This year’s spring clean up mostly involves cutting down the unwanted hazelnut plants. Here I am cutting down about 102 inferior hazelnuts before they can pollinate the rest of the orchard. The picture here is from the rabbits pruning the higher quality plants. This is something I don’t really appreciate! Hazelnuts are monoecious wind pollinated […]
Growing hazelnuts from seed is fairly easy. The process involves stratifying (cold period) and germinating the seed. There is an easier way to grow hazelnuts from seed. Plant the nuts in garden rows in the fall. They will germinate the first week of June. They can be moved to a permanent location in the fall […]
The drone pictures of the hazelnut orchard are taken by Bryce Johnson The hazelnuts are located in 3 rows along the river by the spruce trees. We’ve had to fence off these due to beaver damage. If you look closely at one of the spruce trees it has almost no needles due to a needle […]
Kelsey Dunnell, who has been an important part of the hazelnut research team, has moved to Oregon to finish her PhD at Oregon State University. Good luck Kelsey, & you will be missed!! The picture on the left is Kelsey at NDSU research arboretum near Absaraka, with her hazelnuts research for NDSU. The picture […]
The hazelnut harvest started on August 11 this year. It is a week earlier than usual. As you can see in these pictures, each hazelnut bunch looks different because of the wide variation of plants we have. Notice how open the husk is on this plant. This plant tends to have mostly singles with just […]
While stopping near Minneapolis at my brother’s house, we saw the damage that Japanese beetles can do to the hazelnuts. These hazelnuts are seedlings from Riverbend Hazelnuts planted a couple years ago. Make sure to keep your eye out for these beetles. We don’t want them in North Dakota! Japanese beetles can damage many plants […]
The heavy hazelnut crop this year was decimated by the 50 mph winds that blew through this week Of course it was the larger hazelnuts that fell off in the high winds. They aren’t quite ripe yet. Still another couple weeks to go. The wind broke off some whole branches with hazelnuts on.
Planting your hazelnuts too close to the river could result in some beaver damage as shown below. I (Dan) tried hand pollinating some of the flowers this year. First all of the catkins were removed from the branch, then a bag was placed over the flowers to keep it from getting pollinated by outside pollen. […]
Dan made a sorter to sort the hazelnuts by size so it’s easier to run through the cracker. The sorted hazelnuts. Dan using the drill operated cracker. The cracked hazelnuts. Dan constructed an aspirator that will separate the shells from the hazelnut meats. The nuts and shells get sucked up through the hose, and since […]
The fall colors vary from green to gold to red.