Allegheny Chinquapin

I made the mistake and purchased only two ACs five years ago. Well now one of them has died. The other one looks great and set burs last year but nothing ever got pollinated. They eventually withered and fell off. My question is will ACs cross pollinate with anything? Now that I have several Chestnuts blooming my hope was that maybe somehow they might cross since they are similar. Or am I totally wrong in my thinking? I have planted more ACs this year but it will be 3-4 years before anything is big enough to help with pollination.

Matt


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Not 100% sure on this myself, but I know Empire Chestnut claims to sell seedlings from their Chinese x Allegheny Chinkapin crosses, AKA their "Wildlife Chestnuts." So maybe they do cross pollinate? I'm going to be trying a similar experiment with Chinese and Seguin, planting a single Seguin with several Chinese. Fingers crossed for both of us!

TexOk said:

Not 100% sure on this myself, but I know Empire Chestnut claims to sell seedlings from their Chinese x Allegheny Chinkapin crosses, AKA their "Wildlife Chestnuts." So maybe they do cross pollinate? I'm going to be trying a similar experiment with Chinese and Seguin, planting a single Seguin with several Chinese. Fingers crossed for both of us!

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Yep, that’s what I read as well. I bought some of their seed that is supposed to be the Wildlife Hybrids. They definitely look like they’ve been crossed, as some look like Allengheny, some look like a small chestnut, some look like seguins but bigger, they are definitely interesting. Don’t think I’ve seen them anywhere else online. So, if they can truly pollinate each other naturally, you may end up with hybrid seed too, that doesn’t look like normal Allegheny seed.


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I was 90% sure I knew the answer to your question but wanted be 100% sure, so I asked someone from the OCF.

Answer is shown below:

A chinquapin can be pollinated by any member of the chestnut/chinquapin genus, Castanea. So if there was a Chinese chestnut nearby, it could cross pollinate a chinquapin. Those nuts would be fine for eating. I personally would not recommend spreading the seeds around for planting because they would be hybrids between the two species.

Thanks for the confirmation. At least there is hope my big tree may set a few nuts this year now that my Chestnuts are blooming.


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