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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] Badgersett hazelnuts

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  • From: "Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>
  • To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Badgersett hazelnuts
  • Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 18:40:28 -0500

Steve, You have Badgersett hazels??? Can you tell me how big the nuts are? I hemmed and hawed for about 4 years before ordering mine, just got them a month ago and had to put them in pots as the ground is too dry in the drought. The longer I waited, the more curious and puzzled I got. His site is not hard to find, and he talks on it like they sell a lot of their seedlings, but I couldn't find even one reference to his place or his stuff on the Net. He has a pretty impressive amount of literature on hazels and chestnuts on the net, including the translation of a valuable document from China on chestnuts. He is apparently a past president of the American Chestnut Foundation, apparently back in the days when he was around other people. He has probably stepped on some toes, and it's obvious from his website that he doesn't suffer fools gladly. But I was getting sort of nervous about the fact that nothing at all was being said on the Net about his projects. And I'd talked to Cecil Farris's widow who said I should definitely get named varieties. But Grinnell, Farris's friend, said he was dropping the hazels because they didn't graft well. I don't want grafted plants anyway, the whole idea sounds stupid to me because a) they sucker really badly so you lose your graft in a thicket of rootstock, and b) they sucker so much that they are extremely easy to propagate on their own roots. Nobody else seemed to be carrying Farris's stuff.
I finally called Badgersett's county extension service and wound up talking to 2 agents, one of them in forestry. Both seemed to think Badgersett's stuff was pretty neat. One told me that he hired Amish teenagers to hand pollinate some of his best plants. One warned me that because they were seedlings that they wouldn't be uniform. He said one bush might get 10' tall and the one beside it only grow to 3'. I said I didn't care about that. Neither person had anything bad to say about the place or the plants. So I put in my order.
I have recently talked to someone at Rutgers I think, a NNGA member working with hazels, and he said that there had been some mixups of Farris's stuff that led to some people thinking it wasn't disease resistant. He said the real Grand Traverse was indeed blight resistant and a good variety.
The reason I'm doing all this looking for hazels is that the wild ones are all over our place, and seedlings keep popping up. I don't see all that many nuts, partly because the bigger bushes had been getting shaded out but that has been reversed now. I'm figuring that hazels like our soil, and that with some added phosphate they might put on some pretty decent crops. Only trouble is that they make small nuts with thick shells that don't taste as good as European hazels. Farris talked a lot about flavor and oil content. If I get some good plants going I'l probably do some grafting to ours just to up the production, not because it's an efficient way to propagate them.
Anyway, anything you can tell me about the stuff you got from Phil would be helpful. Also, I'm looking for anyone who has any of Cecil's plants. Donna




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