Are you interested in helping to restore the American Chestnut in Grayson County?
Come to an information meeting March 21 from 1-2:30 pm at the 1908 Courthouse Baldwin Auditorium
Clint Morse, citizen scientist, has been working with The American Chestnut Foundation (TACF) and Matthews Forest on this project. How can you help? Clint will discuss lots of ways for all ages and skill levels.
At the meeting, we will have some nuts for new growers to continue the raised bed trials we started last year. If you ever wanted to grow American Chestnuts, this is an opportunity to keep the tree moving forward.
Starting this spring, we will collect pollen from large surviving trees in the woods and will use that pollen in controlled crosses with well-known trees. The nuts from the controlled crosses will go into TACF’s recurrent genomic selection pipeline. The progeny will then be evaluated for enhanced resistance. One of the important parts of resistance testing is replicated field trials. If you have a home for one of those trials, we will be in discussions.
We will also need to broaden the availability of large wild trees to use in resistance testing. To do that, we will send out search parties to find big trees. TACF has a list of 50 known large VA trees, and we have all heard stories of big trees in Grayson and surrounding counties. During the summer, we will determine whether the trees are alive, mark the trees so that we can identify the trees in the winter, and then collect scion wood for grafting.
Currently the inaccessibility and remoteness of the big trees makes controlled crosses impractical. Grafting the big trees into our own back yard orchards will make controlled pollination much easier in the future.
Over time, as we feed more-and-more nuts into the TACF pipeline, the resistance tests will show which American parents produce the best offspring. We will then do crosses of those superior parents, and through the miracles of modern genetics, the TACF models will be able to predict which seedlings will be most likely to have enhanced resistance at a very young age. Once the models are finding sufficient progeny with enhanced genetics, we will plan a seed orchard at Matthews for the top ten percent of all Americans. It will be the first orchard of surviving American Chestnuts with elevated resistance in the country!
There will also be special projects along the way. Of immediate need, the VA-DOF orchard at Matthews needs to be thinned so that the good trees can get enough light to produce lots of nuts for all of the projects (particularly grafting).
As you can see, there is a lot to do! I hope you’ll join us the 21st and become part of this exciting project.