Alachua, FL (August 18, 2022) - Planting mast orchards are a great way to attract and hold more wildlife on a parcel and improve the habitat. Chestnut Hill Outdoors offers a range of options, but as the company name implies, Dunstan Chestnuts offer several significant advantages.
Blight Resistance: After receiving some budwood from a healthy American chestnut discovered in a grove of dead and dying trees in Ohio, Dr. Robert T. Dunstan grafted it onto chestnut rootstock and then cross-pollinated with specially chosen Asian varieties. Dunstan then selected individuals with the best hybrid characteristics from the new stock, crossing them back to the American and Chinese parent trees until he developed a strongly blight-resistant variety.
Reliability: Dunstan Chestnut trees bloom later in the spring. As a result, they are far less susceptible to broad-scale mast crop failures, sometimes caused by late freezes. Furthermore, they lack the boom and bust cycles more common to oaks.
Better Growth: Dunstan Chestnut trees grow faster and ultimately bigger than oaks. Under optimal conditions, they can bear nuts in two to five years, whereas a white oak might not bear for 20 years. Even sawtooth oaks take longer. And at maturity, Dunstan Chestnut trees can reach 60 feet in height and 40 feet in spread.
Productivity: Perhaps best of all, Dunstan Chestnut trees become prolific producers of the hard mast - as much as 50-100 lbs/tree at maturity. Furthermore, Dunstan Chestnuts are more prominent, averaging 15-35 nuts/lb, compared to Chinese nuts (35-100/lb) and American nuts (75-150/lb).
The nuts have fewer tannins, making them sweeter and more palatable. And finally, they're nutritionally superior, containing four times the carbohydrates of a white oak acorn, 2.5 times the protein and only a fraction of the fat.
Preference: In tests performed by Dr. James Kroll at the Whitetail Research Institute in Nacogdoches, TX, deer selected chestnuts at a rate of 100:1 over acorns, even though the wild deer at this location had never seen a chestnut. That is perhaps less surprising, considering chestnuts were once the most abundant species in the eastern hardwood forests of North America.
Landowners and managers choose when selecting mast species to attract and feed wildlife. That choice becomes much easier when one like the Dunstan Chestnut stands out among the rest.
Chestnut Hill Outdoors is more than just a nursery. In order to ensure you receive the maximum benefit from their products, they also provide sound advice and instruction on proper planting and care. And they ensure the plants you receive are suited to your regional climate. For more on the varieties listed above and all Chestnut Hill Outdoors products and how to care for them, visit ChestnutHillOutdoors.com, or call (855) 386-7826.
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Chestnut Hill is the best place for you to purchase your food plot and deer attractant plants because they offer a large selection, their plants are specifically bred to attract deer, and they offer customers different sized plants at different levels of growth.
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