On the bright and windy morning of Saturday, April 4, four volunteers planted 88 chestnut nuts at the Catawba Sustainability Center’s breeding orchard. The Catawba Sustainability Center, a property of Virginia Tech, is located in Catawba, Virginia. Catawba is a community in Roanoke County and can be seen from the popular McAfee Knob hiking destination. The town is a 35 minute drive southwest from Blacksburg and seven miles from Salem.
The volunteers, led by Carl Absher, planted each of the locally-produced nuts in soil beds along with several inches of peat moss. They then placed plastic “tree tubes” around each of the newly buried nuts. Tree tubes will provide the saplings with protection against animal damage and also serve to mimic shaded forest conditions by reducing light intensity on the saplings. Finally, landscape fabric was laid at each planting site to protect the young chestnuts from weeds.
The trees planted on this site were a mix of American chestnuts, Chinese chestnuts, and American-Chinese hybrids. The American Chestnut Foundation will eventually inoculate each of these trees with chestnut blight to test for blight resistance.
