Pecans, Walnuts, Hazelnuts - Middle Tennessee (recommendations)

[TNHunter]

Supposed to get my Grafted Kanza and Amling from Rock Bridge in May…

I have planting holes prepped and ready…

TNHunter

[Carlin]

In regards to hazelnuts you should be looking more ate geneva releases (gene etc) as opposed to osu releases (jefferson yamhill etc) as the oregon ones are only resistant to one strain of blight (the one that has turned up on the westcoast decemating hazelnut orchards) whereas there are something like 3 strains back east…just figured you’d want to know/not waste time and money on plants that likely wont be successful

[drusket]

@Cabescove

Had never heard of the ambrosias before

That’s the first I ever heard of them either…now I’ve got something else to look out for. Sorry about your lost pecans. It’s tough to nurse things along for years only to see nature take them out in an instance. Sometimes I think all we can do it plant a lot of things and hope some of them pan out.

[Cabescove]

Thanks. Yes, I was disappointed. I grew up in NE Texas with pecan trees everywhere, and then spent most of my adult life in the midwest and Pennsylvania. Finally getting back down south (N of Chattanooga, TN) and one of the first things I planted were the two pecans. Between the Japanese beetles, the ambrosia beetles, the stink bugs and now the SWD fly, it is getting a lot harder to succeed as a fruit grower than it used to be.

[Cabescove]

I didn’t think about doing that. Good idea. I think I am done with pecans, though. By the time they would bear, I would be retired and moving on. I am spraying for ambrosia this year. They say it can take fruit trees or vines.

[Oldmixonfree]

Does anyone know where to find seedlings of “Major”?

Pecan rootstock in general seems to be a pretty obscure market- far more than pecan trees themselves. It’s so easy to find rootstock selections for fleshy fruits. Is there a reason for this other than the comparatively weaker popularity of nut growing?

[cousinfloyd]

@RobThomas

Hello fellow Middle Tennessean. I grow Kanza, Lakota, and Amling pecans. They do great here and are very disease resistant. No sprays needed.

Are your trees yielding good crops already? If so, how many years did it take for them to start? Did it seem like one variety was more precocious than another? Is season length ever a problem with Amling for you?

@RobThomas

Black walnuts grow like weeds throughout TN, and I have several on my property. I’ve never tried planting any named varieties because we have more than enough wild ones that drop several hundred nuts every year.

If you’re cracking or thinking of cracking black walnuts with hand tools, it might be very worthwhile to try the named varieties. Between the bigger nut size and the greater ease with which they come out of the shell in larger pieces and sometimes also thinner shells, you might get a lot more nut meat for your efforts out of the named varieties.

@TNHunter

Tree with long plates of shaggy (scaly), peeling bark… Possible Hickories – Shagbark, Shellbark, Southern shagbark, Water

There’s also Carya ovalis, false shagbark hickory, which if I believe also typically has 5 leaflets per leaf. And I don’t think it’s included in that Tennessee publication, even though I’m pretty sure it grows in Tennessee. I originally mistook the bark of false shagbark for shagbark (C. ovata) but the nut has noticeable differences and maybe the buds, too.

[TNHunter]

@cousinfloyd …

The bark can be misleading in some cases… the tree shown above in my field… I was sure thinking shagbark… but when the nuts developed this year… they are pignut.

I have lots of red hickory… and several pignut… and have noticed the red hickory and pignut … the nut itself (minus the husk) are near identical… size shape nut meat… the husk on both is thin… the pignut has that classic pig snout… where the red does not. Info I found online says the pignut is often bitter and the red hickory is sweet… but so far every pignut I have tried has tasted just like the red hickory. I have found no bitter pignut yet.

If you can find a very large red hickory… the nuts can be quiet large. I found a couple huge red hickory the other day in one of my hollows and the nuts were 2x the size of others I had already collected. Older mature trees, had much larger nuts.

I heard someone on YouTube say that red hickory are often called false shag. They can get a little shaggy… but still not quite like a true shag bark.

But that one in my field… is a pignut… per the nut… (which normally has a more smoothed bark) but it is very shaggy by the bark. To me it is a false shag… for sure. I have not found any other pig nuts in my woods that have shaggy bark like that… think this one got crossed or confused or something.

I was quite disappointed when I found it had pignuts on it.

[cousinfloyd]

@TNHunter

But that one in my field… is a pignut… per the nut… (which normally has a more smoothed bark) but it is very shaggy by the bark. To me it is a false shag… for sure. I have not found any other pig nuts in my woods that have shaggy bark like that… think this one got crossed or confused or something.

A couple comments from my attempt to ID a very similar tree that had me confused might be particularly of interest to you. The first comment is me quoting a retired dendrology professor that helped me out:

@cousinfloyd

From the pictures you provide, I favor Carya ovalis, false shagbark hickory, for the identity of your mystery tree, based upon the bark, bud and fruit. I concur with you; the fruit husk is too thin and the buds too small for shagbark hickory.

In my opinion, pignut and false shagbark hickory are very closely related, and possibly not worthy of recognition as separate species, an opinion I share with others. I do not agree with your reference. Pignut typically has 5 leaflets, and false shagbark has both 5 and 7 leaflets with the majority of leaves having 5 leaflets. Major clues for me were the nearly spherical shape of the fruit, the thin husk and the narrow and short shags of the bark, not the long (2-3 ft) and wide (4-6 ins) shags of mature shagbark. Also recall that shagbark leaves are very large, 16-24 inches long.

@Hillbillyhort

This may be carya ovalis ? Or a hybrid of it “x” C.glabra
Or as is said in grays manual of botany;

"Several vars.recognizied, some of these perhaps better considered as mere forms "

I spent the day today thinning around hickorys here, many of which I have no idea what kind they are…?
Highly variable !

[Fusion_power]

Carya Ovalis (Red Hickory) and Carya Glabra (Pignut Hickory) are often considered ecotypes of the same species. They cross readily where their growing range overlaps.