Epicotyl Grafting

Hypocotyl versus Epicotyl

I originally thought that I was grafting onto the hypocotyl of the seedling's stem, but was informed that if that part of the stem is above the cotyledons it is called the epicotyl.

 Epicotyl graft is grafting a scion onto a newly germinated seedling's stem.

I should have taken more pictures when I was removing the newly germinated root stock and doing the grafting, but I had total graft failure last year and was not expecting anything better this year. This year's trials were much better with 15 successful grafts out of 30. Grafting stems that are smaller than 1/8" is a real challenge for me.

The epicotyl grafting procedure I used was;

1. To find some very small/thin scion's from my best plants and store them in ziplock bag in the fridge.

                                                   2. Find a rootstock with limited suckers.

3. Germinate the rootstock in a closed container with a 50% mix of vermiculite and peat to produce a long epicotyl stem.

4. Remove the newly sprouted seedlings and cut the stem off at the thickest part about 3/4" from the base.

5. Find a scion about the same thickness as the rootstock stem and trim the scion into a wedge shape.

6. Insert the scion into a vertical cut in the epicotyl stem, then wrap the graft with parafilm. 

7. Next dip the scion and graft into warm liquid paraffin wax. Coating the scion and graft.

8. Then immediately dip in cold water.

9. Plant the grafted seedling in a good potting mix.

10. Place in a closed container with a clear top and maintain the temperature at about 70 to 80º F.

I did mist it a couple times to maintain the humidity.

  

This is the grafted plants 5 days later. As you can see some are suckering up from the rootstock.

Here you can see more suckers and stems starting to grow below the grafts.

I tried removing the suckers, but this was unsuccessful and the swelling buds on the grafted stems dried up.

This is a close up of a failing graft with a stem growing below the graft. 

I moved the grafted plants to the greenhouse to start hardening them off and I noticed catkins forming on the grafted scions. I was so surprised to see catkins on a 2 month old seedling. The catkins were removed to let the plant grow a little bigger during the summer.

This probably happened because the scion was taken from the top of a mature plant.  Next time the scion will be taken from a lower immature stem. The biggest problem is to find a hazelnut rootstock from a newly germinated seedling which will not sucker up. 

This is what the graft looks like after 4 months of growth.

This is a picture of the whole plant after 4 months.

At the end of the summer I had 14 nice looking clones.

Still hazelnuts tend to sucker up and this would interfere with the cloned plant.

So this next growing season I am going to replant with the graft below the soil level and see if roots will develop above the graft. During this period of time any suckers that form on the rootstock will be remove.

I've also thought of using clonal material from these new cloned plants this spring. This would make things a little easier than trying to locate small/thin stems in the orchard.

Disappointing Harvest 2023

This was a disappointing year with frost damage in the spring and only a few hazelnuts to harvest in the fall. To top that off there was rabbit damage during the winter and me trying to pick the few nuts before the squirrels do.

This picture sent to me by a friend asking me what's wrong with these hazelnut plants. I had no idea and went to check the hazelnut plants in my orchard and found the exact same thing on several of my plants.

Every thing above the snow line had small or no leaves at all and below the snow line everything was normal. I contacted several people and they told me it looked like late frost damage. 

It might also be that these plants are not quite hardy for our climate in this area.

I remove all the stems on these plants with no leaves in the fall, and listed these plants on my database as having this problem.

This year, 2023, started with a late spring with 3 ft of snow in the orchard. In the beginning of April we had a few warm days in the 50's and the catkins began expanding and releasing their pollen, then the temp dropped to 15º F on the 15th of April and stayed cool until May.  Flowering and pollination usually occurs between 15th and the 29th of April.  Then on May 7 the female flower began to appear at the same time as  the buds began to swell, almost covering the flower. In the picture above you can just barely see the small red flower at the end of the bud.

