Hazelnut Breeding Project

I started breeding hazelnuts in 2018. I have a friend who has a hazelnut orchard of about 50 hazelnut trees of 5 or 6 different varieties. He let me collect hazelnuts for sowing. I stratified the seeds and grew them in my polytunnel before planting them out in a temporary nursery. I stratified 550 hazelnuts.

By the time i planted them out in their final position the next winter 2019/2020 i had 234 plants in total. This was partly due to the fact some never germinated and that when i came back from having left for a week 50 or so plants in my tunnel had been attacked, chewed and dug up from the crates by rodents, something i didn't anticipate.

I planted a wooden stick next to each plant to mark their position.

I planted them fairly close at about 2 meters distance in a random fashion. The hazelnuts, by the time i planted them, were between 3 inches and 3 feet tall. In retrospective it was a mistake to plant out the small ones, because they had a hard time growing. I underestimated the work of cutting the grass in between the hazelnuts. Throughout the year i cleaned the patch using a scythe.

I decided not to protect them individually, or to build a fence all around them, because it would have been quite expensive and meant a lot of work. So i had many plants grazed back by deer, but i sought strength in numbers for protection and also for breeding. If you want to create new varieties you kind of have to sow loads, to increase your chances, and with hazelnuts the deer hardly ever kill them, since they grow back from the roots.

I had a place where there had been a plastic tarp lying on the ground for two years. When i pulled it away there was beautiful weed-free soil. So i decided to plant 12 hazelnuts there, really close together,  in an attempt to emulate the mini big forest method of miyawaki. I planted those 12 hazels one foot apart and mulched them with hay. Eventhough i had planted small plants there they ended up being the biggest ones at the end of the year. The result was astounding.

One got chewed off at the base by a rodent so far. I hope it will send up a new shoot.

I stratified more seeds last winter and have enough now to get my plants up to 400. I told a friend about it and he said: "Wow, you will have a lot of rats!" And sure enough talking to my friend, who has the hazelnut orchard, he confirmed that it attracts rats. My initial idea was to plant 1000 seed-grown hazelnuts. But now that i have realized how much work it is to look after them, while they are small, and also being worried about attracting too many rats, i decided to leave it at around 400 plants.

Time will tell how many will make it and whether i will find some good new varieties among them.