Hazels from seed

[Al]

I coppiced my Kentish Cobnut today, reducing the thicket of stems to about 10, it is a seedling dug up from my mother's platt (cobnut orchard) in Kent, & is about 15 years old. Very vigorous & healthy but has never produced a nut, great for beanpoles & peasticks but no nuts. I now realise it was lonely so I did get a little friend growing nearby & it made 4 nuts last year so I guess some of its female flowers are receiving a dusting of pollen. The old tree does not seem to make any little red female flowers at all, just catkins. I will try & get a wild hazel &/or a filbert established to try & ensure there is plenty of pollen around for as long as possible but guess I might just have a male only tree here. A wide variation of flowering & pollen producing times seems to be this tribes strategy for mixing up the genes, & maybe the odd male only tree?. My mother' platt is a mixture of Kentish Cobnuts & Filberts as was traditional in Kent, still growing strong after a couple of hundred years. 

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Today when I was weeding, I noticed a row of hazelnut seedlings sprouting. They were planted 14 months ago as whole nuts. Five plants germinated last spring and have survived until now. About 15 have germinated so far this spring.

[Al]

Amazing the nuts should stay viable in the ground for so long, I suppose by sticking the nuts in the earth in Autumn we are doing exactly what nut trees hope squirrels will do with their nuts. Of course the hazels want the squirrel to forget some of his nut stashes. Local squirrels spend ages squirrelling away plum stones in my garden, plum trees abound. But most of them are suckers, sometimes an incredible distance from the parent. These plums were in the garden when we moved here so could be very old, they sucker like mad & produce lots of tasty yellow fleshed fruit with red skins really early; July. Victoria do not ripen until August here.

[blueadzuki]

What size? If they are smallish (ping pong ball sized of so) there is such a thing as a Red Gage (as in a red version of the greengage)

[12540dumont]

Yes, the dratted squirrels have killed all my begonias, by planting walnuts in their hanging cages. Then the brain addled varmints can't remember what pot they put them in, so they dig them all up. On any given year, I'll have 10 or so walnut trees started in my ornamental pots. Today I'm trying to unwind a walnut root from a hydrangea. The walnut has gone straight through the bottom of the pot to plug the drain hole. Zack used to be a dead shot with a bb gun. Now we have a pellet gun and the darn thing is always either out of charge or pellets. I had that squirrel dead to rights and in my sites. I fired and nothing. Damn squirrel is still sitting in a tree laughing at me and waving his fluffy red tail. I feel like "Wiley E. Coyote" so, 100 garden catalogs arrived. Where the heck is the Acme Catalog?

[Al]

I can't help being impressed by the energetic determined efforts of squirrels, but when it comes to nut orchards (or platts as they are called in Kent) squirrels have to be deterred. They strip cob nuts just before nuts reach maturity.

Those walnut roots sound impressive, it seems certain trees thrust down a serious taproot while very young. Oak, walnut, pecan, pawpaw, etc. presumably in search of deep moisture. A challenge when growing in containers. I am trying a couple of Pawpaws in Air-Pot containers to try to air prune this tap root & keep the tree growing happily.

[coppice]

Al, pawpaw never tolerated their roots being handled when I tried bonsai training them. YMMV