Week of October 27

Autumn has fully arrived in Gainesville with cooler nights and the ripening of the nut trees.  North Florida has lots of pecans, but we have another prized nut in our Florida garden, the Chestnut.  In truth, our neighbor, Dina, has a couple chestnut trees growing on the boundary between our lots and the largest tree has spread over our yard, bringing its nuts.  The American chestnut was of course the victim of perhaps the worst ecological disaster in North American history.  It was a hugely important tree from Florida to Maine, providing wonderful wood for furniture and building, and it’s nuts were popular for roasting and baking.  Around 1910 to 1940, millions of acres of chestnut forests died of a blight from Asia in a colossal eco-catastrophe.  A  single chestnut tree was found healthy amongst a grove of dead chestnuts in Ohio, propagated from shoots, crossed with Chinese chestnuts, and made available for sale.  These are called Dunstan chestnuts after the plant breeder, and most of this testing was done at Chestnut Hill Farm near us in Alachua, Fl.  This tree was likely bought from them.  They start with lots of stringy white blossoms in the spring and the hedgehog-like seeds in the fall.  They have an outer skin of spines covering the dark brownish red nut.  They are ripening now, as they start to crack open to expose the chestnut.  In our yard, you have to pay close attention, so the squirrels don’t get them first.  We look forward to roasting them on an open fire, as the holiday song goes.