— Linda Black walks down the orchard path outside her back door with her head bent, eyes scanning the dirt and scant grass.
For what seems like the hundredth time before noon on this mid-September day, she stoops to scoop up smooth, dark brown chestnuts that fell earlier that morning or the night before. Amid the rolling hills and bluffs between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, a stiff breeze brings chestnuts down like a welcome rain.
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Harvest season has begun.
Home-grown chestnuts will be roasted throughout Illinois and elsewhere in the U.S. this holiday season, thanks to people like Black and her husband, Dale, who are bringing back a tree that was once an important part of America’s landscape.
More than a century ago, American chestnut trees were plentiful and valued not only for their nuts — a food source for man and wildlife — but also for rot-resistant wood and tannins used to process leather. However, an invasive disease called chestnut blight, believed to have been introduced in 1904 through imported Asian trees, destroyed virtually all the chestnuts by the 1950s.
But growers in several states have been working for the last few decades to re-establish the chestnut.
Among them are the Blacks, who own the Chestnut Ridge of Pike County Orchard near Rockport, about 50 miles south of Quincy, one of a handful of chestnut orchards in Illinois. Last year, gathering their crop primarily by hand, they collected more than 8,200 pounds of chestnuts over the six-week fall harvest — their best ever.
This season, armed with newly acquired harvesting equipment, they expect to match that total despite the summer’s wicked drought.
“We didn’t know what to expect this year after the drought, but … the size of the nuts looks really good,” said Linda. “I think the chestnut trees adapt to the conditions they have and put everything they have into making good chestnuts.”
Before the blight, chestnut trees grew 100 feet tall in forests primarily in the East but also reaching near southeastern Illinois, said Dennis Fulbright, a professor of plant pathology at Michigan State University. Now chestnuts are largely an orchard crop, often a hybrid.
Attempts to resurrect the chestnuts started soon after the blight and took flight in the 1970s, Fulbright said. U.S. production is increasing, but by worldwide standards, it is still minimal. Most chestnuts bought in the U.S. these days are imported.
The Blacks started their orchard in 2001 with 100 seedlings. The orchard, now with 3,000 trees, takes up 30 acres of the Blacks’ 160-acre farm and is planted in Dunstan chestnuts, a blight-resistant Chinese-American combination.
Those first seedlings planted years ago are now 25 to 30 feet tall and last year alone yielded 2,700 pounds of chestnuts. Dale estimates that at maturity (roughly 20 years old), the trees will reach about 75 feet and yield about 50 pounds each.
Chestnut trees can thrive in Illinois because of the state’s climate, Fulbright said.
The exact number of growers in Illinois varies depending on the source. Ray Young, secretary-treasurer of the nonprofit Chestnut Growers of America, said he is aware of nine growers in Illinois and believes the Blacks have the largest orchard in the state.
Hard work, hungry deer
A retired contractor with a mind for measurements and keeping all things straight and even, Dale, 65, grew up in Rockport. He has loved trees since he worked for Stark Bro’s Nursery in Louisiana, Mo., as a boy, and to tend this many trees and work through the harvest is his dream.
“It takes a lot of hard work to make me happy,” he says with a laugh.
“Dale loves trees, but we chose chestnuts because they are rare, so that made them fascinating,” said Linda, 55, his wife of 21 years. “And in years to come, they will provide a valuable timber log for our (three adult) children. In the meantime, we get to harvest the nuts. It’s been an interesting journey.”
The orchard is a challenge, Linda said. Incredible dedication, back-breaking labor and a team approach have gotten them this far. Many of the trees came from seeds directly sown and tended by the Blacks on their hands and knees.
“I get up really early, and I come out here to work, and you know it is work, but I think, ‘How can it be better than this? It’s just beautiful out here,”’ Linda said.
The beauty of the perfectly aligned trees, and their charming black cat, Midnight, who follows her like a dog down orchard rows, has not clouded her view of reality or the work that surfaces daily.
In the summer, when temperatures many days hovered around 100, the Blacks were working without help, constructing and installing 3,400 linear feet of 8-foot-tall fence. It was to protect the orchard from Pike County’s large white-tailed deer population, their crop’s biggest threat.
“We’re old. That was really hard work,” Dale said to his wife.
“It was,” Linda said. “You bet it was.”
