From the Fields - Joe Avila

By Joe Avila, Stanislaus County chestnut farmer

We are pretty excited and ready to pick this year’s chestnut crop. It looks like a very nice crop. Many of the chestnuts are already sold. We are fortunate. The crop is about a week or 10 days late, but we had a great summer, not too hot. In June during pollination time, the conditions were nice, cool and breezy, which always helps to move the pollen around. Last year, the crop was fine. The year before, it was a little bit light.

My wife Jenni and I pick a few buckets of chestnuts each morning. The size of the Jumbo Giant variety looks really nice. People like their chestnuts large, so it looks like it is going to be a decent year. We had nuts that were maybe 4 inches to 6 inches in diameter. We’ve had a lot of broken branches due to the heavy crop.

Chestnuts are falling right now, so we pick every other day for a few hours. This week, it is going to be crazy. We will start getting the sweeper and the pickup machine out and start picking mechanically because we don’t want the chestnuts to sit out too long. We will soon have more help for harvest.

The trees get so big that there’s not a lot of sun, and we’ve had some humidity, so that means we’ve had some fungus activity. The mushrooms love the shade and first appear on the exterior bottom of the tree trunk. In past years, we’ve had to fight it because of the humidity. I just irrigated, and with no sun under the big canopy of the orchard, the spores of the mushroom spread like fire. I found that hydrogen peroxide is a good treatment that works well. I put it in a bottle and spray it. It seizes up the mushrooms, and they no longer take any energy from the tree.