Restoring Chestnuts to East Texas

Did you know that the greatest ecological disaster that has ever occurred in North America happened right here in East Texas? That's right - the extinction of the American Chestnut in the South (which includes East Texas) is the worst ecological disaster science has ever seen on this continent. In 1909 the US started importing chestnuts from China to satisfy the insatiable american appetite for "roasted chestnuts". What they didn't realize was that those imported Chinese chestnuts brought along a blight that our great American Chestnut could not fight off and within a few short years it had killed over 4 billion chestnut trees - yes, you read that correctly - BILLION with a 'B'.

Well, fortunately, there were a few really smart individuals that managed to save a few up north and start a process of developing a chestnut that was immune to the Chinese chestnut blight and today you can buy those chestnuts trees from a few select nurseries that  have spent decades growing enough to develop a market for selling them. Here at the C4 we feel it is our duty to help restore some of those great trees so we have started a process of planting a few every year and the first actual chestnuts are starting to bloom!

Chestnut Blooms

We plant them along the edges of food plots to give them plenty of sun and to make it easy to care for them. We have developed an easy and inexpensive way to water them and we have built exclusion cages around them to keep the deer from killing them (bucks love to rub them). We are looking forward to "roasting chestnuts over an open fire" this year and eventually they will produce enough of a crop to be a real benefit to the deer herd. Chestnuts are high in protein and digestible energy, they produce every year as opposed to every other year for oak trees, and some recent studies done by Dr. James Kroll have shown deer prefer chestnuts to acorns 100 to 1.

Chestnut trees in a food plot

If you would like to know where you can get some Chestnut trees of your own and help to restore this magnificent tree to your area then contact us through our website at www.c4whitetails.com and we will tell you all you need to know.