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Greetings from Watkinsville!

December 22, 2009

It has been our pleasure to host one of the backcross orchards for the Georgia chapter of The American Chestnut Foundation this year here at The University of Georgia’s Horticulture Research Farm. The Hort Farm (as we commonly refer to it) is a roughly 90 acre facility located in Oconee County and is only a 10 minute drive from campus.

The Hort Farm serves as a living laboratory for faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates to conduct research in horticulture as well as other disciplines. As part of the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, we also host research in plant pathology, entomology, and soil science.

Some of the larger components of the Hort Farm’s land use include: pecan breeding and evaluations, disease management of peaches, ornamental breeding and evaluations, and a two acre certified organic production area in support of an organic certificate program. We also host the UGA Honeybee Research facility here at the farm.

When the call went out for GA-TACF members to possibly host a backcross orchard, I jumped at the chance to be a part the program. After conferring with our faculty advisor and department head I offered up a former peach orchard to serve as an evaluation site. The peach trees had been pushed out years ago but we maintained the rows with various cover crops in anticipation of planting something new. We ended up using 5 rows with each row approximately 300 feet in length. We prepared holes with a peat based planting mix every five feet within the rows.

Dr. Cipollini and Will Watkins delivered the two breeding lines, BG413 x GALUM7 and BG393 x GALUM7 (as well as pure American and pure Chinese controls) along with all of the planting tubes and fabric to me in early March. Because of heavy rains, we were not able to plant the nuts until March 17^th and 18^th. We used a simple method to randomize the planting of the different lines and controls in the orchard. Our method involved randomly flipping through a UGA phonebook and pointing to a number (without looking). The last digit of the phone number selected told us how many prepared spaces to skip within rows while a zero told us to skip to the next row. We then inserted the blue plastic grow tubes and tags over each planted nut. Having never planted chestnuts before, I was anxious to see how well we had prepared our area and to see the nuts germinate. After four weeks, we had nearly 60% germination and after 9 weeks we had 90% germination!

Now at the end of its first year, the backcross orchard has 85% survivorship. We are excited and optimistic that this next year will see the trees continue to grow and flourish. We also hope that next year we may host some genetically transformed American Chestnuts from the lab of Dr. Scott Merkle with the School of Forestry and Natural Resources, UGA.

The backcross orchard at the UGA Hort Farm was prepared, planted, and maintained by the following dedicated individuals: Cliff Brock, Matt Dirr, Carl Hall, Chrissy Ciaccio, Suzzanne Tate, yours truly, as well as numerous undergrads who helped to mulch the nearly 1,500 linear feet of Chestnut rows.

Cliff Filling Holes