Looks like it is going to be a good year for hickory… my reds and pigs are loaded.
Have not checked any mocker or shags yet.
Last year many of the shags that produced the year before… did not produce last year. Hopefully they will this year.
Is it common for wild hickory trees to alt bear ?
Yes, alternate bearing is almost always true for wild hickory trees of all species. The big shagbark across the road from my house had an off year last year but looks like this year will be loaded.
Thanks much,
The upland shagbarks seem quite slow growing, comparatively, though admittedly I don’t spend enough time around them to say that for sure. They definitely dont match the size of the ones in the valley by a long shot.
There are large bitternuts here that are able to compete in a forest setting.
Often they seem to be growing with sugar maple IME, but it’s also kind of a weedy generalist. Ive seen it a lot on field edges near me.
One thing to keep in mind is that niches can be a little different in different regions, especially at the edges of a species’ range. Here, for example white oak is confined to rock outcrops and grows quite dwarf. These ones are at least 25 years old, for example:
Red mulberry- Morus rubra- grows here too, but only on east facing outcrops and talus slopes. it is similarly stunted.
Cultural inputs (fertilizer, etc.) may overcome tendencies toward alternate bearing.
The ‘Garnett’ shellbark ortet, in my county, is growing in the middle of a corn/soybean field; the farmers plow and plant almost right up to the trunk. In the 20+ years I’ve been watching and collecting from it, it has only missed bearing one year - 2007, when an Easter freeze event eliminated virtually all fruit/nut production in the entire state. My grafted trees of it do not get anything like that level of fertilization… time will tell whether they slip into alternate bearing or not.
‘Weschke’ is a bitternutXshagbark hybrid.
‘Sinking Fork’ - my own introduction - is a local tree… first easy-cracking shagbark I stumbled across. Won 1st Place at KY State Fair in 2001. It is a small-medium size nut, avg ~5 gram with 38% kernel. Mild to bland flavor. I still like it, but it’s definitely eclipsed by larger nuts.
Two shagbark varieties that I was really impressed with this year are Polly’s Bend (central KY origin) and Lizzie Mountain(NC origin). Both are fairly large nuts with thin shells that crack out mostly halves/quarters, and have great flavor. I’ve had both for some time, but no nuts yet on my trees… but I’m gonna be grafting more of these two, going forward!
@Lucky_P … i remember the easter freeze of 2007 well…
90% of ginseng tops were up at point and the freeze was significant… most tree leaves here were out and good sized… they all turned black… and fell off and about a month later came back out.
Ginseng only sends up 1 top for the year usually early to mid April… but some can be later.
90% or more of Seng tops were killed with that frost … so there was very little to harvest that fall.
That is the only time in my life that I saw ginseng prices top 1000.00/lb.
The supply was just very low… so the price went extra high.
We had a second sevier weather event that year here…summer fall extreme drought. I had two Alabama red maples planted in my front yard (5 Years) and both died. I watered them some but evidently not enough.
My wild transplanted sugar maples survived.
@TNHunter
Yep. I had persimmons, mulberries… well, everything, really… with 6-10 inches of tender new growth… 4 consecutive nights of temperatures into the low teens… devastating.
Killed 10-yr old heartnut/Japanese walnut seedlings outright, Killed all my kaki persimmons and Persian/Carpathian walnuts back to the rootstocks. Killed limbs the size of my thigh back to the trunk on trees in my woods. Wheat crops here were just at ‘boot’ stage, killed the head - and nitrate levels skyrocketed, making wheat salvaged for hay a potentially toxic feedstuff for cattle.
Following that freeze, we had severe drought…with only a single 1-inch rain event between May 10 and Nov 30. Freeze-damaged trees in our woods died - and continued to decline and fall - for the next 5 years or more. There was no local hay produced, folks were paying $100 for a roll of cornstalks or CRP residue released for haying in October. Many beef producers who were over 50 yrs of age, just liquidated their herds and the cattle never came back… as a veterinarian and beef producer, myself, it was a sad thing to see…
harrowing
I had a greenhouse full of plants, maybe 5000 or a tad more that were killed on April 7th 2007. We had 22 degrees overnight and it decimated a lot of crops. There were no honeybee swarms that year.
On the hickory theme, I see a lot of nuts on trees in this area. This looks like a good year to explore the woods.
