The Farm Log for the Year 2011

Considering what a bad growing year 2010 was we now move into 2011 hopeful and wiser. We now know chestnut producers can loose most if not all their harvest for any one year. Had chestnut producing been our only source of income we would have lost everything including our home. Aside from not having any income our normal expenses for operating the orchard continued. These expenses are such things as equipment repairs, fuel, replacement of hoses and watering sprinklers, and many other expenses. No wonder why there are so few commercial chestnut producers who derive all their income from producing chestnuts.

Goals for this year are focused on increasing efficiencies and helping our customers enjoy their chestnuts more through continued research and development of new chestnut focused recipes. So our goals for 2011 are:

1. Increasing the survival rate of chestnut tree seedlings to better than 90 percent.

2. Formalize the recipe development with taste testing panels and well documented recipes that are easy to prepare.

3. Add 4 more acres of chestnut trees to the farm.

Winter

Considering what a bad growing year 2010 was we now move into 2011 hopeful and wiser. We now know chestnut producers can loose most if not all their harvest for any one year. Had chestnut production been our only source of income, we would have lost everything including our home. Aside from not having any income, our normal expenses for operating the orchard continued. These expenses are such things as equipment repairs, fuel, repacement of hoses and watering sprinklers, and many other expenses. No wonder why there are so few commercial chestnut producers who derive all their income from producing chestnuts.

Spring

The new chestnut trees from chestnuts harvested last fall are all up and growing so fast, some are already 9 inches tall (Late April). Seeing all this new life spring up from the soils is such a sight to be seen. These new trees are already being spoken for with lots of folks calling in and picking out just the right trees for their ground. Precoce Migoule is the most requested chestnut cultivar so far this year. If a nice long storage life, that is more than 10 days in the fridge, then consider the Bisalta #3 chestnut cultivar. The chestnuts from this tree were used in a storage test we conducted this past fall and winter. We were able to store the chestnuts for a full 10 weeks in a sealed standard ziplock plastic bag. The bag was opened ever 2 weeks for inspection.

Aside from taking care of the new trees, all 3000 of them, we have regular orchard maintenance to do like, mowing grass, weed control, replacing dead trees, fertilizing trees, and preparing for the fall harvest. Preparing for the fall harvest starts in the spring because there are a lot of resources needed during the harvest and distribution of the chestnuts. From little things like mesh bag closure, shipping boxes, and computer automation for order processing. Then there are the big things like formalizing the fall marketing plan for the harvested chestnuts. So if there is a time we feel we are caught up with the things that need to be done, the feeling is just ignoring the many chores we just have not put high enough on the priority list to be noticed.

Summer

So far the weather during most of the growing season has been 5 - 10 degrees F below normal. The cooler temps appear to effect the growth rates of the chestnut trees. Typically, the chestnut trees grow 3 or more feet a year. This year we have very few trees that have grown more than 18 inchest so far, and most of this years grow is now done (last week of August). The good news is even though the temps have been below normal and rainfall way above normal, the chestnut trees have an excellent nut set. The harvest season is only about 4 to 6 weeks away and we still have a many chores to accomplish before it arrives.

In the back rooms of the chestnut business we find lots of dicussion about how to put together a chestnut orchard that produces the largest chestnut with the greatest tons per acre. The chestnut tree of choice for size and production is the Colossal cultivar. For people who just want great tasting chestnuts from their chestnut trees, they need to set aside size and tons per acre. If we look at apples as an example, the Wolf River apple is widely accepted as apple variety that produces one of the largest apples. For those people who have one of these apple trees you will find it is not their only apple tree, because the apples are not a great apple when compared to other apples grown. In the commercial apple tree business nobody grows the Wolf River apple for commercial sales. There are some great apples available to us including Fuji, Pink Lady, Honeycrisp, BelMac, Jonagold, and many others. Now lets focus back to the chestnut trees and list a few of the great tasting nuts without the focus on size on tons per acre. At the top of the list are Marrone de Marradi, Marrone di Comballe, Marigoule, Regis Montis, and Szego. All of these chestnuts have common genes from the European chestnut trees (c. sativa), some pure c. sativa, and some hybrids with c. crenata or c. mollissima. One other thing these chestnut trees have in common is they will never come close to producing chestnuts on the commercial scale like a Colossal does. The Colossal makes a good choice for commercial growers because most consumers want very large chestnuts, and that is what the Colossal chestnut cultivar delivers.

If you go looking for one of these great tasting chestnut trees in a local nursery your not going to find it. There just is not enough demand for chestnut trees for the retailers to stock them. Over the past 20 years the yard sizes of the average new home has gotten much smaller. Only small trees fit in these small yards. The apple nurseries have dwarfing apple trees that fit nicely in these small yards. A chestnut tree planted in the back yard after 20 years would be shared with as many as 4 neighbors. Now that is a good neighbor, well maybe not that nice if you have to pick up the leafs and dropped branches and you do not find chestnuts as appealing as the person who has the trees in their yard. So chestnut trees for the most part are banned from local retail nurseries. Mail order or online is your only choice. Most online nurseries also do not sell chestnut trees. Your only option for finding chestnut trees that produce great tasting chestnuts is online speciality nurseries. The good news for this year is we now have all these great tasting chestnut cultivars growing and next year we will be able to provide some of these to the public for sale.

Late Fall

Looking back at this year's growing season and summarizing it in just a few words, these words would be "Poor, poor, and can it get any worse?" Sounds bad doesn't it? Our harvest ended up being only about 400 lbs, 15 percent of what was expected using a mathematical model we are developing to forecast the harvest. Seems like this fancy forecasting model needs some big tweaks to correct for this years miss. More on the forecast model and its errors later.

It is time to start thanking our customers. This year more than any past year every customer had to wait almost 3 extra weeks before we were able to ship fresh chestnuts. The chestnut harvest was nearly 3 weeks late this year. We would normally see our first chestnuts fall around the 22nd of September. This year the first chestnuts fell about the 10th of October. We continued to harvest all the way up to the first week in November. The focus here can not be entirely on the chestnut harvest. We also produce grafted chestnut trees. Some of those customers have been waiting for over a year for their trees. These are truly very patient people. For most of them their wait is almost over. We will start shipping trees the first full week in December and continuing until March.

Now, back to the issues with the chestnut harvest forecasting mathematical model. The model fell to its knees this year because it failed to identify chestnuts that never developed kernels. Chestnut burrs were sampled in the months of August and September to examine the developing nuts. What was observed and what the harvest delivered did not match. The model uses the assumption that about 75 percent of the burrs deliver 3 nuts. The remaining 25 percent deliver 2 nuts. In a simple way, count the number of burrs on the average tree (actually about 5% of the average trees in the orchard), multiply by the number of trees in the orchard, then apply the 75% having three nuts and 25% having 2 nuts, then dividing by the number of nuts it takes to make a pound of nuts. Using this model the orchard we have should have produces about 3000 lbs of chestnuts this year. What needs to be tweaked in the model to get a more accurate forecast? The model will need to have some pictures added so the evaluation of the chestnut burrs and nuts provides good guidance to the evaluator for determining if a nut is properly developing or not. This next year pictures will be taken and documented so the model.