well hi everybody its John from Lake Erie just nuts want to welcome you to the 2019 year we're gonna try some new things here we're gonna try a little bit of green screen see if we can mess some things up what I'll want to do this year is I'm gonna try to do a series on growing chestnuts and why I chose an orchard different aspects that you need to worry about with growing an orchard if you've been following my progress you know I'm not an expert I'm a novice who studied quite a bit about chestnuts but I'm definitely a novice I just produced my first chestnuts in the fall of 2018 in the fourth year of my orchard being in the ground we're gonna discuss multiple avenues of this we're gonna discuss why I got into chestnuts why I chose them then we're gonna discuss the different varieties of chestnuts that are out there we'll discuss some of the pluses and minuses of the different varieties that are there won't be a comprehensive list but it'll be a good list for you to start from then we'll discuss how do you go about laying out an orchard I'll discuss how I did it I'll discuss how other people have suggested you do it but there's no right or wrong way it's just how I did it and me sharing that experience in a way that has worked for me and you can take some of those pieces and use it for your own ideas or you can abandon it and use your own ideas there's no right or wrong then we'll discuss different ways to get your chestnuts whether you purchase seed seedlings whether you use and bare-root whether you grow your own whether you buy from somebody the pluses and minuses of that and some of that depends on where you're from then we'll move into setting up your orchard maintaining it fertilizing it and then production picking how do you sell your harvest do you go local you go more broadly to yourself to a co-op do you do you pick do you sell individual seed nuts those are all considerations that you put in this and we'll do this in a several part series and we'll start this with how I got into chestnuts so we'll go to part one of our chestnut series why did I choose chestnuts for my orchard planting well after learning about the American chestnut blight and how it took down the American chestnut and becoming curious about it I heard about Dunston chestnuts and went to Chestnut Hill orchards on the web read about how it's a good food plot tree for deer that deer like chestnuts more than acorns even and read about the American chestnut and that the Dunstan had some American characteristics although it looks more dominantly Chinese overall and I bought three chestnut trees so why did I choose a chestnut orchard number one it's less work maybe it seems to be less work than apples you know you have to spray them multiple times a year you have to have a certain root stock you have to have certain varieties you have to prevent multiple multiple pests and there are lots of maintenance top working and so forth chestnuts don't require that number two is a relatively short production season well that's true of many annual crops that produce you know parentally I guess is how I should describe that most chestnuts will dump over a two or three-week period and you can pick up the crops and then number three it's not that common of a tree to grow so I thought I would have something unique it could potentially fill a niche in the area there's no other chestnut orchards in the area that I'm aware of there are people that have chestnuts but nobody that I know of that is formerly growing an orchard and of course the chestnuts taste great I'd been lucky enough to acquire a piece of property they had some prime chestnut growing area I did some soil analysis through the Penn State soil lab and found that my pH was well below seven which is neutral and chestnuts like an acidic pH so I bought three of the Dunston chestnuts from Realtree nursery and I planted those as bare-root seedlings in the spring of 2014 this was my sample crop I was gonna give it a year or two see how they grew and they looked like they were happy in the first summer they were growing to the top of the five foot tubes trying to grow out of them they look very happy well the chestnuts seem to be pretty happy where I'm at so I read a lot about the chestnuts from a University of Missouri publication that you can see here and follow the website and ultimately purchased 100 Chinese chestnut and hybrid type seedlings from Empire chestnuts in Ohio and I put those out in a planting in April of 2015 hope you enjoy the series should be fun should be fun to see your guys's comments I'm open to positives negatives I'm still in flux here I'm I'm happy to change some things if I'm persuaded by evidence or knowledge so please feel free to comment thank you and in our next episode we'll discuss the different varieties of chestnuts that you can plant how you can plant them and move on from there hope you enjoyed this first installment of how to grow a chestnut orchard