Tree Farmer Buzz Ferver Spreads His Love of Chestnuts, on the Ground and in the Kitchen 

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• Suzanne Podhaizer
• Chestnut tree

Allan "Buzz" Ferver, a 66-year-old with a fetching grin and an Abe Lincoln-style beard, stood at his kitchen island holding a clear plastic bag. Inside was a pale, nondescript meal, a few shades creamier in color than white flour. He spooned some into a mug, added boiling water and stirred. As the water swirled around the grounds they darkened to tan, and the steam developed a sweet, nutty aroma. "Chestnut coffee," he said as he handed over a cup. The taste was reminiscent of Ovaltine, but earthier.

Over the next few minutes, Ferver offered up a bowl of rich chestnut grits laced with cow butter; a slice of wheat bread spread with a thin layer of chestnut butter; and a bowl of tiny, shiny, pan-roasted nuts, their shells cracked to show the ivory flesh inside. We ate the nuts raw, too, cracking the shells with our teeth and biting out the nutmeats.

Ferver is excited about these unusual dishes not only for their gustatory appeal but also for the agricultural possibilities they represent. In Vermont, he explained, "we can plant chestnuts, hickory and walnuts — trees with high food and economic value — and the crop lives between 100 and 400 years."

He pointed out that trees can be planted without tilling the soil and disturbing its structure, and their copious seeds feed deer, birds and squirrels as well as humans. Compare that bounty with Roundup Ready grain, grown on vast patches of otherwise bare earth, which he refers to as "corn deserts."

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• Suzanne Podhaizer
• Chestnut parts

At Perfect Circle Farm, located on Airport Road in Berlin, Ferver is cultivating about 15,000 chestnut saplings, which he offers to customers through his website. "I probably sell 3,000 to 7,000 chestnuts a year," he guessed. He also offers smaller numbers of hazelnuts, butternuts, walnuts, persimmons, mulberries, and other nut and fruit trees.

In the fall, Ferver travels around the country gathering seeds from promising plants in Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Indiana and elsewhere, then brings them back to sow in Vermont. Social media, he explained, has made it easy to seek out chestnut enthusiasts who have kernels to share.

Ferver also grafts twigs — referred to as scionwood — onto hearty rootstock, seeking to create strong, healthy plants that will thrive despite Vermont's cold winters. The ones that survive with minimal coddling are deemed appropriate to sell. "Grafted plants produce [nuts] faster but historically don't live as long as seedling trees," he explained.

If chestnuts are so great, why don't we see more of them? Because of a disease.

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• Suzanne Podhaizer
• Buzz Ferver

In the 19th century, some 4 billion American chestnuts towered over eastern forests, providing shade, sustenance and rot-resistant timber. In 1904, a forester at New York's Bronx Zoo noticed blight on certain chestnut trees. It had arrived on shipments of Chinese and Japanese chestnut trees, which were impervious to the fungus. By the 1950s, the American chestnut was all but gone.

Ferver is part of a movement that is trying to bring chestnuts back to the Northeast by crossing Asian trees that aren't susceptible to the blight with their taller American cousins. The goal is to preserve the height of the original American plant and the sweetness of its seeds, while adding in the oomph the trees need to resist the deadly fungus. When a chestnut is infected, its bark develops reddish-brown cankers that kill individual limbs and, eventually, the whole tree.

Ferver has deep roots in the plant biz. "My dad was a landscape architect and had a garden center and nursery," he said. "My earliest memories are of being around crab apples and weeping willows."

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• Suzanne Podhaizer
• Chestnuts

By the time he was 4, Ferver recalled, he spent his time catching crayfish in the brook, observing box turtles and learning to identify the plants that grew in the tiny patch of woods behind his Wilmington, Del., home. At 12, he was a junior counselor at a nature camp for youngsters.

While Ferver was a precocious naturalist, he wasn't a good student. "I couldn't stand to be trapped inside," he said. "By the end of ninth grade, I stopped doing any work. I just got stoned and tripped while I was at school."

Instead of shipping him off to the military, Ferver's parents opted for a now-defunct farm school in South Woodstock. "It was the hippiest wackadoodle school," Ferver said with a chuckle. After breakfast duty and a couple of hours in class, he was able to spend the rest of the day exploring the thousands of wooded acres that surrounded the campus.

