Kate Bradshaw

Plus, how to collect your own haul.

Hans Johsens prepares for the onslaught of harvest season visitors to his Skyline Chestnut In the Santa Cruz Mountains, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2023. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

By Kate Bradshaw

This story was first published in The Mercury News Oct. 31, 2023.

We’ve all heard the Christmas Song, the one that starts, “Chestnuuuuuts roasting on an open fiiiiire.”

But how many of us have actually eaten them?

The stewards behind two Bay Area chestnut orchards are on a mission to help more people learn about — and enjoy — these round, prickly-packaged treats. While Weylin and Rose Eng, an 80-year-old Orinda couple, find joy in distributing their farm-grown chestnuts from Winters, Hans Johsens offers visitors willing to trek into the Santa Cruz Mountains a chance to harvest their own from trees that date back to the Gold Rush.

In general, Californians are not as familiar with chestnuts — outside holiday song lyrics anyway — as East Coasters, Europeans and people from areas of Asia where chestnut trees are native, Weylin says. Chestnut trees were once so abundant on the East Coast, legend had it that a squirrel could travel from New England to Georgia by scampering through the branches of the trees, never once touching the ground.

But the tree species went nearly extinct about a century ago, thanks to Cryphonectria parasitica, a parasitic fungus.

Today, the number of cultivated chestnut orchards occupies just 4,200 acres across 1,600 orchards nationwide, according to a 2021 report by the Savanna Institute, an agroforestry nonprofit.

Full story here.