Hello, my name is James. I live in Florida with my wife Sheri and
our 7month old son. We have a 5 Acre lot We're building a house
on.

For some reason Chestnuts are almost impposible to find down here.
I look every year in stores and either find absolutly none, or very
few that are not very good quality.

I'm looking into growing my own chestnut trees on my property and
I'm hoping to gather some information and advice.

Our lot is wooded and we like the trees, even though most of them
are pine trees and scrub oaks.. nothing really spectacular, but
they provide shade and privacy. We lost a lot of trees during the
development of the property, bringing in trucks to drill a well,
getting power installed, and a septic system all ended up thinning
out the natural trees. We want to plant somthing to fill in the
area, and we may also want to clear out some of the scrub oaks and
plant some nicer trees. the scrub don't really live all that long
so they don't get all that big. some nice large shade trees would
be nice. We also want to plant various kinds of fruit trees as
well as have a vegetable garden.

I found some American chestnut trees on-line at www.tytyga.com the
website claims the following:

'A reportedly blight resistant hardy, native chestnut stand was
recently discovered growing in a very isolated location in a U.S.
National Park. These trees produce large, honey sweet kernels of
unexcelled taste and quality. Ty Ty will offer these rare trees now.
Zones 3-9'

I'm really interested in getting some of these and see if I can get
them to grow. I'm wondering what to expect. They offer 1 yr and 2
yr old trees. How old do they normally have to be before they
will bear chestnuts? I saw on the website that they are not self
pollinating so I'll need at least 2 trees, but I'm not sure how many
I'll end up with yet.

they have larger chnese chestnut trees, up to 10feet. I'm thinking
of getting a pair of those under the idea that they will be
producing chestnuts before the smaller trees. I'm wondering if
it's a good idea or a bad idea to plant chinese and american
chestnut trees in the same location... would it help with
pollination or hurt? would the chestnuts themselves be affected
somehow? Should I plant all the chestnut trees together in one big
patch, or seperate the chinese onese from the american ones? How
much space should I keep between trees?

I'm also curious about the chestnuts themselves... I always thought
the trees just grew nuts, but now I see they grow inside a burr.
How hard is it to open the burr? how do you harvest chestnuts? how
many can I expect to get from a tree? I suppose you get more of
them the older and larger the tree gets. I've been wondering how
many trees I would need if I wanted to end up with enough chestnuts
to sell, especially since they are so hard to find in my area.
I'm not sure how to go about this yet, but it seems like it could
be worthwhile.