Mitsubishi Australian CEO Gives A Frank Assessment

The two big things you need to know are How Acidic and how well it drains or not. I took a class last year on how to grow the American Chestnut. American Chestnuts like to be high on hilltops with very well-drained soils. There's a geomapping tool in Pennsylvania that uses known land and altitude data to populate the best places for Chestnut plantings, and my property is one of the best in the county.  What I used was a mix of planter soil and something called Pittmoss, better than Peatmoss. Its manufactured here and is mostly recycled newspaper. It's good for containers because it holds moisture better than peat.  Just put them in some 5-gallon buckets and let them go.  I need to move them around a bit soon. True genetic American Chestnuts are very hard to find. If you find them online, they are most likely crossbred with something else that is blight-resistant. I got my seeds directly from the Pennsylvania Chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation at one of their research centers at Penn State.

They look like sticks right now, lol. Their leaves are just starting to come back. But here's what they looked like going in.

My wife gets starter trees for landscaping, and we use 5-gallon plant buckets that have the holes already, but you could use a normal 5-gallon bucket and drill some holes and put it in a planter plate to hold water to help with feeding. We always just use miracle grow soil and the trees are doing really well. We have a bunch of Leyland Cypress trees to be planted once I finish the yard retaining wall and new fence.

Speaking of growing trees in buckets/pots, did you over-research what type of potting soil/media to use? I think I'm going down a wormhole of too much information and overthinking.  What did you end up using? 

Interesting. I'm using my work computer so I can't exactly download anything to edit them, but I'll probably just try from my phone next time.