The deer will stomp on the sharp chestnut burs — the prickly pods in which the nuts grow — with their hooves to open them. They love the nuts, the leaves and the bark of the tree, said Dale. Fallen nuts are also food for critters and rodents, and Dale can tell by examining empty burs who was eating what last night.
The tennis ball- or softball-sized burs cannot be handled without work gloves. Linda shows her fingertips where her husband regularly removes sharp bits of burs, and Dale rubs the back of his neck where a prickly bur landed on him.
The Blacks said their chestnuts combine the desirable American chestnut qualities with the blight-resistant Chinese variety. Although they thrive at the Illinois orchard, the patented Dunstan is not reliable in, for example, Michigan orchards, Fulbright said.
“The Blacks are great people who have worked extremely hard,” he said. “They deserve all of the chestnuts they get, but it’s important to plant what is productive in your area for the future of the chestnut industry.
“Getting the word out that there are chestnuts being produced here is a real issue,” he said.
Most chestnuts sold in the U.S. are imported from Italy, Turkey and Korea, said Fulbright, an adviser to a chestnut co-op in Michigan, the state with the most growers in the nation, according to a census taken in 2007 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Life in Camp Chestnut
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Fulbright estimates 85 percent of Americans have not had a chestnut. But, he added, “Few people dislike chestnuts once they have had good ones, and the fresher the better. You can’t find them any fresher than having been grown locally.”
Generally there are three golden nuts inside a chestnut bur, nestled side-by-side in what feels like a bed of velvet. Besides tasting good, they are highly nutritious. Typically, as the nuts dry, they fall from the bur onto the ground, but sometimes the burs fall with the nuts still in them.
Chestnuts are gluten free and have the lowest fat content of any edible nut. When raw, they have the texture of a crunchy apple that is not quite ripe, and when roasted, they are more like a firm potato.
The Blacks started selling their product online (chestnutridgeofpikecounty.com) in 2006 and expect to sell to 47 states and Canada this year. The larger the nut, the higher the price. The largest is about 1.25 inches in diameter. Generally, they cost about $5 a pound.
Alan Rizvic of Palatine, a loyal customer, plans to buy 2,000 pounds of chestnuts this fall — about half for family and friends, and the rest to be roasted at the Bosnian community’s annual Chestnut Festival on Oct. 13 in Des Plaines.
Rizvic said chestnut roasting is a tradition, and Bosnians from Illinois and nearby states gather each autumn to get that taste of home.
“The people are very happy to have it,” Rizvic said. “The chestnuts are excellent. Just delicious.”
Harvest season at Chestnut Ridge requires help, but the Blacks have no employees. They rely on Linda’s parents, Edna and Paul Turner, of Quincy, who park their motor home by the processing shed each fall and pitch in. Linda and Dale park their camper there as well, staying close to work in the area Linda calls Camp Chestnut.
A freezer full of prepared meals fuels them through the three-week peak season when they work from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. When the harvest is done, Linda will begin processing orders to meet holiday demand. Usually they are sold out by Dec. 15.
Until this year, they said, they collected the nuts and put them in 5-gallon buckets that they would load onto a vehicle and take to the processing shed. “After a few days you really know where your glutes are,” Dale said. “But you get used to it.”
This year they used equipment to gather the fallen nuts and burs. They are not increasing the yield by having the equipment. They are just making the process easier — but they still make sure every last nut is taken off the ground.
Inside the shed, the chestnuts are husked and sized through machines designed and built by Dale. Before then, the Blacks and Turners spent nighttime hours in thick gloves, sitting around a table separating nuts from burs by hand.
“It was definitely time-consuming,” Dale said. “But all of the conversation we had? It was well worth it.”
The Blacks haven’t reached the point of making a profit on this dream, Linda said. “But we also get to spend our summer days in a beautiful place on planet Earth, so it’s all good.”
Though the drought kept production below what the Blacks had hoped, Dale said the orchard overall has exceeded his expectations.
“If we had an ideal year this year, we would be looking at 16,000 pounds and the following year, 30,000,” he said. “But I can see 30,000 pounds a year in three to four years.”
And when the harvest is complete?
Roasting chestnuts has become part of the Black family’s Christmas tradition. But so has escaping somewhere south for a winter vacation.