Hazelnut harvest

yep. and it happens this time of year. whole branch will brown out like sprayed with round up but rest of the plant is doing great. no signs of disease or damage either. it only happens on my 2 older ones. i only give them a few shovels of compost in early spring. thanks for the link!

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@JesseS,
Think we should figure out how to graft the small ones over to something better like these NCGR-Corvallis: Corylus Catalog. I have some bushes that are pretty old I planted but the nuts are all hollow! I wanted to do it this year but I really had a crazy year How difficult is it to graft hazelnuts? . Got busy with grafting everything else. Take a look at the cultivars Barcelona and Jefferson!

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Do you have Eastern Filbert Blight in your area? If so, I would avoid Barcelona. Jefferson and some of the other OSU releases are supposedly mostly immune but they may not be 100% immune.

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Not yet but I would still want to plant resistant bushes. Thanks for that information.

eastern filbert blight is across most of the country at this point. the disease cant take up to 10 years to show up on bushes. Its a pretty serious disease that we can avoid by planting resistant bushes. I think its better to not waste time on shrubs that will die. I have seen friends make that mistake and its depressing. If youā€™re going to plant the oregon cultivars, at least plant some of the american hybrids too so that youā€™ll have hazels in the long term.

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How do you process or crack that volume of nuts? Iā€™m considering an order to Oikos and trying to decide if it would be worth it. I pi ked two quarts (husked) of wild hazels many years ago and ended up not eating most because of the small size (hand cracking). Sue

A hand cranked cracker with a rotating drum, hopper is the best way to go, I am still hand cracking but in the next couple years I might need to invest. Canā€™t remember the brand nameā€¦ A friend has one of these and says it works good, still have to pick the meat out though.

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This might be obvious (Iā€™m new, I donā€™t know) but I have two-for-two Hazel grafting so far and Iā€™m betting that the reason is because I grafted onto what could be called water sproutsā€¦but these were mini-pollard creations from the year before. The basics = I cut a bunch of 1"- 2" stems at about 4ft tall simply to open up the canopy around a ā€˜rescueā€™ apple tree that was among many wild Hazel trees/bushes. The next mid-Spring I saw that there were a couple very vigorous shoots on the sides of many of the cut stems. I used these to graft to because they seemed to not be as tough and sinewy as normal branches. I grafted scions from a Tonda di Giffoni and an OSU Dorris and they both worked well.

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Can you share the technique and timing you followed grafting hazels?

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Since we have a lot of blight in our wild hazels I plan to buy disease resist stock for now. But grafting would be interesting in the future on their suckrts or seedlings. Sue

My concern of grafting high on wild root stock would be blight killing the rootstock.
If the scion wood is blight resistant , I would think it would be better off to root that as a cutting , layering, or graft Union buried , so that the whole new plant is resistant,
If grafted onto a wild seedling of unknown resistance , blight could kill the rootstock and you have lost it.

I "had " an incredible planting of filbert / hazel cross, I gathered seed from the infamous "Etter " nut orchard (with John Gordan ! )in Pa.
Planted them on the farm here , 5yr started Bering , 10 yrs , of heavy production, some 15 ft. Tall ,beautiful , though much variation then ā€¦ Then the blight.cameā€¦within 5 yrs or so it killed them ā€œallā€.
I was , and still am really bummed about it.
So hopefully this info may save some of you about 20 yrs.!!!
These trees had a mostly European ā€œlookā€ to them, of unknown ancestry
As Mr Etter had past befor I got a chance to visit.
Now I am starting some of the new blight resistant ? Ones. Starting over again .

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Has anyone been to the Etter orchard lately ,as I have not been there in years,ā€¦just wondering what condition it is in ?

I used a simple whip graft, and I cut off most of the leaves from the two recipient shoots. According to my dated photos I must have done the grafting in early Aprilā€¦the important part being that the shoots were new and vigorous and putting out small leaves. I guess now would be the time to chop some major stems so they will put up some vigorous shoots to use. Also, I grafted on top of 4ft long shootsā€¦shorter seems like it would be better. Though I wrapped them with Parafilm, I tied them pretty hard with the green (nylon?) ribbon, too.

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I to love these nuts. A friend has great supply an dose not use so its free game for me! I ate so manny last year. Amazing harvest tho jesse!!!

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That is correct, where I grew up (zone 5, Moscow, Russia) we had wild hazels growing around everywhere, we didnā€™t even bother to plant them - only picked from what was growing around. They were smaller than what you can buy in store, but delicious. They also made nice privacy screen, so usually they were growing outside the chain fence. They also made perfect, fast growing material for garden trellis - long, strait, smooth. I miss the time when when you needed a pole, you just step outside your yard and get one on the street :grin:. Now I need to drive to store to get fancy bamboo :grin:.

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Hazelnuts are my favorites second to the elusive black walnut. I bring back fresh hazelnuts I buy in the supermarket or outdoor market every time I am in France.

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i have the wild beaked hazels on the property but the darn squirrels always get them. we used to go pick them when we were young. my father made a homemade shucker to get the picky husks off. worked good! we used to sell them on the street corner for $1 a glass full.

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last nov when i was hunting my cousins property in missouri. there was tons of black walnuts all over the place on the ground. id never eaten one but if i knew they were that good i could of brought home lots of them. most people there cut the trees down near their houses, because theyā€™re so messy. a shame considering the nuts are so sought after elsewhere.

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Black walnuts vary in taste and other qualities. A wild tree could be great or poor. There are cultivars of high quality ones. Typically, they are strong flavored and most folks prefer them in cooking over eating them fresh. They grow wild all around here. (Orygun)

these were the size of a white walnut. hard to walk in the woods there without stepping on some.

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