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Propagating Your Own Chestnut Trees

Chestnut trees are expensive to purchase as compared to other fruiting trees such as apple, pears, and cherries. At such a high cost a person would be motivated to try to propagate their own chestnut trees. There is only the skill set of grafting woody plants to be acquired, some small tools and a few supplies. Here is the list of the tools:

1. Grafting knife
2. Bypass pruner

That was short. What about the materials that are needed? The materials list depends on when, where, and how the grafting is being done. A generic list can be used for most chestnut tree grafting situations. This generic list is the basics:

1. Banding or wrapping material
2. Graft sealer
3. Scion wood
4. Nuts or seedlings

It looks like the materials list is also short. The scion wood and the seedlings/nuts are specific to grafting the chestnut trees, where the banding/wrapping materials and the graft sealer are available from many sources. The amount of materials that are needed depends on how many grafted chestnut trees you need. A good example to help determine the quantities is if the target was adding 100 new grafted trees in the orchard. If you are purchasing seedlings then we only nee to know the success rate of grafting chestnut trees. The problems is the success rate is widely variable depending on the scion wood, the compatibility of the seedling to the scion wood, the grafting method used, and many more variables. For commercial chestnut tree propagators, a 75 percent success rate for chestnut trees is a very high standard. Usually success rates are closer to 50%. So for 100 grafted trees a propagator will require somewhere between 134 to 200 seedlings.

To save even more money, nuts could be obtained in the fall and stratified for spring planting. So how many nuts will be needed for those 100 grafted trees. The best practices known to chestnut tree propagators for converting nuts into seedlings has these numbers associated with the efforts:

10 lbs of nuts at 30 nuts per pound totals to 300 nuts. The 10 lbs of nuts will cost about $30 - $100. Of those 300 nuts about 10 . 20 percent will rot before spring arrives. You might now have 250 nuts for spring planting. Planting the 250 nuts in the soil should get about 70 percent germination rate. At the end of spring you might have 175 seedlings. Of those 175 seedlings, about 15 percent will have genetic problems where the seedling would not develop into a seedling that can receive a graft. Now you have about 145 seedlings that might take a graft. Now let.s look back at chestnut tree grafting success rates being close to 50 percent. Starting with 10 lbs of nuts the resulting grafted trees would be about 75 trees, about 25 trees short of the desire goal of 100 grafted chestnut trees.

Now let.s add labor into the resources needed to complete the process of making grafted chestnut trees.

1. Purchase 10 lbs of nuts 0.5 hr labor
2. Stratify the nuts 2 hrs labor
3. Plant the nuts 2 hrs labor
4. Graft 100 trees at 6 minutes per tree 10 hrs labor

Total labor need to make 100 grafted chestnut trees is 14.5 hours.

Field grafting trees at a rate of 6 minutes per tree is very fast. For someone who only grafts a few trees here and there 10 - 15 minutes per tree would be a better approximation. This would change the labor hours to between 14 - 25 hours.

The final cut comes the year after the grafts were placed. The final cut will remove about 20 percent of the tree due to poor graft performance or the lack of buds/new growth on the graft section of the tree.

Are you still ready to put your time and money into the undertaking of propagating your own chestnut trees? Here are a few helpful hints to help guide you:

1. Do not graft if daytime temps are below 70 degrees F
2. Do not graft if daytime high temps are above 85 degrees F
3. Only use healthy scion wood
4. Use a section of scion wood having at least 2 buds
5. Place 2 or more grafts per tree, most propagators use 3 or 4
6. Do not water the trees for at least 4 days after the graft. Excessive fluids in the tree reduces the graft success rate
7. Scion wood should be about the same thickness as a pencil
8. Only use scion wood gathered in the winter while the chestnut trees were dormant
9. Only use wood from last years growing season for scion wood
10. Only graft the scion wood from the mother cultivar on the same seedlings the nuts for the seedlings came from. Chestnut trees are very picky with graft compatibility between the root/under stock and the scion wood.

This is how hint #10 works. If you want Colossal chestnut trees then the seedlings must be started with nuts from a Colossal chestnut tree. By grafting seedlings from the same cultivar to the same cultivar scion wood grafting incompatibilities can be avoided.

Before jumping into the propagation of chestnut trees, start with checking plant quarantine laws and finding sources for the scion wood and nuts that will not be hosts from bad stuff like chestnut blight, gall wasps, and other things that like to destroy chestnut trees. Bringing bad pests and pathogyns into what was a pest tree area is not a good thing when it can result in the reduction in the food supply, not just for chestnut trees but for many other plants too.

 
 
Contact Information:

Farm Location:
6160 Everson Goshen Rd
Everson, WA 98247
Ph: (360) 592-3397


Business Offices:
Washington Chestnut Company
6160 Everson Goshen Rd.
Everson, WA 98247
Ph: (360) 592-3397