Hazelnut Trees?

Jack Sawyer

Hey All,

I am very interested in growing some hazelnut trees in my garden.

- Do garden centres have them this time of year?

Can I germinate from nuts?

What species are best - I hear theres native and turkish?

Thanks!

Oldtree

these have some in pots:

http://www.futureforests.net/cg_fruit.htm

Caracol

you could try a mixture of cob nut varieties and hazel nut as they will pollinate each other.

Future forest (mentioned in the previous post) have some in containers and also more as bare root if you wanted to hold off planting until next winter.

magicbastarder

bear in mind that native hazels are more shrub than tree - they will not develop a 'lollipop' shape like you might expect.
if this is a problem, turkish hazels will form the classic tree shape. if you want to do it on the cheap, you'd probably be able to find some near you and collect nuts next autumn. they're child's play to germinate.
i used to collect bags of nuts in phibsboro, broadstone park is lined with turkish hazels.

wildlifeboy

magicbastarder wrote: »

bear in mind that native hazels are more shrub than tree - they will not develop a 'lollipop' shape like you might expect.
if this is a problem, turkish hazels will form the classic tree shape. if you want to do it on the cheap, you'd probably be able to find some near you and collect nuts next autumn. they're child's play to germinate.
i used to collect bags of nuts in phibsboro, broadstone park is lined with turkish hazels.

I was wondering about this. I have a 5 year old hazel and its barely over a foot high. in the same period a rowan has grown over 7 foot tall. two questions..will the growth rate pick up and should i let the stems come from the base because i have been mostly trying to get a classic tree shape by pruning the shoots coming up. also what should i get to cross poillinate it and how old are they before the produce nuts?

magicbastarder

forget pruning the shoots, it's not growing to grow into the tree you want. leave it be and see how it fares.

Jack Sawyer

Thanks for the reply folks.....

Cant say am too excited at the prospect of buying, planting and coaching Irish ones that are going to be 1' tall with no nuts after 5 years!!!!

Although strangely enough I've since discovered some Hazels growing on scrub land near me that are 12-14' high & think I'll just go harvest them each autumn instead.....

prospect

I bought a Hazelnut shrub (not quite a whip, but not far off it) on a whim about 3 years ago.
I planted it in a bed of trees and shrubs and kind of forgot about it.

Last autumn one of the kids came into the house all excited with a handful of hazelnuts. We went out to check it out and there was a healthy crop of them on the ground, we had missed them growing. The shrub is about 5 foot at its highest point.

We only have the one, and I'll be giving it closer attention this season.

magicbastarder

Jack Sawyer wrote: »

Cant say am too excited at the prospect of buying, planting and coaching Irish ones that are going to be 1' tall with no nuts after 5 years!!!!

i strongly suspect that is due to his constantly pruning the plant to get a strong leader; if the plant is in the ground and healthy it should easily exceed 1' growth each year.

baaba maal

I planted a native hedge three years ago and I included some native hazel. It is only starting to take off this year (up to a metre tall at this point). I decided to add cobnuts last autumn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazelnut. These should be far better in terms of producing nuts- they need to be pollinated by another variety and the native Irish hazelnut apparently does that. They are available in some garden centres. After one year they are already bigger than the native hazels. Hopefully I will be harvesting nuts in a couple of years.
I'm not sure if hazels can ever really be turned into trees as my understanding is they will continue to put up multiple stems no matter how often they are cut (although I'm open to correction on this).