Posted on 08/22/2019 9:47:46 AM PDT by Berlin_Freeper
The wild chestnuts around this leafy college town used to grow in such great numbers that locals collected the nuts by the bushel and shipped them off to New York City for a small fortune.
These days, though, it can be hard to find a single tree thanks to a devastating blight imported from Asia in the late 1800s.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Beautiful wood, too. Just a notch or two above oak, IMHO.
Interesting! Thanks for posting.
Interesting! Thanks for posting.
The ubiquity of the chestnut was a product of indigenous people’s agricultural techniques. The Indians in both Americas farmed the trees in the forest, planting fruit and nut bearing trees everywhere and burning off the underbrush often. There are areas in Amazonia where it would be impossible to starve due to the number and variety of fruit bearing trees selected millennia ago and tended up until the advent of the Europeans.
I know a guy who just makes that large weird metal “art” in front of buildings.
Must be worth it. His wife frequently posts destinations they’ve gone for dedication of his pieces.
I know another guy who builds fire gardens.
“Should we resurrect the American chestnut tree with genetic engineering?”
definitely. that would be awesome. we’re losing our ash trees in Colorado to the Emerald Ash Borer which carries a fungus that kills the trees too ... only way to keep them safe is to treat them with a systemic chemical injected into the tree every couple of years ... bark borers are killing our Austrian and Scotch pines as well, so those need to be sprayed every year as well ...
love to see ashes and elms genetically engineered for the future as well ...
It took 16 years for Powell and his colleague Charles Maynard to create a blight-tolerant tree using a gene found in wheat and many other plants. The gene causes the chestnut to produce oxalate oxidase, an enzyme that detoxifies the blights acid.
Its an elegant solution, Powell said. The enzyme doesnt kill the fungus, so its less likely that the blight will evolve ways to defeat it. And unlike the crossbred trees, the genetically engineered ones preserve nearly all of the native chestnuts genome.
The banning of DDT has inflicted so much damage in the world, from extinct trees to bedbug outbreaks to millions of Malaria dead around the world.
And yet here in Pittsburgh the Democrats can’t stop naming things after Rachel Carson.
The big chess tournament was taking place at the Plaza in New York. After the first day’s competition, many of the winners were sitting around in the foyer of the hotel talking about their matches and bragging about their wonderful play. After a few drinks they started getting louder and louder until finally, the desk clerk couldn’t take any more and kicked them out.
The next morning the Manager called the clerk into his office and told him there had been many complaints about his being so rude to the hotel guests....instead of kicking them out, he should have just asked them to be less noisy. The clerk responded, “I’m sorry, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.”
Sure plant the trees. Then give us back our Elms and Ashes.
Turkey’s done!
There were still small groves and individual Elms around the country being managed through the fifties and sixties with targeted DDT spraying, and they were doing quite well. But when DDT was banned almost all of them got infected and died.
But you are correct that the large tracts of them not managed were wiped out. I was only speaking about ones they wanted to preserve, and there were still quite a few.
A "Win, Win" situation. Both are good eat'n and the wood is rot resistant and easy to work.
Hell yes....
They have a wildlife preserve up in Maine named after Rachel Carson, and every time I drive by I grit my teeth.
I’ll bet. And as big as they were, you could probably get a lot of wood out of it too.
What a shame.
Yes! Bring back the chestnut trees. Bring back the elms.
Did we learn nothing from Jurassic Tree 2?
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