Has anyone grown hazelnuts in the south successfully? I am growing 2 Yamhill and 2 Jefferson hazelnut trees. I was told they will not produce consistently here. Should I just rip them out? I am at the base of the Appalachian mountains in 7B. Usually in the summer we have highs of around 90 F.
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You should be fine zonewise. Eastern Filbert Blight (EFB) is the main limiting factor. Add Rutgers varieties to guard against that contagion.
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They were advertised as being resistant when I bought them. Are Jefferson and yamhill still resistant to this blight?
These were bred to rescue Oregon dying farms, as varieties mainly Barcelona died out.
They (OSU hazenuts) were selected as having resistance to the 1 strain of blight circulating there in Oregon, but not the dozens floating around east of the rockies.
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That makes sense! Nice to learn something new, I don’t know much about hazelnuts
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You will want to add more variety diversity to ensure sufficient pollnation and read up on hazelnut alleles:)
Look up foggy bottom farm and read about the recently developed varieties which IMO should be considered. As for your zone and growing area, several people who post here on GF are further south and have very successfully grown hazelnuts.
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I’m in your region (East TN) and I bought 2 Winkler hazelnut plants last spring. Both were advertised as being EFB resistant, but both are doing very poorly (if they’re still alive at all).
I later learned that there are different regional strains of EFB. Winklers are resistant to strains common in the area where the plants originated; however, we have different strains in TN. What makes the Rutgers varieties such a big deal is that they were selected to resist most strains of EFB across the country.
Which nursery is currently selling the Rutgers varieties?
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Cecil Farris’ daughter lived (may still be there) at Franklin TN in the 1990s, and had some of his best selections growing there (G-22 seems to come to mind as one of his best EFB-resistant creations).
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Funny in a way, I installed a bunch of equipment in the Franklin TN telephone office back in 1983. I found a walnut tree growing a tad northwest of the town on the side of the road (near Cowee, not far from Burningtown) which had a huge crop of nuts and brought maybe 50 home to plant. I also spoke with an employee of the phone company named Glenn Dill who talked a lot about growing huge black walnuts. He helped stoke the fire which eventually turned into my planting of walnuts near Rainsville Alabama.
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They have not been bothered by blight here in North Carolina, and ours have been in the ground almost 10 years now. They grow like weeds. We have 1 ‘ETA’, and 2 ‘THETA’, that originated from the same university as your varieties did. I just grafted on some ‘Jefferson’ this spring.
Most years once they started flowering, the trees have filled with blooms, although they did not have female flowers the first year of blooms.
It’s odd because sometimes I do not see much if any female flowers, and then there is still a crop, and we don’t always see the burs that the nuts come from. Sometimes I feel like the squirrels are playing pranks on us, LOL
We don’t get much hazelnuts, although I think that might be because the trees are too shaded, oh and because of the squirrels, they are very talented at making nuts vanish.
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