Up in the Chestnut Grove

Last weekend we went to help a local family gather chestnuts in their chestnut grove. Chestnuts only grow between five hundred and a thousands meters above sea level, and the local mountain seems to be prime chestnut territory.




Families from the small surrounding towns have a plot of a few acres on the mountain and late every fall they go and spend a few weeks gathering chestnuts and sorting them into two different categories. The whole, unblemished chestnuts are sold by the kilo and the blemished chestnuts are either sold to local farmers to feed their pigs or milled into chestnut flour, which is used to make sweets and sometimes even pasta. Chestnut trees cover almost the entire mountain, and each family's grove is separated only by a line drawn on the rocky ground.




Each little grove has a hut with a fireplace and sometimes a stove, but no running water or electricity. During the chestnut season, families spend the whole day up the mountain, and lunch is cooked in the huts. When we arrived, we were given pails and burlap sacks and shown where to start gathering. Chestnuts fall from the trees inside of spiky outer shells, which really really really hurt if you touch them (they even pierce most gloves).




We were just gathering the nuts that had already escaped their spiny protections, and we filled our tenth and final burlap sack just in time for lunch, a delicious three-course meal provided by our hosts.

Coming up (after I take a few more pictures of the process on Monday): pressing wine out of the fermented grapes! Then, the olive harvest!


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Location:Seggiano, Grosseto, Toscana, Italia