The chestnuts are sprouting!

Last year, I talked about the American chestnut, enormous trees that were once the cornerstone of the eastern forests until it was wiped out by a fungal blight, and how after a hundred years of attempts to bring them back, researchers finally managed to genetically engineer a tree that was immune. We naturally backed the fundraiser, and were sent three wild-type chestnut seeds to plant.

Each of the science classes planted one of the nuts, and they've all sent up shoots!

These sprouts, beautiful as they are, are doomed.

They're not the genetically engineered nuts and have no immunity to the deadly blight. But with luck, they'll last several years before dying, long enough to crossbreed with the new breed of chestnut and preserve their genes. And we'll learn a lot about growing chestnuts from them, so we'll be ready to care for the immune chestnut seeds when they're ready.