Postgraduation, Ferver returned to Delaware. Since there "was no money in being a naturalist," he explained, he became a builder instead: "I spent most of my life building, but I never gave up plants."

He didn't give up on Vermont, either. In 2004, Ferver and his wife bought a steep, rocky piece of land in Worcester. Although he continued taking building jobs for the money, he also began planting fruit trees and then expanded into nut trees. "I got bitten by the bug ... a really bad one," he said, "And I quickly realized I couldn't grow a lot of plants on that hill."

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• Suzanne Podhaizer
• Buzz Ferver among the chestnuts

The Fervers moved to their current farm in Berlin in 2015 and started regenerating the worn-out soil with care and compost while building up their collection of viable nut trees.

Chestnuts are easy to grow in warmer climates, but Ferver is intent on learning what will grow well in Vermont's cooler Zone 4 climate. There are seven to nine species of chestnut, he explained, so he "systematically started planting all of the species and all of the hybrids." The goal: "We want trees that produce the most, tastiest chestnuts every year so we can reinvent chestnuts as a staple food."

The rebirth of chestnuts appeals not just to permaculture enthusiasts but to professional cooks, as well. Matthew McClure, executive chef of the Woodstock Inn & Resort, is a New England Culinary Institute graduate and a multiple James Beard Award semifinalist. He loves using candied chestnuts in sweet dishes, but he's even more excited by the nut's savory possibilities.

McClure was first introduced to chestnuts when he was 22 years old and interning at No. 9 Park in Boston. There, at a special event, he watched a chef roast chestnuts over an open fire. "I remember the sweet, smoky flavor," he said.

These days, McClure enjoys pairing chestnuts with beef or game dishes. "I really like them roasted, steeped in cream and puréed," he said. "They have a great starchy texture, and the sweetness goes really well with those gamey meats."

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• Suzanne Podhaizer
• Chestnut grits

Ferver noted that chestnuts have a nutritional profile similar to that of corn. He likes to look to Asian and European traditions of chestnut eating.

"Chestnuts have been used for millennia as the basis of people's diets," he said. "Many cultures were highly dependent on chestnuts for winter survival."

In Europe, chestnuts are eaten fresh, but they are also dried and smoked to render them shelf-stable, then rehydrated as needed. The nuts are often used as a base for soups and stews or ground into a flour that can be used in bread or pasta. In Asia, fresh chestnuts may be roasted and coated with sugar, ground into a paste, or braised whole with meat or mushrooms.

The chestnut "coffee" that Ferver serves is made from nuts fermented by one of his many chestnut-growing friends. He's always looking for new ways to fold chestnuts into his diet.

A fellow Vermont grower, Nicko Rubin of East Hill Tree Farm in Plainfield, cultivates chestnuts but hardly ever eats them. "I squirrel them away. They're precious," Rubin said.

Unlike Ferver, who perpetually collects chestnuts from new places, Rubin grows the majority of his stock using seeds gathered from his own small orchard of mature trees, many of which are the offspring of chestnuts planted on Spruce Mountain by another local grower years ago.

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• Suzanne Podhaizer
• Chestnut "coffee" grounds

Rubin and Ferver met in the aughts on a permaculture project in Huntington and bonded over their love of plants. The two sometimes swap seeds to strengthen the genetics of their orchards.

Although they have different growing styles — Rubin is attentive to his trees to give each one a better chance at survival, while Ferver plants large quantities, neglects them and lets nature take its course — they respect and support each other.

"I admire Buzz," Rubin said. "I admire his energy and appetite for beautiful projects, and I like sharing seeds with him."

Although Ferver is passionate about repopulating chestnuts, he's also hoping to find a successor to carry on his work. The long days and lots of digging have taken a toll.

But Ferver believes that the work of restoring chestnuts to the American landscape is hitting its stride. "There are lots of people [planting chestnuts], and all of the people who grow them at any scale are sold out instantly," he said. "The movement is gigantic right now ... There are hundreds of thousands of chestnut seedlings all over the country."

That's good news for chefs such as McClure, as well as fervid enthusiasts including Ferver. "I love chestnuts. I love to eat them. I love to grow them. I love to experiment with them," he said with a smile and a sip of his chestnut coffee.