Nelson's Virginia Chestnuts kicking off pick

Kim and David Bryant have gradually planted around 1,600 trees in their Shipman orchard.

David and Kim Bryant grow a Chinese-American chestnut hybrid that's blight-resistant and well-suited to orchards.

Kim and David Bryant have gradually planted around 1,600 trees in their Shipman orchard, pictured Aug. 10.

In mid-August, the chestnuts on Kim and David Bryant's trees were hidden inside spiky, light green husks slightly bigger than golf balls. Come September, they’ll be baseball-sized.

The husks will fall to the ground, turn brown and split open to reveal the chestnuts inside — typically two to three per husk. That's when visitors can come pick their own chestnuts at Bryant Farm in Shipman, as pick-your-own starts Sept. 24 and lasts into October.

It's also when Kim and David kick into gear. Their crop is labor intensive during the autumn harvest, when for one month the couple — and everyone else in the family they can get to help — gather the nuts as they fall to the ground. It's a race to collect them as fast as possible — for maximum freshness and to keep wildlife from getting to them first.

Bryant Farm is the heart of Virginia Chestnuts, a group of five chestnut farms reintroducing the former staple crop back to Virginia. The Bryants sell chestnuts to customers across the United States and teach an annual Chestnut School to help other commercial chestnut growers get started.

The couple bought their 46-acre farm in 2003 after Kim read that 90% of the chestnuts consumed in the United States were grown elsewhere and that chestnuts were one of the most profitable crops per acre that could be grown in the area.

"So we bought 200 trees about 2007, 2008, planted them, and within a week the deer ate all of them. So 2009 came and we went big. We said, ‘We’ll start with 1,000 trees this year’ ... and then we kept planting trees and planting trees and planting trees until we built up to about 1,600 trees last year." Kim said.

She imagined a big truck would back in, buy all their chestnuts, and drive away. But it hasn't been so simple.

For one thing, chestnuts haven't been regularly roasting on open fires for some time, and most Americans aren't familiar with what's become a specialty product.

Secondly, David said it costs more to grow a chestnut in this country than anywhere else because of American food safety standards. Grocery stores will go with their wholesale suppliers for a cheaper imported product over the one that's "grown right here in their backyard," he said. And then chestnuts don't exactly fly off the shelves when they are stocked.

So Kim and David started distributing, marketing, and selling their chestnuts themselves.

"The UPS truck does back up and get the chestnuts, but it goes through a little bit of a process," Kim said.

The Bryants also buy chestnuts from five other county chestnut growers. They wash, process, refrigerate and ship them all across the United States as Virginia Chestnuts via their website, virginiachestnuts.com. Virginia Chestnuts’ product is also stocked locally at the Roseland and Afton Dickie Brothers Orchard locations and at Shady's Place in Lovingston.

Kim said the refrigeration is what distinguishes their product from those shipped unrefrigerated from Italy and France.

"This is a very fresh product when we ship it out to any state. We only ship usually Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday because we want to ensure that that thing is going to get there either overnight or within two days," she said.

Chestnuts have a high water content, unlike other tree nuts with a high oil content, David said, and they dry out if left at room temperature.

A "perfect" orchard with trees at maturity might yield 2,000 pounds of chestnuts an acre per season, but you shoot for 1,000 pounds an acre, according to Kim. This is a light year, and she expects about half that. Like any other crop, it's variable: the Bryants lost their entire 2020 harvest to a late April freeze.

The Bryants’ orchard looks like most, with short, bushy, evenly spaced trees. But the original American chestnut trees were much taller and didn't have to be propagated. David said there were once more wild chestnuts than pine trees in American forests.

John Scrivani is the president of the Virginia Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation, with offices in the Rockfish Valley Community Center.

"It was a very important tree in Eastern forests, making up about a quarter of a lot of the forests in the Appalachian Mountains at least, and of course it had very regular nut crops every year, chestnut crops every year, which wildlife and Native Americans and later Appalachian settlers came to rely upon," Scrivani said in a phone interview.

Around 1904, a blight was introduced through Asian chestnuts. Over about a 40- to 50-year period, it wiped out almost all the large American chestnuts — some 3 to 4 feet in diameter, Scrivani said.

"It doesn't kill the root system and chestnut's a sprouter, so there's lots of sprouts left, but they get the blight, the blight's still here, and they generally die," Scrivani added. He explained the Virginia Chapter still finds wild chestnut trees — more than usual in Nelson County, actually — but they usually don't self-pollinate or produce fertile nuts.

Kim and David's trees are an American Chestnut hybrid, bred for nut production and to be blight-resistant. They’re good for orchard production but need a lot of sun and likely wouldn't be able to compete with taller trees in a forested environment. The American Chestnut Foundation's mission is to develop a blight-resistant chestnut that can survive again in eastern forests.

Because chestnuts aren't an established American crop, the Bryants had to start from scratch, adapting pecan harvesting and sorting equipment to work for the softer tree nuts.

Chestnuts are starchy, like a raw potato, but sweeter, David said.

They’re "surprisingly versatile," Kim said, and can be ground up into a gluten-free puree as the foundation for soups or chestnut butter.

David likes to eat them raw when they’re crunchy, but he's also smoked them over a fire with applewood — when they’re heated, some of the starches are converted to sugars.

Restaurants have expressed interest in using the Bryants’ chestnuts, and Richmond's Hardywood Brewery made an ale with them a few years back. But the labor involved in peeling the chestnut's second, leathery shell is an impediment.

"Everybody's looking for an angle, looking to have a unique dish, but we have to deliver them in a form that they can quickly and easily use and we just haven't been able to do that," David said.

That could change this season now that David has ordered a machine to peel that second skin, soon to ship from Italy.

"We’ll be the start of peeling chestnuts in Virginia," Kim said.

In the meantime, the Bryants’ pick-your-own chestnut opportunities are from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sept. 24, 25 and 28 and Oct. 1, 2, 5, 8 and 9. Chestnut trees also will be available for purchase.

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