One thing worth considering when setting yourself up for a self-sufficient, semi-self-sufficient, or even a more sustainable lifestyle is your demand for fuel and resources. Growing a sustainable crop of trees suitable to harvest for building, or even just for firewood has to be at the top of your list. If those trees can also produce food that is an added bonus!

If you wish to heat your home via the somewhat more natural option of wood fire, you will need to have a great supply of wood on hand. From my own personal experience you can never have enough good wood, and we tend to store as much as possible all around our property to season so that it will burn cleaner and hotter. If you are lucky enough to be living rurally, or even semi-rurally, then you can easily sort yourself and some of your friends out with a long term supply of great wood for both burning and building with. This great article sums it all up nicely, and gives some great tips on the wonders of that old favourite, the chestnut tree.

The Spanish or sweet chestnut (Castanea sativa) is said to be named for the ancient city Kastanaia in Turkey (there is also some conjecture that it may be the other way round). The tree is now found all over Europe, being introduced in very ancient times from Asia Minor. It is quite distinct from the horse chestnut, which is from and entirely different family and borrows the name merely from the similarity of the nuts. Sweet chestnuts belong to the same family, the Fagaceae, as the oak (Quercus) and northern beech (Fagus).

It grows in a large, round-headed spreading tree and can live to a very ripe old age, assuming huge proportions. One growing in Italy, on the slopes of Mt Etna, in the nineteenth century was reported to be about 60 metres in circumference and 2500 years in age. This may be 'stretching it' but they are commonly reported to be over 500 years old.

Chestnut leaves are quite distinctive being a long tongue shape with very prickly holly-like margins. There are variegated with the leaf margins being white or yellow. It is grown for the productiuon of hop poles. I saw this in Kent, England, where stands of chesnuts were coppiced: cut to the ground every six of so years, from where they sprout long quick-growing branches.  An English friend of ours had a house built in 1660 in little Hadham, Hertfordshire, which had coppiced chestnut branches used as purlins, to which were wired the roofing tiles. I can't imagine that these would comply with the council regulations these days, but they certainly have stood the test of time longer than treated radiata pine has.

Chestnut timber is also used for fencing, palings, posts and firewood. The tannins which make the wood durable apparently corrode iron badly, so any metal fittings used need to be made of copper, brass or stainless steel.

The fruits of sweet chestnuts are enclosed in prickly cases resembling a baby hedgehog, which each containing two or three nuts. If you want to grow them for food, it is better to grow grafted varieties which have been selected for the large size of their nuts; seedlings grown from trees often produce nuts so small they are useless. Preparing nuts for eating is a bit of a chore, as the bitter skin of the nut has to be peeled off, so you really want to make sure you start with nuts of some substance.

Chestnuts contain twice as much starch as potatoes and are commonly eaten as a potato substitute in Europe, Asia and Africa. The fruits are also used as a sweet or in savoury dishes and even as the base for a liqueur in Portugal. The famous sweet marron glace are crystallized chestnuts, which have been made in Southern France since the seventeenth century. Boiled and mashed chestnuts also make an ideal mixture for stuffing. Roast cabbage with chestnut stuffing is a traditional French dish.

Sweet chestnuts are easily grown from seed sown in the autumn when they fall. They are best sown where they are intended to grow as they quickly make an immense tap root, which makes them a bit hard to shift later. The young trees will grow incredibly quickly if in good ground or fertilised - this plus their very readily coppicing habit would make them an ideal species for a firewood lot. Some which were grown from seed 30 years ago will now be spreading trees, about twelve metres in height and width.

Young chestnut wood is more ground durable than oak and is particularly suitable for stakes and fences, but the older wood tends to split, warp and lose its durability with age. Because of its ultimate large size and rapid growth, a chestnut tree would soon outgrow its alloted space in a small suburban garden.

Sourced from The Leader, May 21 2009