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NL: tamme kastanje / F: Marrons Sweet chestnuts are incredibly  nutritious  and offer their fruits abundantly without the need for big human input. All one needs to do is to plant a tree and take some little care of the baby tree (like giving it some water in overly dry seasons) until it reaches a considerable size and from then on, the tree will take care of itself. That puts them among some of the most sustainable foods ever. Consuming grains means large amounts of land being used for growing the crops, large machines are employed in harvest, usually ruining the soil fertility, then they are processed, stored and transported until it gets to the consumer. Chestnut trees, on the other hand, do a great job in the soil, offer shelter and food to wild animals, birds, insects, clean up the air and on the top of that they yield precious foods that can be easily harvested. Sweet chestnuts grow easily in most of the Northern hemisphere. It is hardy from zones 5-7. The skin of sweet ...

This time of the year we can find plenty of sweet chestnuts (Castanea sativa) available in most urban parks or in any little piece of nature where the chestnut trees were allowed to grow and do their job. Chestnuts are highly nutritious and they rank among some of the most ecologically responsible foods you can think of.   The only thing you need to know is how to tell the edible chestnuts from the horse chestnuts, which are usually shedding their fruits at the same period. Here are some pictures of the sweet chestnut to help you identify them. The main features to help you identify the edible sweet chestnuts are the little "tail" on the nuts, their husk and the shape of the leaves. Here are some pictures from the horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastannum) so that you can see how different they are from the sweet chestnuts. Note that this plant and nuts are NOT edible. That is why it is so important to learn the clear difference between the two of them. The nuts of the horse ch...