Hungary: Most sweet chestnuts are grown in Western Transdanubia

The sweet chestnut is native to southern Europe, eastern Asia and North America. Based on the finds discovered in the Anna Cave in Bükk, the ancients knew it already in the Neolithic Age. In our country, already in the XIII. was cultivated in the century. The expected age of the sweet chestnut is extremely high, it can even be hundreds of years. There are 5-600 year old chestnut trees around Kőszeg. The sweet chestnut is also native to Hungary, but special ecological requirements must be met for its cultivation, as it requires wetter weather, higher humidity and acidic soil. For this reason, commercial-scale cultivation is only possible in a few parts of the country, such as the southern Transdanubian, western Transdanubian and Börzsöny mountain regions. It is typically a small-scale plant, similar to the hazelnut. The commodity plantations planted in the 1970s, with a total area of about 450 hectares, have now almost completely disappeared. Even today, most of the annual harvest ...