Seed nuts from Ace — Alma (A-26)

The variety

Ace is one of the twenty-three families in Greg Miller's cooperative chestnut breeding program, which has put more than 12,500 trees in the ground across fifteen states. Ace itself is a complex hybrid rather than a pure Chinese chestnut, originally from California, and Michael Nave recommends it to eastern growers specifically as seedlings rather than grafted trees.

There is one oddity worth telling. The named Ace cultivar is male sterile — it makes no pollen at all, one of only two cultivars Miller flags that way. Our trees are seedlings of Ace, not clones of it, and in 2026 most of them shed pollen normally. That is what you would expect, since every one of our seedlings had a pollen-bearing father, but as far as we can find nobody has published on it. It is a small reminder that a seedling is its own tree, not a copy.

Alma in 2026

[TO BE WRITTEN — 2026 Ellington observations: bur set in the hard 2026 season, first drop date, nut size, shell splitting, whether burs drop whole.]

The tree

[TO BE WRITTEN — the mother tree's own note: where it stands and anything particular about it.]