Old Southern Apples, Revised & Expanded by Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr.

My local land grant university has published pamphlets saying that renovating old orchards and plantings don’t make economic sense and they should be cut down and replaced with new trees, without taking ecology into account. Age is viewed as an illness of decline, where planting new is largely favored over investing in the old. If Corsica, a culture whose resilient identity is centered around the chestnut, is losing their chestnut forests to abandonment, what hope does the future of tree crops have in the US, whose society refuses to see the value of renovating the incredible trees that already exist? There is little-to-no respect for tending old trees unless they have aesthetic value in well-trafficked areas.

Standing amongst this neglect, I was hit with the futility of my own work and purpose.

Terraces for chestnut harvesting and travel through the forest The mainland France chestnuts thus reduce the quality of products the Corsicans have perfected over hundreds of years. Corsican chestnuts are bred for flour, a dietary staple in Corsican cuisine, and have been selected over hundreds of years for this specific purpose.

Yet, these imported chestnuts aren’t Corsican chestnuts, as they’ve been selected and bred for fresh consumption. The prices have ballooned to $8 euros/pound due to the fact that people are now foraging for them in an untended, overgrown forest, rather than harvesting from the abundance of stewarded chestnut forests that once fueled a culture of mountainous people.Īs a result of the chestnut shortage and inflated price, chestnuts are being imported from mainland France at less than half the cost. Because the trees are yielding fewer nuts, it is becoming harder and harder to harvest them. Because there are no people around to revive these forests, chestnut yields are in decline. The forests here, she told me, are sick from abandonment, a theme that became amplified as we talked to more people. Though some own land in the Castagniccia, most young people have moved to the coast or to mainland France for jobs, only returning for short periods of time- usually only time enough to pick up a small amount of chestnuts in a season. The first night in the Castagniccia region, in the heart of the Corsican chestnut forest, we talked with an Innkeeper about the surrounding chestnuts, provoking an unexpected story of rural flight from Corsica’s young people.

Old Southern Apples, Revised & Expanded by Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr.