Riverbend Hazelnuts: Summer 2018

Hazels are not as productive as last year but some plants have a decent amount of nuts developing.

This is a new plant that just started producing nuts this year. I'm hoping the sticky red hairs on the husk will divert the squirrels. It might slow them down but it won't stop them.

This year's spring had a few warm days and then 2 weeks of bitterly cold days, which caused winter damage on some plants and also shortened the period of time the flowers could be pollinated.

The plant here had a lot of the dead branches or branches with small leaves. The plant must have come out of its dormant state too soon and the sub zero temps killed the branches.

I found damage on both the wild and hybrid hazels.

This spring also caused a flush of new growth from the bottom.

This is a close up of a branch with winter damage.

I did scratch the branch and found the cambium layer completely dead.

A lot of the plants had the top 4 or 5 buds damaged and if the catkins (male flowers) or stigmas (female flowers) were in this area they did not open up.

I'd like to look on the brighter side and show a few of the different types of hazelnut husks.

I like this plant in which the husk looks like a flower.

This is a cluster of flower type hazelnuts on the same plant.

This is another picture of the hazelnut husk with the red hairs.

The hairs are very sticky, and the nut looks to be large.

Some plants have large clusters of nuts, which usually means a smaller nut that's hard to remove.

Some plants that ripen later in the fall have developing nuts that still are very small.

This plant ripens in late September and has larger then average nuts.

I wanted to show this picture of one of my better plants with the small developing catkins to the right of the hazelnut husk.

These catkins will produce the pollen for next year's crop.

Here we have a husk that's more open and on this plant the nuts drop out of the husk when ripe.

This plant has almost no husk at all and also drops out when ripe.

The plant is hard to harvest because not all the nuts ripen and fall out at the same time.

This is a wild hazelnut that has a fat juicy husk that never opens up to release the nut.

I do not like this plant at all because the husk has to be pealed by hand to release the nuts.

This plant has some of the same characteristic as the wild hazels but the nut is larger and when dried down the husk will release the nuts.

This plant tends to hold on to the nut until it is dried down and then the husk easily separates from the nuts.

This is one of the better plants with large good tasting nut. The husk is more leaf like and separates easily from the nuts.

This plant has a husk that is similar to the wild plants but it will release the nut when dry.

The husk here is very large and leaf like. This plant tends to drop the whole cluster at one time which make for fast and easy harvest.

These husks remain green even when the nut is ripe.

The plant has a good nut but hard to find when ripe.

I wanted to show diversity of plants. The one in front has a tree like structure about 7 ft tall and plant behind is more of a bush type at 4 ft tall. Both plants are same age

Drone pictures

On the left side of the drone picture is the older hazels planted in 2005, and the hazels in the center were planted in 2010 and 2011. I had just removed 5 undesirable from the center group, and planted new seedling.

In this picture we are looking straight down at those same plants. At the top you can also see cages from the newly planted hazels. In the middle you can bearly see the hazels that were planted last year.

All the plants that were planted last year were either hand pollinated nuts or clones of my best plants.

In 3 to 4 years it will be interesting to find out what type of nut they will produce.

This is a close up of those same seedlings that were hand pollinated.

This is a close up of one of the layered clones that was planted last year.

This cloned plant even has a few hazelnuts on it this year.

This is another drone picture of last years plantings and the newly planted hazels in the cages.
Please disregard the ash pile that I have not removed yet.