Wildlife Growers Fruit Tree Nursery
Chestnuts for Deer and People, too
Don’t repeatedly spend your money on expensive bags of corn; plant chestnut trees, instead. An acre of chestnut trees can produce 6,000 pounds of nuts each year. That’s equivalent to 120 bags of corn.
Deer, turkey, hogs, and other wildlife love chestnuts because they taste good and are loaded with carbohydrates. In terms of wildlife attraction and nutrition, chestnuts are similar to corn. However, the trees are much easier to grow, provide more reliable production, and are more permanent than a field of corn. Chestnuts of Chinese origin are very resistant to the exotic chestnut blight fungus that almost extirpated our native chestnuts in the early 1900s. Unlike apples and pears, chestnut trees grown from seed tend to closely resemble their parents in form and nut characteristics, including productivity and drop dates. Our trees were purchased from other wholesale nurseries and grown to a larger size for resale. Most drop their nuts during September here at our location. There will be more variation in nut characteristics among seedling trees than among grafted trees. However, from our experience with pure Chinese chestnuts, seedlings are more vigorous, problem-free, and longer-lived than grafted trees. Our trees start producing some nuts in our nursery rows, and mature into wildlife magnets. Although chestnut trees produce male and female flowers, they are mostly self-sterile, so plant at least 2 trees in each orchard. Suggested for USDA Zones 4 to 8.
Our chestnut seedlings begin dropping the last week in August and continue well into September.
Because we sold all of our large chestnut trees last year, it will be next year before we have more large chestnut trees.