🌳
Chestnut
🗓 Season: September · October
🔍 When is it ripe?
Spiny green burs split open to reveal 2–3 shiny brown chestnuts. Gather from the ground after they fall. Must be cooked (roasted, boiled, or ground into flour) — toxic raw in large quantities. Peel the papery inner skin after cooking.
This is a truly powerful tree. In 1956, the family who lives here moved to the United States from Monte Cassino, Italy, where they had a farm with a chestnut orchard. In the 1970s, the father of the family went back to Italy to visit his friends. When he returned, he brought twelve baby chestnut trees back with him. The family planted all twelve of them together in their garden, and they grew there for a few years, all in a row.
There used to be billions of chestnut trees in the United States, but in the 1900s almost all of them were killed by a fungus called chestnut blight. Eventually this blight made its way into the family's garden and killed eleven of the twelve chestnuts. This tree is the only survivor, and it is one of only about a hundred trees that remain in the region where chestnuts used to thrive.
Not only does the tree continue to resist the blight, but it also gets struck by lightning in the same spot 2-3 times every single year, and it continues to heal itself and thrive!
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