Chestnut
Castanea sativa
Grows to forest scale in the end, so it is a tree you site once and site carefully.
- Type
- Fruit · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green · Gold and chartreuse
- Sunlight
- Full sun, somewhere warm and out of the wind.
- Watering
- Keep young trees watered; an established one needs nothing.
- Feeding
- Compost mulch in spring; it hardly needs feeding beyond that.
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Flowering
- June
- Pruning
- In winter, take out dead and crossing branches and nothing more.
- Apr–Jun Bud Break
- Jun–Jun Flowering
- Jun–Sep Fruit Set
- Sep–Oct Harvest
- Oct–Dec Leaf Fall
- Jan–Apr Leaf Fall
- Plant spacing
- 24 ft 9 in
- In-row spacing
- 24 ft 9 in
- Between rows
- 34 ft 5 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody, with a taproot it keeps
- Working depth
- 24 in–5 ft
- Can reach
- 10 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 39–66 ft across, about 1.5–2.5× the width of the plant
It anchors downwards as well as sideways, which is what lets it stand in a gale and what makes it hate being moved. Plant it small: past a few years in the ground a taprooted tree transplants badly, and often not at all.
The habit is Chestnut’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- Leaf miners Leaf miner tunneling between the leaf surfaces
- Vine weevil Chestnut weevil grubs inside the nuts
- Chestnut blight The disease that erased the American chestnut from four billion trees to almost none. Orange-buff cankers girdle the trunk; the roots live on and sprout, and are struck again.
- Leaf spot Ink disease
Beneficial predators that hunt this plant's pests — grow their favourite flowers nearby to recruit them. companion plant
- Beneficial nematodes Steinernema & Heterorhabditis spp.Hunts Vine weevil
Microscopic worms watered onto damp soil that hunt down soil-dwelling grubs and release a bacterium that kills them within days. Timing is the whole thing: warm, damp soil and a small target grub, which means late summer for most of what they are used against.
- Frogs & toads AnuraHunts Vine weevil
A resident toad works the beds every night for slugs, cutworms, and weevils. Recruit them with water — even a sunken basin pond — plus damp shade and an upturned-pot toad house; skip the slug pellets that poison their prey.
- Ground beetle CarabidaeHunts Vine weevil
Fast, glossy night hunters that patrol the soil surface for slugs, cutworms, and root-fly larvae. Give them daytime cover — thick perennial edges, stepping stones, a log — and skip the tillage that wrecks their burrows.
- Hedgehog Erinaceus europaeusHunts Vine weevil
A European animal, and worth saying so plainly: there are no hedgehogs in North America, and the ally that does the same night shift here is the toad, the opossum or the ground beetle. Where they do occur, cut a gap in the fence and skip the pellets.
- Parasitic wasps Braconidae & TrichogrammaHunts Leaf miners
Tiny, stingless wasps that lay eggs in or on caterpillars, aphids, and moth eggs — the white cocoons riding a hornworm are their calling card, so leave that caterpillar be. Umbel flowers with shallow nectar keep the adults fuelled.
Comfrey, Clover, Wildflowers
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com