacks the chestnut but, although they were bad this year, one spraying of DDT was effective. The weevil (curculio) was bad enough last year so we are spraying this year. Small growers should put the nuts in metal containers and thus destroy the larvae, if any.

I would like to remark here that we are a nursery growing many ornamentals, and the Chinese chestnut, although low branched, is a very ornamental tree. I know of no tree that has a handsomer dark, shiny green leaf or one whose green color holds so well until frost.

Now I think you will agree I have reported the behavior of our trees fairly, the difficulties of raising the trees, and have emphasized that I doubt if you will get success with the Chinese chestnut without effort; yet in conclusion I would like to step into "fantasy". Our No. 19 tree bore 124 pounds; suppose you had 50 trees per acre bearing that quantity. You would get 6,000 pounds per acre. The European chestnut, which is not as good, brought 30c on the Baltimore market last year. That would mean $1,800.00 per acre. Imagine having 10 acres!

1947 CROP

Pounds of Chestnuts from Original Trees at Eastern Shore Nurseries, Inc.

No. 1, 78; No. 2, 58; No. 3, 51¼; No. 4, 7½; No. 5, 49; No. 6, 31; No. 7, 34; No. 8, 31½; No. 9, 63; No. 10, 40½ No. 11, 61½; No. 12, 64½; No. 13, 56; No. 14, 47½; No. 15, 74; No. 16, 60; No. 18, 106; No. 19, 25½—Total, 938¾ pounds.

Young Orchard: 225½ pounds.

Discussion after E. Sam Hemming's paper

Corsan: "Do you recommend the use of lime?"

Hemming: "We do not use lime. We use Vigoro at the rate of 1 to 1½ lbs. to inch of diameter per tree."

Corsan: "Why do you use Vigoro?"

Hemming: "No particular reason, just that it is available."

Member: "What time of year do you fertilize your trees?"

Hemming: "We fertilize during the winter—usually during December."

Crane: "Last year we used a method of storing Chinese chestnuts which proved very satisfactory. Two thousand pounds of nuts were stored last year. Fall planting is good where one can use it but in a lot of areas it can not be used because of rats robbing the plantings. We have to store the nuts. The procedure we follow is to harvest every other day. Nuts are placed in tin cans with friction top lids. The lids should have one to three holes of 1/16" diameter in them to provide air. Cans are placed in storage at a temperature of 32 to 40 degrees F."

Stoke: "I keep chestnuts in the cellar in a can with an open top in what we call limestone sand. Keep wonderfully well. Chestnuts must have air."

Gravatt: "Down south we have a lot of trouble with decay. We take nuts right from the bur and put them in the soil. They give much better germination."

Crane: "The Chinese harvest their chestnuts just as soon as the bur cracks. They do not wait for the nuts to drop from the trees but harvest the nuts from the trees and store in covered pottery jars. They plant in the fall of the year. They do not hold nuts for any length of time."

Corsan: "How about charcoal?"

G. Smith: "Charcoal is good to store nuts in. They are shipped from China that way."

Smith: "Would chestnuts stand carbon bisulphide for getting the weevil out, or is the hot water treatment better?"

Crane: "Carbon bisulphide treatment is dangerous, it will kill weevils but it will also kill the nuts so they will not germinate. Unless precautions are used it may cause an explosion and fire. Methyl bromide treatment is better."

Stoke: "The hot water treatment is the best. It consists of immersing the nuts in water at 120 degrees F. for forty minutes."

Hemming: "I have raised about 100,000 seedlings and have never seen blight on any of my seedlings."

Dr. Smith: "A tree needs usually to be as big as the small end of a baseball bat before the bark opens enough to let in the blight spores."

Stoke: "Blight begins where there is rough bark which provides lodgment for the spores. Rough bark and moisture result in blight, hence the disease usually starts near the ground."

Crane: "The blight problem in the growing of chestnuts has often been stressed. I think you will have more loss from sunscald and root rot than you will from blight. Blight is a minor trouble with us. The Chinese chestnut naturally grows with a low head. It is a mistake to cut off the low branches on the trees until they attain some size, they can then be cut off."

Stoke: "Regarding the protection of nut trees against winter sun scald, I find that if you take ordinary aluminum paint and paint the south and southwest side of nut trees it will last for two years."

Dr. Smith: "Chestnut trees have blighted for me where the water table was too high and trees of same origin or better drained ground nearby did not blight. Blight is often a sign that the tree wants something it lacks—much like disease in humans."