I’ve been wanting to put in a pair of hickory nut here. we had massive trees at the house I grew up in and I love them a lot. I’d really like to grow shagbark, but I know if I start from seed or sapling I’ll probably be dead before they produce (I’m pushing 50).
has anyone grown these? I’m in zone 6, I have a good spot for each tree to get full sized. my worry is finding healthy, older, grafted trees to put in, from a reliable source. I don’t mind waiting until fall, I think I’ll have to anyway as I haven’t seen any in stock since I started looking in earnest this year in March.
if you grow these, what are your best advice about getting them started out well? I’ve only got a few nut trees here, hazelnut and a “Hardy pecan” which I’m pretty sure is pushing zones and won’t likely make it.
do they grow fast? I know it’s about 10-40 years to produce depending on whether they’re grafts or seedlings, but what’s best to help them grow and produce faster, or better for them?
any thoughts, sources or advice would be welcome
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With nut trees most if not all you are really growing them for the next generation unless you are super young. They will live a few generations at least. The only exceptions to the long time till harvest I know about is almond and sweet pit apricot. I had a order in at Stark Bros for a supposedly self fertile pecan but did read it would be 15 years to produce fruit and anything in the hickory family produce a chemical called jugilone which kills other plants like apple trees. If you are looking for nut trees Raintree starts sells in July, Bay Laurel starts sells in September, One Green World starts sells in October or November. I know burnt ridge nursery sells a lot of nuts but am unsure of when they start selling.
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You’ll be waiting awhile on most hickories. You could try go native trees out of PA. They have many native tree species, but have a focus on hickories and american chestnuts.
https://www.gonativetrees.com/hickories/
I’ve gotten a few american chestnut trees from them before. You can get shagbarks from them in those deep 30” tree pots which give you a massive tap root to start with.
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Grafted hickory will produce much quicker than seedlings
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Zone 6… ANY pecan should survive… but it’s a crapshoot as to whether your seedling pecan will produce good nuts - if there’s a suitable pollenizer in the area. If you’re more interested in hickories… you could graft your ‘hardy pecan’ over to a good hickory, to be a companion to any others you plant.
Grafted hickories will bear in half the time, or less, that you’d be waiting for a seedling to reach production age. I’ve had hickories I grafted come into production in 5 years… but I also have some grafted trees I purchased over 25 years ago that have yet to make a nut.
You’re probably not going to find a LARGE grafted (or seedling, either, for that matter) hickory available; small specimens, particularly on pecan rootstock, will grow fairly quickly.
Unless Dax (Barkslip) has some ready to go, I’d recommend you visit David Hughes’ Rock Bridge Trees nursery website. He has a number of grafted hickory clones (on container-grown/rootmaker system northern pecan rootstock), listed in his ‘Northern Pecan’ section. For shagbarks, ‘Grainger’ is a must-have; ‘J.Yoder #1’ has long been a top selection; ‘Porter’ is good; ‘Mitch Russell’, a shagbarkXshellbark hybrid is very good.
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The only nut species I am aware of producing good to very good seedlings from select parents is black walnut. It only works when both parents are exceptional. I’ve planted Thomas black walnuts and within 5 years harvested nuts from the seedlings. The seedling nuts are as good and sometimes better than the parent.
Lucky gave good advice re varieties. Porter and Grainger in particular are noted for good flavor. The best I recall, Grimo has several shagbark selections including Yoder, Porter, and Grainger.
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@resonanteye — I have lots of hickory trees on my property… reds, pigs, mocker, and perhaps a couple of shagbark… I really like hickory nuts…
But instead of planting or grafting hickory, or buying grafted hickory… I have decided to just forage hickory nuts. I love foraging… and there are several places in my county where you can simply drive to a location, park, and take a little walk in the woods and harvest loads of shag bark hickory nuts.
If you have any parks in your area, national or state parks… check their rules on harvesting things like nuts, berries, mushrooms, etc… I have a really nice park here that allows harvesting 1 gal of (several different types of nuts and berries) per person per day.
They keep the parkway roads and some trails mowed nicely and there are several huge old shag back hickory trees growing with limbs reaching out over the mowed area… which makes for easy picking on hickory nuts.
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Those shagbark nuts look good, TnH.
One of my best local shagbarks is growing on the property of my kids’ former elementary school… good enough to take 1st place at the KY State Fair.
