
VegHand
32.5K posts









Since apparently we’re not allowed to say “strains” 🤣anymore… you only get 4 cultivars forever. Go!







The American chestnut was the dominant tree of the eastern US forest for thousands of years. One in every four trees in the Appalachians was a chestnut. Then, between 1904 and 1940, a fungal blight from Asia killed roughly four billion of them. The species nearly went extinct as a forest tree within a single human lifetime. The recovery effort is now in its fourth decade. The American Chestnut Foundation breeds disease-resistant hybrids by crossing American chestnuts with blight-resistant Chinese chestnuts, then backcrossing for generations to recover the American tree's form. Other researchers have used gene editing to insert a wheat gene that detoxifies the blight. The first restoration plantings are alive and growing in the Appalachians. They won't be mature for another 50 years. None of the people who started this work will see it finished, but we should all be glad they're doing it.

























