Yixon LG
BRIEF:
Very large, early dropping, exceptionally flavored. Among the biggest-nutted pure Chinese chestnuts documented anywhere in the country.
DETAILED:
Yixian Large was selected by Michael Nave from a seedlot out of Yixian, in the southern tip of Anhui Province in China. It sits quietly near the top of the American chestnut world without much fanfare.
The numbers are why we planted it. At the University of Missouri repository in 2009 it averaged 25.5 grams a nut — eighteen to the pound. That beat every other chestnut on the site that year except one European-Japanese hybrid, and it comfortably outweighed the famous names: Bouche de Betizac, Marsol, Marigoule, Colossal. Peach, itself a large-nutted Chinese chestnut, came in at about seventy percent of its size. In a different year at the same site it tied for first in a taste test.
Nave's assessment is that there may be no Chinese cultivar in the United States that consistently produces larger nuts, and none with better flavor at that size. It also drops early, which puts it on the table before anyone else has fresh chestnuts.
Our Yixian Large are among the youngest trees in the orchard, so everything above describes the mother tree rather than ours. We have a few years to wait before we can tell you what they do here. We think it will be worth it.