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Chinese or European?

Dunstan. It's an American/Chinese hybrid. Supposed to be 15/16 American genetics but I wouldn't bet the house on that. They're not well thought of in the chestnut restoration community, but I'm not trying to save the world so that doesn't much matter to me.

I just want some fresh chestnuts to eat, and it's hard to buy good ones in the store. All I can ever find for sale around here are European and they're always stale and half dried up.

I have quite a few native persimmon trees on my property so no need to buy any. Mrs. Augie loves those things but I'm not crazy about them. I expect they would be very good in sweet rolls or bread but separating the flesh from the seeds and skin is a lot of work so we don't bother.

I remember the name Dunstan from my fruit/nut orchard research.

History of the Dunstan chestnut and chestnuts in general.

https://chestnuthilltreefarm.com/learning-center/dunstan-chestnut-history-2/

Funny how a fungus from the Orient that destroyed the American chestnut now has us trying to grow our own chestnut market using hybrids of oriental chestnuts. Seems like most of our invasive species came from China.

The American chestnut used to get pretty big.

MO Center for Agroforestry has been working good marketable chestnuts for a while now so I'm leaning towards their varieties. PKQ is a fairly new one that looks very promising for nut production. Gideon, Qing and Mossbarger are some others.

Yeah, chestnuts are supposed to be eaten fairly fresh but can be refrigerated for a little while. Meanwhile all the stores have them sitting out at room temperature and who knows how old they are. Mostly a holiday season gimmick.

Hazelnuts are something else I've looked into. Rutger's has been working on improved varieties since the late 90s. Been looking into various fruit trees too but for some reason, don't have any notes on persimmons. I have the word persimmon in a note but nothing more. Guess I hadn't gotten around to it yet.