they definitely should grow well in your zone. i planted all mine from nuts and my oldest is 9 yrs now. are yours american/ euro hybrid crosses or pure euros? the crosses from what ive read produce a crop much sooner. hybrids produce a large bush from suckers at the base where the pure euros are small trees. as long as you have seed from different types, they should cross pollinate. ive got small crops off of hybrids only 4ft tall. i think pure euros take longer. lots of guys grow them so they should chime in.
I cant remember properly where I got the nuts from, but they were sold as corylus avellana. But you never know what you get, when you buy stuff on eBay.. They were quite large, so definitely not pure american hazels.
But you have gotten nuts from your seed grown bushes?
That definitely makes me more optimistic.
It has now become possible to buy a few named cultivars here, so if my seed grown bushes fail to produce nuts, I can buy some that will.
Six years from seed and catkins already is encouraging. Catkins are only the male side though, so I’d go looking in late winter for the tiny red tufts of the female flowers. That tells you whether they’ll nut. Seedlings vary a lot so it’s worth watching which of the six look best.
my seedlings started producing at 4-5 years. as long as you have some mixed genes , you should get nuts. hopefully your euros come from newer eastern filbert blight resistant varieties. euros nearly got wiped out on the u.s west coast from it. they have since been bred for blight resistance. euros also have bigger nuts. some hybrids have come close but arent quite there yet. keep us posted on how they do for you.
I dont think we get any sort of blight here (Norway). We do have wild hazels, but almost exclusively on the milder coastal regions. Not inlands, where I am.
Although, I recently learned that someone an hours drive away, has had success with growing a cultivar called “Long Zellernut”. Gets a good crop most years.
oh ok. i didnt realize you are in europe. you should be fine. no blight there that i know of. up until the last 15 yrs. we havent even been able to grow the American hazels here in northern Maine. it was too cold but milder winters are allowing us to do so. i can now grow pure euro. genetics as im in z4b with z5 just up the hill according to the new u.s.d.a map. now i need to find the space. best of luck!
Growing up in the Pacific Northwest we had six filbert (hazelnut) trees in our back yard, Three were more round and darker in color, three were elongated and lighter. All were delicious and were a favorite snack for our poor family. Now seventy years later hazelnuts are said to be able to thrive in southern Nebraska with much colder and drier winters. I would love to give them a try but I was used to trees not bushes. The trees were smallish but still trees. Can filberts be grown successfully in zone 5 in the midwest?
I have a long hedge of about 16 hybrid hazels started from seed supplied by various sources. Some of the best hybrid breeding work has been happening in the upper Midwest and northeast, using improved seedling orchards resulting from hybrid swarms. It is my understanding most new commercial plantings are still from improved seedlings, as layering is time consuming and expensive and tissue culture techniques haven’t really been nailed down. Not to mention many cultivars have not been around long enough to be thoroughly tested. Can be lots of variability in the offspring depending on seed source, about half mine produced nuts year 4 from seed. Make sure they are planted close, they are wind pollinated. I’ve read somewhere recently (Z’s nutty ridge perhaps) that recommended in row spacing as been reduced compared to previous recommendations, as bushes that filled the rows in close enough to touch increased nut production noticeably.
While it would be a fun endeavor all the sites giving advice have let me know it would not be a good fit. I only have room for five trees and they unanimously suggest at least twenty. It was a good thought.
I now realize my 8 trees are much too far apart. Maybe I will stagger another row close by. The few nuts I have gotten have been tasty. The critters got most of them.
i only have 4. you only need 2 that flower at the same time for pollination and can keep them small as you want because they sucker from the base. whoever told you that is full of it our trying to get you to spend more money. most places that sell them have a pollination chart to tell you which ones to buy together. mine are planted in a 10’ x 10’ block.
That was the common theme…critters will get most or all the nuts from less than twenty trees. In Oregon we had six trees and had more filberts than we could eat. Have the critter populations gotten larger or is it location?
