mine are planted in clay but on a slight slope and have grown great. i kept mine always mulched with woodchips with no other fertilizers. seeing they are now producing ill give them some chic manure next spring.
theres a guy that has a nursery in eastern N.C that sells hybrid hazels in the same zone as you. saw it on a facebook page im on. dont remember the nursery name. think his are crossed with European hazels. try googling it. i dont see why regular Americans wouldn’t produce where you are. id think they would do well. esp. in the under story. i bet the Turkish hazels would be great for your climate. Oikios used to sell them. try contacting him on his site. he still sells nuts so might still carry them.
There is something to be said about a monoculture, even with a no spray type of crop. If you had only a couple of each of the plants mentioned on this thread, all packed into the same lot (which is basically what I am doing) your disease pressure should be reduced.
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@steveb4 and others… searching for a NC Nursery with hazelnuts… I found this…
Looks like a good candidate for no spray… and Steve it says zone 3 hardy (-35 degrees) or warmer. Evidently they do well in NC… and might for TN as well.
They have these too…
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So the story on that one is I’m terrible at grafting plums so I just let it grow out. Maybe it’ll have a decent fruit resembling a plum but it’s supposed to be a great rootstock. see: Mariana GF8-1 | Willamette Nurseries rootstock clonal seedling fruit tree ornamental seedlings
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yep. thats the one. i think he got the zones mixed up as europeans are hardy only to z5, hybrid americans z4 and beaked are z3.
Goumi, Fuzzy Kiwi, blueberry, tayberry, fig and pomegranate.
i was talking about the hazels on his site.
Rather than monoculture I’m pretty sure the disease pressure is reduced because of the smaller number of plants.
That’s the deal in terms of dealing with pests, imo. Even diversity in large plantings, doesn’t reduce pest pressure, unless one is growing very pest resistant fruits (i.e. pawpaw, etc.) Small young fruit plantings are rightly credited for low pest pressure in humid climates imo. The reason is because they are small. Monoculture does not reduce pest pressure imo. Monoculture increases pest pressure.
That said, I’m generally a proponent of monoculture, especially as it relates to large acreages. Even with the obvious disadvantages of monoculture it generally produces abundant food for people.
The reason is the multiplication of labor. Most people don’t like to think of it, but a modern American farmer multiplies his labor by a thousand fold pulling huge a machinery tool (in large machinery intense monoculture) compared to a farmer in a developing country who farms with oxen. This is the way it is for almost all industries - construction, manufacturing, machining, or any other production of goods.
Interestingly, farming, by much less multiplication of labor (small very labor intensive farms) sounds more desirable to most people nowadays in the developed world.
That’s because abundant food doesn’t necessarily sound appealing to comfortable people in the developed world. Particularly Americans (among other developed nations) who have an enormous amount of food and plenty.
Commercially speaking, large acreages and technology resulting in multiplication of labor have driven the standard of living which most people take for granted.
Most people don’t understand it nowadays. But multiplication of labor by machines results in a standard of living everyday folks, comparable to kings and queens of antiquity.
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It’s true when i plant trees I mix it up so 3 autumn olives in a row, 5 pears, persimmon, mulberry on down the rows. That way when a disease hits it goes 3 trees down and stops. Aronia I was not concerned about nor have they been an issue. All that said harvesting is difficult and if I should need to spray I’ve created myself problems. Certainly Noone wants to spray poison beside a nearly ripe crop but you might be doing just that using that method.
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i have baby shipova grafted to aronia rootstock i got from crickethillnursery.com. supposed to produce in 2-3yrs. next year will be year 3. ill post it here. it would be my 1st. pear ive ever grown.
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Great Plains Nursery sells a newly released variety of hybrid hazels with potential blight immunity called Beast. It’s 75% American and 25% European. Grand traverse is a good pollinator for this selection. Just fyi
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Forgot to mention passiflora incarnate, arguta hardy kiwis, and goji
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unfortunately they aren’t hardy to my zone.
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Early days but it appears we should add shisandra chinensis/five flavor berry to this list
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But that multiplication of his labor is totally dependent on inputs of labor of the many more people that make the huge machines, provide the fuel for them, provide unsustainable chemicals for controlling weeds on that huge scale, etc., etc. Granted, even after accounting for the labor of all those input providers (whose labor, particularly if we’re talking about crops like combine-harvested crops, is far more substantial than what the farmer and the farmer’s employees put into the crop), there’s still a lot fewer total labor-hours going into a crop grown with large machinery, chemical herbicides, non-renewable fertilizer, etc. than the farmer in the developing country growing with oxen, but in a world with more people than ever maybe the number of labor-hours doesn’t need to be our overwhelming focus, particularly in already industrialized countries like America where we have way more problems with obesity and health problems resulting from processed food rather than issues with not having enough calories, especially when we’re depending on unsustainable chemicals, non-renewable fertilizers, depleting other non-renewable resources (e.g. soil erosion, diesel), pollution issues, exacerbating political and cultural problems, etc.
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I think this recent Savanna Institute video pairs well with this topic.
At a point people can decide to value more than just productivity and profitability, like triple bottom line business models.
Many people see the small scale orchards as a purpose for living even if it is more labor intense, it combines aspects of self sustaining, therapy, physical activity, mental activity, learning the natural world etc.
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