I was trying to find information on flowering and bud-break. One article from Thomas Molnar of Rutgers state that the timing of flowering and leaf bud-break is determined by chilling and growing degree day requirements of about 9633.  This spring I'll have to record the average GDH's for each day minus 39.9 and see if this holds true. This may help determine the flowering dates of my best plants for cross pollination. 

The next problem this spring was spray damage from a lawn company that sprayed my neighbor's yard.

The white material on the leaves is not a pest but cotton from cottonwood trees in are yard.

The spray damage in this picture caused the new forming nuts to turn brown and fall off.

Some plants that were farther away had curled leaves but did produce hazelnuts.

I had just moved a few new seedlings out of the green house the day before they sprayed my neighbor's yard. The following day you can already see the leaves start to curl from the herbicide spray.

This is the same plants 4 weeks later. 

I'm wondering if it will leaf out this spring.

I asked the lawn care company to be more careful and they told me it was a little herbicide drift and the plants will leaf out again. Then they snuck in early one morning a few weeks later and sprayed again. 

I should have had them buy all the seedlings they damaged.  I surely would not want to sell any of these plants.

These are seedlings that were moved out of the green house later after they had sprayed.

I just wanted to show what they're suppose to look like. 

This was not the year for growing hazelnuts. The next problem was squirrels. On July 21 the tree-rats began remove hazelnuts which where not even close to being mature. They are not mature and ready to pick until the 2nd or 3rd week in August.

With a lot less nuts to pick I had time to evaluate each plant and cull the undesirable plants after picking the few nuts.

I removed the plant if it had EFB (Eastern filbert blight), small nuts, too thick of a shell, taste bad or if the plant tends to spread by suckering . I removed 86 plants that had 3 or more of these bad traits.

whoo! I almost cut this robin's nest down. It's a good thing the bird let me know it was up there.

Here are some of the stems that were removed. The center stem has the telltale cankers from Eastern Filbert Blight which would eventually kill the entire plant.

I try to burn all EFB stems.

These are a few of the stems I cut down.

In this picture I saved the larger stems for my wood working projects.

This is my latest wood working project, a plant stand with a ceramic tile for a top.

The tile was left over from a flooring project, and I don't think I will not run out of hazelnut wood any time soon.

This is my pest management system for mice and squirrels.

At the bottom of the picture are a pile of cut down hazelnut stems that are waiting to be removed.

Here we have our pest control patrolling the hazelnut orchard.

 

These are the different types of hazelnuts that I saved from the squirrels.

I think because of the dry summer and fall a lot of the nuts did not completely fill out. What I mean by not filling out is the kernel did not completely fill the shell. 

The only plants that are watered are the newly planted seedlings and the 1 year old plants. 

Watering the plants with the larger better nuts is definitely a good idea in dry conditions. 

These two pictures are what the hazelnut orchard looks like after removing over 60 plants from this area.

The white paint indicates save and the red is remove.

If I where planting for maximum nut production the spacing would be 15 ft between rows and 5 to 8 ft in rows.

This is that same part of the orchard from outside the fence.

It looks as if no plants where removed.

The long and mild fall turned the orchard into some very nice fall colors.

Here is a look at the fall colors in another part of the hazelnut orchard.

This is the fall colors of a wild American hazelnut (Corylus Americana) that is from Northern Minnesota.  It is the first to turn color and drop its leaves

This is a hybrid hazelnut with more of a orange leaf.

I just had to show this picture of the shagbark hickory's fall colors.

This tree grows 2 feet or more every year and is already over 30 feet.

Sorry to say no nuts yet.

I think it may be around 10 years old.

This year the sea buckthorn was loaded with these bright orange berries.

They looked great this fall and taste like grapefruit juice.

They are a little hard to pick with all the thorns.

 

 

I was at the NDSU tree arboretum near Absaraka which is now called the Dale Herman Research Arboretum, and found some of my hazelnuts still growing that Kelsey planted there when she was at NDSU.   I was really surprised to find nuts on some of them. I had thought they had been removed a couple years ago. Another interesting thing is they have no squirrels there. I'll have to find out how they removed them.

 

 Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.