A lot has happened in 2020, and we’ve got big plans to expand, so I’m taking the last bit of winter downtime to catch up on the blogging.
The pandemic has been a bad/weird time for all of us. But, 2020 was the year that Chris Smyth and I officially put roots in the ground with our first commercial Chinese chestnut orchard!
The inspiration for this, as I like to tell it, was when we were in Arslan-Bob looking down on 60,000 acres of walnut-fruit forest/silvopasture. Looking at the September 30th, 2018 journal entry: “An eagle 
circled overhead as we pulled ourselves up on the giant, natural stone altar that The Garden Man used to pray on. Somehow it was much windier on that spot. We looked up at the deceptively far away peak, known as Babash-Ata (“the Head of the Garden”), from where the saint/Demi-God is said to have thrown the fruit nut seeds to plant the forest.” I was thinking to myself, up on that rock: what am I doing with my life? I need to get it together and start creating this kind of legacy effect! For scale, the Wayne National Forest’s Marietta Unit currently has an acreage of 64,667, so if you’re looking at a map of Ohio, that is a helpful comparison to what we were seeing.
We began scheming actively on it on Groundhog’s Day 2019. For site preparation, we started clearing invasives piecemeal from some of the old fields at Woodcock, and planted 12 grafted chestnuts on the overgrown pasture we were reclaiming. We just wanted to see how the trees would do over the course of a season, and see if we could learn from that. Despite doing extensive soil sampling and testing, we deemed it wise to “make haste slowly”. Manipulating the environment in a new way can have unintended consequences, and it’s easy to lie to yourself if you really really want a particular piece of ground to be good enough for a particular application. In the end, all 12 trees survived though two of the grafts failed. There were a series of late frosts that delayed vegetative growth somewhat, but the trees appeared fine and some even produced a few nuts that first year in the ground. So as we saw the trees thriving, we periodically got together for planning sessions on what to do in this space.
Woodcock Nature Preserve is a 100 acre 501(c)(3) organization in New Marshfield, OH that Benjamin Stewart had recruited me to in 2018. They had already let me begin building a prescribed fire training program that first season I was with them. So we were already getting to know each other and building trust that way. Chris and I pitched the rest of the board- Becky, Bob and Ben; and by the way if you know anyone else whose name begins with a B who would like to join our board, let me know. We proposed leasing 25 acres of lower quality old field habitat from them, where the 2011 Quail Forever project hadn’t taken off so well as on the southern 45 acre grassland. They were curious to hear us out. We said we’d forestry mulch down the extensive autumn olive cover, take over responsibility for mowing, generate income for the preserve from the lease agreement, and attract interest in the rest of WNP’s project. It’s a good place to visit, and a chestnut farm would turn it into a bit of an agritourism destination, eventually: come see the birds, get across a new 5K walking and running trail, check out the forest farming workshops we’ve been putting in, photograph or harvest (with permission) from the wildflower diversity, come on seed collecting missions to other regional prairies to add to the fields after we burn them together in the winter! There’s a lot starting to happen out there, and ultimately the board was excited to accelerate the good times. SOCC, by then an LLC in its own right, lawyered up and we got a lease agreement signed that we were all happy with. It’s a 75 year lease.
Paradise Ecological Services 