North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["loneroc" <loneroc@mwt.net>]

Hi Donna---I do have several "plantings" of Rutter's stuff to the tune of
about 50 plants---I also have a 75 foot row of Oikos' 'Precocious' cultivar.
The Oikos plants uniformly have reached about 12' tall and throw up straight
suckers or rather basal shoots--since only a few of the plants actual expand
much via suckering.  The Oikos nuts vary in size but average much smaller
than Rutter's nuts.  My row of 'Precocious' (which was not particularly
early bearing) is in the process of dying from Eastern Hazel Blight-at least
half a dozen plants have bough the farm to date and more have been hit.
Since the plants in question were placed near the highway right-of-way to
block prying eyes, one might think I'd be disappointed, but I subsequently
planted a much more attractive line of evergreens and 'Japanese-y' fence
panels which block the outside world just fine.  The hazels that gave up the
ghost were directly in front of the largest panel and though they have
created a window, passersby still can't see through:-)  The Oikos hazels can
all die without much regret on my part; they do make really nice garden
stakes, so whatever survives (only some show disease signs) will be still be
used, if not for the nuts.

The Rutter hazels all are in the 6-8 foot range and are much bushier.  The
nuts vary in shape and size somewhat but the largest are as large or larger
than the hazels you find in a can of mixed nuts.  (I don't think I've ever
been able to purchase just plain hazels, though I did have a dish of
hazelnut ice cream in Bangkok recently that was the best ice cream I've ever
eaten--coming from a Wisconsin boy who only generally prefers vanilla that's
no small praise.  Who ever heard of hazelnut ice cream?)

Rutter's hazels bear heavily, the branches bending under the weight of the
nuts, and they seem to be regular bearers.  I'm a bit ashamed to say that
thus far, the mice, voles and blue jays have eaten my crop.  I haven't
gotten around to picking many.  One harvests them most easily by picking
whole clusters of nuts, husks and all, prior to the husk-split and then
letting them sit for a few weeks for the husks to dry--then the nuts just
fall away from the husks.  Some of the plants drop their nuts easily when
the husk opens and others seem to hold on to their nuts better.  The reason
for the two-stage harvest:  you don't have to race the critters to the nuts.
Rutter's plants show no sign of the blight.

In addition to time constraints--damn job-- I've been a bit reticent to eat
the nuts because I had an allergic reaction to one of the Oikos fruits.  I
had harvested a peck or so and cracked a few out, eating them raw--nuts from
one of the plants caused my throat to swell in a most disconcerting way.  I
suppose that I could have kept the nuts from individual plants separate and
then tested to see which one brought me to the brink of anaphylaxis, but it
seemed like a lot of work.  I've never shown signs of being allergic to any
other nut.  Perhaps someone on the list knows whether roasting would destroy
any allergens--although this doesn't happen in the case of peanuts.  I'll
try again--gingerly--with the Rutter nuts at some point.  This fall I should
get a decent harvest and I need to assess quality down the rows, perhaps
removing any truly inferior plants.  In my precursory observations there are
not too many bad ones.  My Badgered hazels are planted at the back side of
my property behind a row of raspberries and it's a bit awkward to examine
them without making a deliberate effort at closer inspection.

The last fact I'll bore you with is that Rutter's Amish workers don't
actually pollinate his trees, rather they remove (male) catkins from ALL but
the most superior plants in his orchard, thereby guaranteeing that his best
nut producers are pollinated by superior parents.  This has been his
breeding technique for many generations of crosses.  Since hazels are wind
pollinated, the Amish boys (there are girls and adults involved, too) don't
have to make any difficult horticultural decisions.  The just pull the
catkins off all plants that don't have bright red tape hanging from the
bush.  I've visited the Badgered operations twice, and came away very
impressed with Phil's accomplishment.  We conversed for a couple of hours
each visit.  Your suspicion that he doesn't suffer fools gladly is, I
suspect, correct.  At least I'd like to think so, since he didn't run the
other way when he saw me coming the second time.


Steve Herje, Lone Rock, WI ASDA zone 3 (where the Rutter hazels have not yet
been examined this season for their potential crop.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Donna &/or Kieran" <holycow@cookeville.com>
To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2007 6:40 PM
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Badgersett hazelnuts


> 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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