I have some very small wild hazelnuts currently that I would like to graft to large filberts and wondered how difficult are they to graft?
I’m curious to hear from those with experience. My impression (don’t recall how it was formed) is that they are very difficult.
We have many beaked hazelnuts growing wild around us, if I could graft them to goo, blight immune cultivars, that would be super cool.
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I’ll say that the wood is so tough that the deer don’t eat the tips off the branches. I transplanted about ten trees that ranged from four feet to one foot tall (from the woodsy area on my land) out into an open area so they could get more light and I didn’t bother protecting the new trees, because I’d never seen any deer damage on any trees in the woods. Sure 'nuff, not a branch has been nipped. The upshot being that cutting the twigs with a knife is hard; getting a nice, flat cut on the end of a pencil-sized twig seems almost impossible. Also the wood seems kind of dry. I should try to graft a wild scion to a wild tree just to see what happens. Two of my transplants (from about 16 months ago) currently have one nut each. This is from today:
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I have also read that they are very difficult to successfully graft. If you try, is recommended to apply a heating device to the graft since callousing is very slow.
My Yamhil and Jefferson are on 3rd leaf so I am considering airlayering a few of the suckers.
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Certainly not an expert on hazels, but I think layering and greenwood budding are the most common propagation methods.
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I have tried few years ago to graft hazel and i have done it on dormant root stocks with cleft grafting method and from about 15 grafts i had only two success.
This year i tried to graft again hazel and i done it too late when sap already started to flow and i had from about 20 grafts 0 takes.
Hazel is difficult to graft because of thin bark and cuts on scion and root stock must be perfect matched.
Easiest way to propagate them is by rooting suckers by adding moist soil on them, i have added one video about that in this topic.
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You can also just bend branches down into the soil or created a stool bed from a grafted tree.
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I have grafted hazelnut few days ago and this time i hope for good results 
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Wanted to bump this topic to see if anyone is grafting hazelnuts this year. These are the hazelnuts that are always hollow and small.
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Here is update video of grating hazel, and here you can see results of that grafting .
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The Arbor Day society in Nebraska has a huge collection of grafted hazelnuts so there must be a good method I’m unaware of to graft them. I’m looking hard at the cultivars Barcelona and Jefferson NCGR-Corvallis: Corylus Catalog. Those varieties could change my 50 nut bushes into a hazelnut gold mine if I can figure out how to graft them.
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Nothing wrong with a gold mine. I’m going to attempt grafting Jefferson onto Theta and York but I understand they are difficult to get takes. From what I read before ordering my filbert trees Jefferson is suppose to be the Barcelona replacement as it has blight resistance. I’m just getting started so I really don’t know much about their needs. Good luck with your grafting.
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Couple things you should be aware of Clarkinks that you might already know. If the grafts work you will have lots of root suckering, probably would need to prune them out a couple times a year. Also, pretty much all the old Oregon cultivars like jefferson and barcelona have been show to not be all that resistant to eastern filbert blight.
I’m growing acres of hybrid hazelnuts that are mostly seedlings, many nuts are small but the bushes produce heavily and we use the nuts for processing and roasting. They are really fantastic.
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Update: my two attempts at grafting hazel trees have been successful so far. I did them about a year ago and they took well and grew some. This year they are showing new growth, so I consider them successful. The scene was this: I used one scion each from my two store-bought trees, a very young Dorris (OSU) and a very young Tonda di Giffoni. I grafted each to a new, vigorous ‘water sprout’ type of shoot that had grown out of a couple 1"-2" stems (cut off the year before) from a wild tree growing in a bush format.
This year (a couple weeks ago) I did something different: I grafted two scions from a ‘Nixon’ onto the Giffoni (already very leafed out), and will graft two scions from a ‘Normoka’ onto the Dorris (swollen buds, no leaves yet).The Nixon is looking healthy (but it could be lying…time will tell). Again, I grafted to one-year vigorous shoots.
I hope to (soon) graft both Nix and Norm to the wild/native trees in an area where there are many, to cross pollinate with the wild ones and create some kind of hybrids. The native ones are prolific and tasty; the 2 N’s are both huge and tasty, with very good cracking properties; as in, little to no ‘paper’ and fall right out of the shell.
I have to add this edit even though it isn’t about grafting…but it is about propagating. I made up some bins (not a great idea) of fig cuttings in mid Feb and I suspected a couple cuttings of being something other than figs…not sure how that happened. Well, there were these four sticks that looked very different than the others but they were slowly putting out leaves so leave’m be. Today, as I’m getting ready to get the cuttings into individual containers I figure it out: they are Hazel sticks, probably from a late Winter pruning. Who knows why they ended up as possible starts; I guess it’s not an intrinsically bad idea. So three of them have little leaves but also semi-developed flowers, which is how I recognized them as Hazels. I should remove the flowers, I suppose. Last year’s hardened shoots, no hormone, in with the figs, almost surely from one or both of my store-bought Hazels. Green fingas, as the Brits would say. FYI.
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Thought I would add some additional information about my hazel/filbert grafting. The three grafts from 2017 have all done well. This year I added several more grafts but using more conventional type grafts such as cleft and side attachment. All the scions (about 10) were either wrapped with parafilm or dipped in wax for a coating. They all have either started to leaf out or have buds enlarging. Pretty sure all will do well. The reason I’m adding this post is for anyone that is uncertain about how difficult hazels are to graft. My experience is that they graft as easily as apples or pears.
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My current collection of hazels are Jefferson, Theta, York, and Yamhill (graft in this year). All these are listed as blight resistant and I have had no problems to date with any of these. I had a few blooms this year but no pollen tags but I think they are near size and age to start producing nuts. Although Jefferson is reported to have the largest nut size we need other varieties for pollen. If your considering ordering hazels you might consider getting only Jefferson and trading for scion wood for varieties to graft in for pollen. All these thoughts are coming from someone that still is new to growing hazels.
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I have one of the modern blight resistant pollenizers, maybe Eta or Theta, and stuck two hard wood prunings into the ground next to the tree. They both rooted and have survived a couple of years there.
I keep forgetting to transplant them while dormant.
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Wish I had known they rooted so easy. I’m assuming these were put in the soil while dormant and the weather was Cold? Seems easier than my method of air layering. Thanks for the tip. Bill
I don’t remember exactly when I did it. Probably February or March. We have long, wet, cloudy transition to spring. I sometimes do stuff like that with prunings just to give the miracle a chance. This one worked. Last spring Bearwithme gave me a bunch of hollywood plum cuttings. I tried rooting them in a humidity dome, some I tried to callus in a bag, and some I stabbed into a raised bed in the vegetable garden. The only ones that rooted were a couple in the garden.
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Thanks