I had a sweet autumn clematis and a hardy kiwi which were battling it out up until the 2007 freeze. The clematis was ahead in growth before that freeze. Days afterwards the clematis turned white and gave up the ghost and the kiwi choked it out that next season.
First time I saw a sweet autumn clematis lose to another vine.
I saw a tiktok about making hickory syrup by boiling bark strips. Is that the correct way to make hickory syrup and not by boiling sap like most other syrup trees?
Hickory is one of those plants that make me wish I had more than an eighth of an acre yard.
Historically, hickory syrup has been made by boiling strips of shagbark bark, then sweetening the resulting ‘liquor’ with sugar, and cooking down to desired thickness.
I make mine using nutshells retained after cracking and picking out nutmeats, with a few nut husks thrown in to add more color.
I used to boil my nutshells & kernel fragments on stovetop for the larger part of a day, but have a Hamilton Beach crockpot that ‘boils’, even on low setting, so now I do most initial cooking in the crock, on high… less water boiling off, necessitating replenishing, compared to stovetop cooking.
I strain the ‘hickory liquor’ through an old t-shirt, then add ~ 1.5 cup white granulated sugar per cup of liquor, and cook down to my desired thickness. I’ve had some issues with the sugar precipitating out… have seen references that if you substitute corn syrup for about 1/4-1/3 of the sugar, that precipitation is avoided. I usually boil a few intact hickory nuts while cooking it down, and put a nut in each jar, when I decant into canning jars.
that sounds amazing…
How do you use it?
I usually use a one to one ratio of sugar and hickory liquid. I don’t get any precipitation in my syrup.
Having grown up a lot ng time ago in The Deep South, my taste in syrup runs to THICK corn/cane syrups like Golden Eagle, Yellow Label, AlaGa, Cane Patch, etc., Not that maple-flavored sugar water that prevails up here in the frigid northland (tic).
If I cook mine down to my desired honey-like consistency…it’s probably gonna precipitate out some crystals. I can live with that.
@Chills - hickory syrup is good, as you’d expect, on pancakes/waffles/biscuits, as a topping on ice cream, can be whipped into butter to make a tasty spread.
Back a bunch of years ago I heard about and started playing with Hickory syrup. Lucky was kind enough to share his recipe, and I found some others online. A couple of my experimental findings were: 1) toast your Hickory bark. It’s a tricky process to get it to just the right level of toastiness, but this definitely imparts a nice Smoky flavor to your syrup. 2) I found that Demerara sugar gave me some additional flavoring that I wasn’t getting with white sugar. It’s quite a bit more expensive though.
A third finding that I thought was interesting I only discovered this year. My syrup experiments were I’d say at least 10 years ago. I made a large batch that ended up being fairly tannic. It had a nice flavor, but was just too sharp on the tongue. I set it aside and hadn’t thought about it until this year when I stumbled across the bottles in a wooden crate. They’d been stored in the garage, which was the furthest thing from temperature controlled imaginable. Anyway, when I tried this previously tannic syrup, it tasted great. Moral of the story, if your syrup tastes too tanic, age it like a red wine and you will probably be happy with it down the road.
I made some hickory syrup this winter and compared that made from bark with that made from nut shells. The bark produced an odd vegetative flavor while the nut shells yielded a nice clean tasting syrup.
My thoughts was that the nutshells were nice and clean, with no lichens, poison ivy rootlets, bird poop or bug frass. Even with the occasional nut husks I throw in for deeper brown color, I at least rinse off any accumulated dust.
A couple of years ago, I made a batch from nothing but nut husks…it was “as black as a thief’s heart” as my grandmother would say, but tasted great!
Ive been making hickory syrup got years using only bark. I have never hand and bad flaver from mold or fungus. I did scrub all my bark with a brush under running water.
For years not got years
How did your wright hican graft take? I grafted it a few months ago. Mine are looking nice. No compatibility issues as far as I can tell.
I checked the shagbark on the hill across the road today. It is heavily loaded with nuts. I pulled a couple and cracked them. Nuts are well filled, husks are about 1/2 inch thick which is typical for shagbark in this area. I named this tree Tsali which is a Cherokee name from the time of the removal on the Trail of Tears. By the look of the nuts, they will be mature in about 4 to 6 weeks.
We had very high rainfall this summer resulting in exceptionally high growth of my seedling and grafted pecans. I will be able to graft nearly every tree next spring.
