So, Dad looks to have bought four chestnut saplings for the farm at Crockett.
That’s going to be an interesting experiment. Dr. Kroll, AKA Dr. Deer, would tell you that deer love chestnuts above pretty much all other food, and that it’s what they have spent most of history eating. Up until the chestnut blight, the proportion of chestnut trees in North American forests was huge, and they were a major food source.
These are Dunstan chestnuts, which are a blight-resistant hybrid species. If they can get established and start putting out nuts every year, they should be a huge draw for us. Ideally, they’ll get established, and start spreading, and we’ll get a nice mix of chestnuts through our whole forested area, but that’s a multiple-decades sort of hope.
The trick is going to be getting them to thrive, and keeping the local animals from scraping them up or knocking them over. Probably need to put a little fence around them for the first couple years, so that nobody tries to scratch his antlers on them.