FALL COLORS & TREE LIKE HAZEL'S

I'm a little late with posting fall colors, but I wanted to compare it to last years colors.

This hazelnut plant is from the fall of 2016.

This is the same plant from this fall, 2017.  The colors look almost the same, but they could be a little more of an orange color this year. The plant really has a good fall color, but the nuts from this plant are small and bitter.

This is a picture of a wild hazelnut plant in my orchard from 2016.

This is the same wild hazelnut from this fall, 2017. The color this year is a lot more reddish, and it's always the first plant to show fall colors, and was originally from northern Minnesota.

In this part of the hazelnut orchard the leaves have always been more yellow, but this year there are more orange and red colors. The green plant in the center is not a hazelnut but a raspberry patch, and you can also see some of the different sized hazelnut plants. 

The 6 year old plants in this part of the orchard have quite a large variation in colors. The tree with the bright yellow leaves close to the middle right is not a hazelnut, but a buckeye.  I planted the buckeye to try to divert the squirrels away from the hazelnuts, and found that they would not touch the nuts from the buckeye until all the hazelnuts were gone.  That was another good idea gone bad. 👎

This is an interesting picture showing colors and sizes of these two hazelnuts. The smaller red-orange colored plant in front is almost 5 ft tall, while the taller more yellow colored plant in the back ground is over 15 ft tall.  Both plants are the same age and produce a good quality nut, but taller one produces a larger quantity of nuts. 

 Developing a tree-like hazelnut plant

Most wild hazelnuts are a small shrub with suckers. The stems remain small and the plant tends to spread by suckering up from the roots.  These plants tend to be hard to control and manage in a yard or orchard.

I'm trying to develop a plant with a more tree-like structure with one truck. In this picture the 15 year old hybrid hazelnut plant has one main stem with several smaller ones on the sides, and if pruned would have just the one stem. This type would be easily manage in a yard or garden, and could be pruned into tree form.

This might look like one plant but actually its 2 plants that were planted too close together 15 years ago.  The plant on the left has one trunk with one main stem and a couple smaller stems that could be pruned off. The plant on the right also has one trunk with three main stems.  I was going to eliminate one, but both plants produce lots of excellent nuts. Next year I plan on cloning both by layering.

This is another plant that does not sucker and has several stems coming from one main truck. I'm layering this plant, because it is such a heavy producer of large thin shelled nuts,  The hollow plastic container with compost is the layered stem that I'm cloning. This stem will be moved and planted in a new location in the spring.

These are two more hazelnut plants that stay as a tight multi stem shrub, and both are good producing plants. I might have to start pruning some stems to keep the plant more open. Some of these plants have never been pruned in 16 years and I'm finding that the older branches produce smaller nuts. On some older hazelnut orchards they coppice (cut back to the ground) every 10 years, but I'll try pruning some of older branches out to open up some plants next spring.

This is nothing to do with hazelnuts but this was growing out of a Mulberry stump in the hazelnut orchard. It's a mushroom that I've never seen before, but looks very interesting.