This is the best summary I could come up with:

On a sunny fall day at the edge of Shenandoah National Park, Jake Good, a nursery technician with the Virginia Department of Forestry, was getting acorns and chestnuts into the ground.

Poured from sacks into a machine, these seeds — future Chinese chestnut and white oak trees, many collected from donors around the state — were filtered into tubes that cast them on a row of earth about seven feet wide.

Trees filter the water and air, reduce temperatures to decrease demand for electricity during hot months and bring in autumn’s “leaf-peeping” tourists who spend money across the commonwealth.

One of the state’s more diligent acorn collectors is 69-year-old Mike Ortmeier, who started gathering them as a retirement project after leaving the Department of Energy in 2009.

A self-described “super-collector,” Ortmeier said he gathers as much as 1,000 pounds of acorns and other tree seeds per year from public streets and other people’s property.

Brittany Blackwell, one of the workers pushing seeds into the ground at the Crimora nursery, said she and her children went to a farm her family previously owned to gather Chinese chestnuts as part of this year’s collection effort.

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