Peach

BRIEF:
Named for the soft fuzz on its shell. Medium-large, easy-peeling nuts on a tree that regulates its own crop instead of overbearing.

DETAILED:
Peach came out of the same 1972 Ohio planting as Gideon and Amy, selected by Greg Miller, and takes its name from the fine fuzz on the shell. It really does feel like a peach skin.

The nuts run medium-large, reddish-brown, mild and sweet once cooked, and they peel easily — which matters more than most people realize until they have sat down with a difficult chestnut.

Its best quality is restraint. Many chestnuts overbear and shrink their own nuts in the process, so a young tree's nuts and a mature tree's nuts are two different products. Peach regulates its crop load instead, and the size holds up year after year. We call that stable sizeshift — most lines trend downward as they age, and Peach does not. That reliability is why it is one of the six standard mother trees Miller recommends, and why it forms part of the well-known Peach-Qing-Kohr breeding trio.

One caution worth passing on: Peach is more vulnerable to hard cold than most Chinese chestnuts. In a Tennessee trial only six of twenty trees survived, most lost to a late spring freeze. We keep ours away from the low ground where cold air settles.

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