I’m alway keeping an eye out for likely-looking hickories and pecans I see in folks’ yards or city/state parks… since most ‘improved’ hickories are chance finds, you never know when you’re gonna run across the next great one.
I’ve not grown out to fruiting age more than a couple of hickories. ‘Grainger’ seedlings - at least, based on limited trials by Fred Blankenship and others - seem to produce better-than-average nut quality.
But… I’d hazard a guess that good hickories are pretty rare in the PNW, where the OP is loacted… though I’m grafting a good-looking hican from Portland OR (likely planted by a displaced Texan) this year (I’ve not seen the nuts, so I’m not going overboard on propagating it, yet). So… planting their own is probably their best bet, and grafted selections are going to be the way to go, rather than planting seedlings.
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@Lucky_P … I did not notice the location PNW… you mean not everyone in the USA has fine hickory trees like us 
Back in March… I went fishing and did a little shag bark hickory scouting too…
Found this nice one… down in a river bottom.
Had some nice sized broad shouldered shag nuts still laying under it. They were all bad at that point… but I will be trying those out this fall… hopefully.
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that tree looks just like the ones I grew up with. I grew up in PA.
they aren’t wild growing here though!
I’ll look into grafted, and check those websites to see if there’s any that might produce. (effort, I emailed both!) I don’t mind a ten year wait, but thirty? I’m pretty tired already!
dax goes by the name “barkslip” here. Among other things, he grows some hickory and pecan grafted trees. I got 4 trees from him a few months ago. They are growing very well. The pecans are about a foot taller already and the hickories about 6 to 8 inches.
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I’ll ask him! I got an email from gonative, they said their biggest trees available will take 20 years or more to produce, but should grow fairly quickly for canopy.
Yeah… you’re probably looking at 20 years+ for a seedling hickory to come into bearing. I’ve got 24 yr old seedling pecans in a riparian bufferstrip planting that have yet to produce a nut. One seedling (selected for red budscales) of my KY State Fair-winning shagbark selection, ‘Sinking Fork’, has been producing a few nuts for the past two years… 20+ years after being transplanted to a favored location in the yard.
Grafted specimens should come into production in half that time, or less.
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I don’t have grafted that are of size. It’s gonna be another couple of years or more for most of mine. They’re already 2020 grafts but I didn’t graft on 3/8ths or larger so they are taking-forever.
I’m grafting some today on 1-year potted-pecan that are 3/8ths plus.
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if you ever have any to sell/extra I would like to try them. 20 years, I’ll be old but I bet I’m around for it.
The 20+ yr old pecans & hickories in my 7-acre riparian bufferstrip planting would probably have come into bearing earlier - but all the care they have ever received is once or twice yearly mowing, and virtually no fertilization; no mulch, no spraying to limit competition from fescue and weeds. All things that have probably delayed production, but I had too many irons in the fire.
I actually ‘lost’ them, the first year - the ground had just come out of long-term corn/soybean rotation, and my tractor was in the shop all summer long. Ragweed, etc. was 10 ft tall by September… despite having stuck a pink surveyor’s flag by every one of the 500 or so 2-yr old seedlings the kids and I had planted that spring… I couldn’t find them. I figured that if I just mowed (bush-hogged) them, if they were established, they’d re-grow… if they didn’t come back, they probably weren’t going to make it anyway. Probably 95% survived and re-grew.
There’s one seedling of ‘Fayette’ shellbark hickory in that planting - one of a dozen or so that I grew from Fayette seednuts purchased from the late John H. Gordon - that has been producing nuts for the past 3 years… it may be better than its parent…
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Get a ‘Selbhers’ shellbark & a ‘Simpson #1’ shellbark and you’ll have nuts real-quickly. I’m hoping they overlap pollen when the female flowers are receptive. Selbhers is self-pollinating but would be much more fertile with another variety to pollinate it. This year we put I think (6) grafts onto my Selbhers which is getting up there and self-pollinating 25 nuts or so now after it began 4-years ago.
There’s no books written or internet knowledge about protandry of hickory & hican cultivars so right now it’s just a big guess. Selbhers is sweet and you’ll never get tired of them and they crack very-well-
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is there a good source for these? I’m primarily interested in any shellbark!
Yea, totally, there is… above mentioned I believe or I’ll mention them now: Rock Bridge Nursery. David Hughes is a friend and a wonderful guy
Canada: Grimo Nursery. They ship to us.
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