Empty Chestnuts in Burr

Take a close look at the picture below. The picture was taken in late September of a chestnut burr on a Colossal chestnut tree. There are two different views to consider when you see this on your chestnut trees.

In the positive view, the chestnut tree will open up these burrs containing empty chestnuts about a week before the burrs with full chestnuts. This is not an absolute time, but a general indicator that the harvest in your orchard is soon to begin. We don't know why chestnut trees do this with their burrs with empty nuts and not all chestnut trees open their burrs like this.

In the negative view, the chestnut tree has some or maybe many empty burrs. In bad growing years, when the female flowers do not develop properly, the flowers are not able to be receptive to pollen. When the chestnut female flowers are not receptive to the pollen during the bloom, then the resulting harvest in the fall might be well below expectations.



As chestnut producers, our goal is to produce as many large chestnuts as we can every growing year. When we see a lot burrs opening with blank nuts, what we are realy seeing is a lower income from the chestnut trees. Bad news if your only income comes from chestnut production. Since income from chestnuts is very important for us, we went through the effort to find a way to forcast the chestnut harvest. What we found is that chestnuts do not fill in until only 3 weeks before harvest. This is so close to the actual harvest there is no time to make changes to any harvest plans and the following potential sales. Even if at 3 weeks before harvest, the harvest could be predicted with a 90 percent accuracy, what could a chestnut producer do? The chestnut producer who is also a good business man/woman would revise their budgets to reflect the reduced chestnut harvest. Another task is to adjust the labor force to match the harvest.

As you can see, burrs opening with blank chestnuts is saddening event. We as chestnut producers hope we never see this in our orchard, in the same way we hope we never see squirrels, or geese, or deer, or anything else that takes away our hard earned harvest in our orchards.