New Greenhouse & New Crop for 2019

The new greenhouse😎

The greenhouse arrived in a truck and had to be unloaded by hand, because the load on the pallet was a little unstable.  

I'm anxious to start using the greenhouse to dry the hazelnuts this fall and to use it to start new seedlings in the spring. 

I might even be able to keep my tomatoes growing until December.

Unloading went fast, but now its time to identify all the different parts.

Assembling all the parts was supposed to take a day, but it took us a week.

I would like to thank everyone for their help.

 This years crop, 2019

The new nuts look like small green flowers at this point.

I do not really know how large this years crop is, because they match the green foliage so well.

There are quite a few new hazelnuts on this picture. Can you find them, look hard.

Some of the good traits I'm looking for are 4 nuts in each cluster, as shown here in this picture.

Some cluster have as many as 8 or more nuts.

These larger clusters always produce smaller sized nuts that are hard to remove from the husk.

Some plants just produce a single nut that has a larger size, but the quantity of fruit per plant is low.

I try to propagate plants that have 2 to 4 nuts in each cluster.

This plant shown here will only have one or two nuts in each cluster.

This one has a cluster of 5 nuts. I thought of eliminating this plant, but it produces a nice crop of medium sized good tasting nuts every year.

This is a cluster of nuts is from a Beaked Hazelnut (Corylus corneta).

I had to hand pollinate this plant because it flowers a week later then the hybrid hazelnuts.

The nuts here will be a cross between Beaked and my hybrid hazelnuts.

The beaked hazels are smaller nut with a very thin shell. I crossed it with a hybrid that produces large nuts in hopes of getting a larger thinner shell nut.

I also hand pollinate several other hazels to produce a larger better tasting nut.

I flagged this branch to indicate that it was bagged this spring and hand pollinated. 

I'm also cloning plants using the layering method. This particular plant takes 2 years to clone. I've have a fence around the plants so the deer and rabbits won't clip the new plants off.

Over the years I've tried grafting hazelnut plants, but was unsuccessful.

This year I tried it again and this might my first successful graft.

These plants are hand pollinated 3 years old hybrid hazels about 4 feet high and should have a few nuts this year.  They did flower this spring, but I've only found just a few nuts starting. Next year they should produce much larger crop.

The Black Walnut in the back ground was planted the same time as the hazels.

I want to find out if the Black Walnut affects the growth of the hazelnut plants. So far I don't see any difference in the growth of the plants by the Black Walnut.

I still have lots of seedling left for sale.

This year people are buying more of the older plants.

The 1, 2, & 4 year old plants are all sold out, but I do have a few 3 year old plants left for sale.