Great Fall Colors, 2020

 Fall 2020

This year the fall colors on the hazelnuts were better than I've ever seen. With this unusually mild fall the orchard showed its best colors.

In this picture you can see that some hazelnut plants have turned a nice red color. Who needs maples when you can have a bright red hazelnut that also produce tasty nuts.

In the next pictures you can see every plant has a little different coloring

 

These hazelnuts are the some of the wild plants from southern North Dakota by Lisbon. This is one plant with many small stems and lots of suckers.  

This plant with some nice color is a hybrid with few suckers and  nice structure.

This is a 4 year old new hybrid with one trunk.  It will be interesting to find out what type of nuts it will have next year. I'm hoping for large, thin shelled nuts.

This is another new hazelnut plant that had one major trunk, but was badly damage from rabbits last winter. All the branches above 2 feet where damaged and had to be pruned. This plant recovered with over 3 feet of new growth, but it produced 2 suckers which might have to be pruned off. It also lost all the mature stems that would have produced nuts for next year, so with a little pruning it will be producing nuts again in 2 years.

This is a 15 year old plant that has a nice structure with 5 stems and produces large nuts. The small stem to the right is a new stem that I'm cloning by layering. Next spring I'll remove it from the mother plant if it has a sufficient root system and pot it up. I'll leave it for another year if it has a limited root system. I have found that some types of hazelnuts take 2 years to produce sufficient roots before it can be remove from the mother plant.

This year we had a very poor crop of hazelnuts, but in late summer the plants have produced an over abundance of catkins, which is the male flower that will open in the spring and release pollen for next year's crop. I'm hoping this is an indication of a big crop for next year.

Problems in 2020

The beavers have been busy this year. This is not a hazelnut plant but a Boxelder tree and close to a row of hazelnuts.

Here is that row of hazelnuts with what is left of an oak tree in the bottom of the picture.

A few years ago a beaver did major damage to a row of hazelnuts and now any hazelnuts close to the river are fenced.  So if you are planting along a river you must protect your nuts.

This year I thought there wasn't any deer damage but I was wrong.

These next pictures are more damage from a buck who thought he'd let me know he's back.

Fall colors in my back yard where also spectacular this year.

It sure as been an unusual fall. 

 

Hazelnut Outlook for 2020

An Unusual Spring

This year the flowering occurred on April 25, is 2 weeks later than normal, and only lasted 2 days before it cooled down and rained. Hazelnuts are wind pollinated and need a week of warm, dry weather for the male catkins to expand to release pollen, and for the small female sigmas to appear on the buds to receive the pollen.

The plants that were hand pollinated did fine, but because of the many different hazelnut varieties in the orchard they need about a week to pollinate all the different flowering times of these various plants.

Some plants had no nuts, but most had few, and one or two had a good seed set. The plants with the most nuts were more of the wild American Hazelnut varieties. This is probably due to fact that they are the first to bloom, and the later blooming hybrid hazelnuts need a longer pollination period.

This shows last year's crop from one plant, which would fill a grocery bag.

This year I've been getting far fewer nuts, just a handful from my best plants. 

This is one of my better hazelnut plants that produced a lot more nuts than I expected, but still far less than previous years.

The nuts on this drying rack are another plant that had a lot more nuts also, but ripened late and I had to spray a lot of pepper spray to keep the squirrels off of them to let them ripen up.

This is almost the entire crop of hazelnuts for 2020 drying down in the greenhouse. 

Here we have a few of the different size nuts from this year's crop.

As you can see, some of these plants that produce the smaller nuts will have to be removed and replaced with more of the new hand pollinated seedlings.

Repotting  Seedlings

In the spring when the seedlings are moved outside they are transferred from the tubes to larger pots. I was little short on potting soil so I used mostly compost mixed with a little purchased potting mix. The mixture was probably a little too hot due to the new compost, and it turned the leaves dark green with burnt edges. In a week some of the leaves turned brown and fell off.

I thought at first it might be some type of herbicide damage, but now I'm sure it was the new compost I was using for potting soil. Lesson learned!

My only hazelnut graft that worked from 2 years ago is still holding and produced 2 nuts this year.

In search of hazelnuts

I found this hazelnut with a leafy type of husk in Spicer MN on a bike path on July 11, 2020.

This American hazelnut was a little different with the open husk and visible nut in side.

As you can see the nut was small with a thick shell.

 I found these hazelnut plants while hiking in Glendalough State Park on August 4th.

 

Hazelnuts found there had a totally enclosed husk that was round, juicy and slightly sticky.

This is a more typical type of American hazelnut husk.

The nut easily roll out of the husk so it was ripe and ready to be picked. 

The nut was not round but more of a oval flat shape, which is very undesirable for cracking.

 

The nut had a thick shell and the kernel was a flat bean shape, and tasted quite bitter.

Pecan trees

I would like to thank Derek Jundt for the 6 pecan seeds he sent me last year.   I stratified them in the fridge and germinated them the first week in March. I was surprised that all 6 seeds germinated, but one didn't make it after transplanting them outside.  It will be interesting  to see how well they do in our heavier soil, and our winters.

I also received some butternut seeds from Bill Miller in Aneta ND. Only 2 germinated and after transplanting them a rabbit clipped one off before I could put a cage around them, but the one Butternut is looking good.

Thanks Bill!

This is a picture of the last of my 1 year old plants that are for sale.

Cloning using a  Hog Ring Pliers

https://youtu.be/2ZcjcGbtp9s

I'm hoping this video that I made of layering using a hog ring pliers works.

This is my first attempt at making a video and it might not be great but I think shows how I clone hazelnuts.

Summer 2020

Another growing season

I started the hazelnut seedlings in the first week in March, which happened to be a little early and caused them to be too tall and lanky. This was due to the cool spring and not being able to move them outside or in the greenhouse without heating it continuously.

I usually stratify about 400 hazelnut seeds and out of those about 160 plants will germinate, but this year over 300 of those seeds germinated. I found that this is the max for the space I have to start seeds.

I started running out of room and stacking them anywhere there was room under the lights.

Finally it was warm enough to move the plants into the greenhouse with minimum heating at night, and I started using the solar panels to run a temperature sensor and fan. 

After moving the all the plants to the greenhouse it was completely filled.

 I actually had no idea how many plants I had until I moved them.

Even with all the hazelnut seedlings in the greenhouse, I began starting my garden vegetables and flowers.

I was surprised how much better the tomatoes and squash did in the greenhouse compared to trying to start them in the house. They are a little hard to see in this picture, but they are on the top shelf, far end. 

This spring the hazelnuts flowered about 2 weeks later then usual, on the 25 of April. 

They have been flowering the first week in April the past few years. I have found that hazelnuts flower after 2 consecutive 60º days. 

The picture above shows both the male catkins on the right and the female stigmas showing on the bud on the left. 

This is another picture of a female hazelnut flower in the center of the picture.

I was trying to hand pollinate several plants, and found that female flowers only last 2 days before the buds began to swell and cover the stigmas. I did manage to get 3 plants hand pollinated.

This is a developing hazelnut cluster in the center of the picture on June 2. The cluster will usually contain 3 to 4 nuts.

On June 16 this new hazelnut cluster of 5 nuts has doubled in size.

These are the 1 year old plants that are for sale that have just leafed out.

Rabbit Damage

This last winter I had severe rabbit damage with the high level of snow in the orchard.

This is the look of the orchard now after regrowth. The hazelnut plants should be about 8 feet high, but most of the plants are only a little over 4 feet high.  As you can see the rabbit missed a few plants. Next spring I will have to do a lot of pruning to obtain more of an upright structure then a low lying bush.