Chestnut or porcupine?
Monday | 02 November 2009
As some of you know, we have two chestnut trees in our test orchard. It was never our intention to farm all the trees we planted in our test orchard. It was, instead, a way to gain insight into the growing conditions around our farm. Well, this year the two young nut trees successfully pollinated and bore fruit! As chestnut trees are primarily wind pollinated, having just two trees was not expected to yield us heavy crop loads. I expected some though. I didn’t realize back in 2004 when I was planting them that harvesting chestnuts is a painful business. Check out these pictures: these fruits are the porcupines of the nut world! Seriously, heavy gloves are in order to collect the fruit! If left alone, the fruit (or nut) develops in what is aptly called a “burr”. The burr opens to reveal the fruit that eventually falls to the ground to reproduce, or the entire burr falls to the ground and rolls to a new happy home. What surely does not happen is that anybody messes with the burr – they are sharp! I find this adaptation by the chestnut tree to be ingenious – survival is assured when great pain is required to eat the fruit.
Once you get around the burr, the inner seed is protected by two skins, the pericarpus and the pellicle. In the wild, these skins protect the inner seed from harsh or drying conditions until spring when it can germinate. When grown for production, the fruits are peeled and carefully stored to maintain moisture and freshness. Either way, the chestnut is a complicated nut.Here at Cowhorn, I think we will enjoy these two trees for their beauty and their small bounty. As well, they will serve as a reminder to us that Mother Nature has developed many hidden secrets to protect herself and her creatures from extinction or harm.
– Barbara Steele
