Week of September 26, 2021

Other crops harvested in the fall at both TAProots Farm and our Florida Home are nuts. In Upstate New York, we harvest Carpathian English Walnuts with one tree with many nuts ready for collection this year. At our Florida home, our neighbor has a CHESTNUT tree planted at our fence line, with most of the nuts landing on our side of the fence. Chestnuts were a mainstay of the eastern US forest until an imported blight wiped them out in 1910. A few survivors were crossbred with a chestnut from China by a plant scientist named Dunstan, and Dunstan Chestnuts have been featured by a local grower, Chestnut Hill Farm, for many years. We provide our neighbor’s chestnut tree with fertilizer and it has produced nuts every year, though some years the nuts have been poorly formed and few in number. The crop this year is plentiful with huge nuts, likely due to the abundant rain. They start with stringlike white blossoms and then form a green husk covered with sharp spikes, requiring heavy gloves to handle them. We wait for them to drop off the tree, needing to be checked daily as the squirrels enjoy them too. A heavy, sharp blade is required to crack the husk, which is the pulled apart to expose the dark brown nut. We keep these in a sealed container in the refrigerator until time to eat them. An X-shaped cut is then made on the round side of the nut’s shell and they are placed on the grill for 10 or 15 minutes (so the song goes), yielding yellow nut meats good for eating, mixing in salads, or the turkey’s stuffing.