Chestnut gathering Coloring Pages

An Early Autumn Event Before Acorns Fall

Chestnut gathering is a fun event that happens from September to mid-October. You can do it at chestnut groves, tourist farms, or on preschool and elementary school field trips.
It happens a little earlier than gathering acorns. Even when it is still a bit hot outside, chestnuts are already starting to drop to the ground.
If you stand under a chestnut tree and look up, you can see lots of spiky round balls hanging from the branches.

Two or Three Chestnuts Inside the "Burr"

Those spiky round balls are called burrs.
The burr is a shell that protects the chestnuts. Inside one burr, there are usually two or three chestnuts.
When they get ripe, the burr splits open in a cross shape, and the brown chestnuts peek out. Then they drop right onto the ground.
When you pick them up, the shape of the chestnut is fun to look at. One side is flat, and the other side is round and puffy. If three chestnuts were inside, only the middle one will be flat on both sides! So just by looking at the shape, you can tell where it was inside the burr.

Spikes Are Armor to Protect Against Animals

The spikes on a burr are much harder and sharper than you think! If you touch them carelessly, they will prick your fingers.
They act like armor to keep animals and birds from eating the chestnuts before they are ripe.
That is why for Chestnut gathering, you should wear work gloves and rain boots. Even if you step on a burr on the ground, rain boots will keep you safe.
When you take a chestnut out of a burr, hold the burr down with your rain boot and use tongs to pull the chestnut out. Never grab a burr with your bare hands!

The Chestnut Has Two Layers of Skin

If you look closely at a chestnut you picked, you will see a hard, shiny brown skin on the outside. This is called the outer skin.
When you peel the outer skin, there is another thin brown skin underneath it. This is called the inner skin.
On Japanese chestnuts, this inner skin sticks tightly to the nut and is hard to peel off. Sweet roasted chestnuts sold in town peel off smoothly because they are Chinese chestnuts.
Cooking chestnuts with the inner skin still on in sweet syrup is a special way to eat them in Japan!

They Taste Sweeter After Cooling, Not Right After Picking

Chestnuts you just picked are actually not very sweet yet.
If you keep chestnuts in a cold place at around 0 degrees for about a month, the starch inside turns into sugar, and they get much sweeter! In experiments, they became three times sweeter.
Since chestnuts are seeds, they save up sugar by themselves to survive the winter. People use this trick to make them tasty!
In your fridge at home, you can keep them in the chill room for two to three weeks. Just like sweet potatoes, they get delicious the longer you wait!

Leave the tips of the spiky burrs white

If you color all the burr spikes with a dark color, it will turn into a big black blob.
It works great if you color the bottom parts dark green or brown, and leave the tips white. The spikes will look shiny and feel nice and prickly.
Fresh burrs are yellow-green, and dry burrs are dark brown. Using two different colors shows which ones fell off the tree a while ago!

Color the flat side and round side differently

The trick to making the chestnuts look great is to color the round side dark brown, and the flat side light brown.
Just doing this makes them look nice, round, and 3D!
The pointy tip at the top has a tiny tuft of soft hair. Draw this part lightly with thin lines.
The round part at the bottom is called the hilum, and it is a whitish, rough spot. If you leave this white, it looks just like a real one!

Keep the inside of the burrs light

The inside of an open burr is smooth with no spikes.
Instead of coloring it the same color as the outside, try using light cream color or leaving it white. It will show clearly how the burr split open.
If you leave the gaps between the chestnuts and the burr white, it makes the chestnuts look like they are sitting right inside!

Have fun coloring the work gloves and rain boots

In this coloring page, everyone is wearing work gloves and rain boots.
Since the ground and the chestnuts are mostly brown, color just the gloves and boots with bright colors like red, yellow, or blue. This will make the people pop right out in the picture!
Chestnut leaves are long and thin with zigzag edges. Mixing green leaves and yellow leaves makes it feel just like a September forest.

Jomon People Grew Chestnut Groves

Chestnuts are nuts that have been eaten in Japan since very ancient times.
At the Sannai-Maruyama Site in Aomori Prefecture, lots of chestnuts from over 5,000 years ago were found. What's more, when scientists checked the DNA of those chestnuts, they found the nuts were more even in size than wild ones.
This means the Jomon people were not just picking them up. They picked trees with good nuts and grew chestnut groves.
Chestnut wood was also used for building posts. Chestnut trees were important because they gave people both food and wood.

Chestnut Flowers Are White Strings That Bloom in June

Have you ever seen a chestnut flower? It is hard to imagine from autumn nuts, but the flowers bloom around June.
Long, thin, string-like flowers hang down white all over the branches. From far away, the whole tree looks soft and white.
These flowers have a strong smell that invites many bees and little bugs.
Long rains that fall around this time are sometimes written as "栗花落" and read as "Tsuiri." It means rain that falls when chestnut flowers fall.

"Peaches and Chestnuts Take Three Years, Persimmons Take Eight"

Have you heard the saying, "Peaches and chestnuts take three years, persimmons take eight"?
It means that from seeds or young plants, peach and chestnut trees take three years to grow fruit, and persimmon trees take eight years.
From this, it became a saying that it takes time for anything to produce results.
Chestnut trees are fast for nut trees, but it still takes three years. The chestnuts you pick now might have come from a tree someone planted years ago.