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IPR News Radio's Sunday host, Cheryl Bartz, tells us what to look for as we wander around northern Michigan, helping us notice the little wonders all around us.

It’s raining Chestnuts!

Chestnut Growers Inc.
America was once covered with chestnut trees. It was said that a squirrel could walk from New England to Georgia solely on the branches of chestnut trees. (Photo courtesy Chestnut Growers, Inc.)

Is it too soon to start listening to that holiday tune “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”?

Not really, because chestnut harvest time is underway!

My neighbors have a small orchard and I offered to help collect the nuts after they fall from the trees.

It looked easy. But like so much agricultural labor, it was not as easy as it looked. There’s a real knack to doing it efficiently.

America was once covered with chestnut trees. It was said that a squirrel could walk from New England to Georgia solely on the branches of chestnut trees.

The trees grew up to 100 feet tall. They produced delicious nuts, appreciated by wildlife and humans. The nuts were so abundant that farmers sometimes fed them to cattle.

But Japanese chestnut trees imported in the early 1900s brought along a fungal blight that within 50 years reduced the population of native chestnuts to about one percent of what it once was.

A handful of American Chestnut trees remain, including about a third of an acre in Missaukee County. But nuts commercially grown in the US are species from other continents.

The nuts grown by my neighbors, for example, are Chinese chestnuts.

Several organizations are trying to save native chestnuts by breeding the few survivors. Others are cross-breeding American chestnuts with Chinese, European or Japanese chestnuts, which are more resistant to the chestnut blight.

Michigan is one of the largest producers of chestnuts in the U.S.

Chestnuts are delicious and I’m looking forward to trying them in new ways—which will not include roasting on an open fire.

Cheryl Bartz hosts IPR's Sunday programming and writes a (mostly) weekly essay called "What's Up Outside?"