Harvest Gives Hazel - Hazelnut

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Hazel - beautiful and fruitful

The first small seedling of hazel, which is popularly called hazel, we acquired on the market in the early 90s. Its variety was unknown. At that time, hazel was a rare plant in our gardens due to the lack of planting material in stores.

Two years later, in the forest at the edge, I found a rather tall shoot about 60 cm high near the mature hazel bushes. It was a separately growing branch without side shoots.

I gently pulled this shoot out of the ground, wrapped the small roots in wet moss, put it in a plastic bag and brought it home. I put him in one row, three meters from the purchased hazel.

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So that these shrubs do not interfere with fruit crops in the future, they were planted near the fence on the eastern side of the site. We did this so that when they grow up, they can shield our site from the wind, because it is located on the outskirts of the village, next to an abandoned field.

Hazel seedlings grew rapidly, apparently responding to the care and attention given to them. I planted the plants in a specially dug hole, into which I poured several buckets of compost, rotted manure and a handful of superphosphate. All components were thoroughly mixed together with the earth taken out of the pit. Then every year, in the spring, I brought under the bushes one handful of azophoska or nitroammophoska and a bucket of rotted manure and compost. When the bushes grew, in the spring I applied only complex fertilizer, scattering it around the tree trunks. In a dry summer, she watered the hazel abundantly once a week.

Lilac bushes and the most common, ubiquitous bush roses were planted in a row next to the hazel. Later, I read somewhere that hazel roots emit toxic substances, which means that under these bushes and next to them, no other plants can survive. And so it happened a few years later. The bush rose "ran away" from the unwanted neighborhood, letting out new shoots far from the hazel roots, and the mother plants themselves died. And this despite the fact that they grew in a sunny place. The lilac lived a little longer, but was depressed all the time. And then she died too.

So the hazel conquered a large living space for itself. Perhaps this also happened because the hazel has a powerful root system. Even the grass doesn't grow under it.

In five meters, under the neighboring bushes of lilacs, a whimper grows, but it does not "get close" to the hazel. Rotted manure and compost, which we introduced into the hazel tree trunk circle, did not produce friendly shoots of weeds (and there are a lot of weed seeds in them) either. This property of hazel is very convenient when it comes time to collect nuts. You do not need to look for them in the grass, they are all in plain sight.

The first harvest - a handful of nuts, we collected and tasted five years after planting. And since that time, our hazel has been bearing fruit abundantly every year. Hazel harvests are always impressive. We collect more than ten liters of nuts from two bushes. At the same time, mice, and sometimes squirrels, take away part of the crop.

I have heard complaints from gardeners, who also grow hazel on their plot, that their fruit yields are very poor. Perhaps we are harvesting such a rich harvest due to the fact that two different varieties of hazel grow on the same site: cultivated and its wild relative, which are pollinated in spring, and the plants receive the necessary elements for nutrition. Our bushes have grown tall, but we do not pick the nuts from the branches, but wait for them to ripen and fall by themselves. We do not notice any difference in the taste of the nucleoli and their size between cultivated hazel and those brought from the forest. They are delicious, in my opinion, tastier than the hazelnuts sold in stores, they have a kind of pleasant aroma. The crop usually ripens by the end of September.

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We dry the nuts in the house, sprinkling them on newspapers. This process takes at least one month if you are in a warm room. If they do not dry well, then the nucleoli will be close to the shell, and then it is inconvenient to prick them, as they crumble into small pieces.

Our hazel does not produce shoots, but hazel sprouts appear every year in different parts of the site. It is the mice who carry the nuts that we did not have time to collect throughout the site, and bury them in the ground. And in spring they germinate, sometimes forming continuous thickets of young shoots. We pull them out of the ground like weeds, and then plant them in the designated place for growing. We give the grown saplings to the neighbors. I think that now it is possible to carry surplus planting material back to the forest in autumn and plant them there. Young shoots can be transplanted completely painlessly from early spring to late autumn. Even in the summer, weed out from the beds (emerged from the nuts) and planted in another place, hazel plants take root well.

Once every five years we thin out the hazel bushes so that it is convenient to approach them, and there is no shading inside the crown, since hazel grows not as a single tree, but drives the bush out of several trunks. At the end of September, we cut down excess and thin weak branches. I cover the sections with garden pitch.

I believe that it is necessary and useful to grow hazel in garden and summer cottages, because the kernels of its nuts are very tasty and healthy. And not just the cores. I read that the leaves, bark and fruits of hazel are used for medicinal purposes. Young, May leaves are harvested, they are dried in the air. The bark is harvested in spring and autumn, dried in well-ventilated rooms. Ripe fruits are dried in an oven or dryer at a temperature of 60-70 ° C. Shelf life of leaves 1 year, bark - 2 years, fruits - 1 year.

The plant has an astringent, anti-dysentery, antipyretic, vasodilating effect. Kernels improve bowel function, help dissolve kidney stones, and exhibit tonic and stimulating properties. Hazelnuts sold in stores are expensive, and their taste is inferior to our hazelnut.

And the most important thing for gardeners - this shrub does not require special attention, only in the first years after planting it needs to be well fertilized in the spring and watered several times over the summer in hot weather. After three or four years, you will have to remember about it in the spring, in order to throw a handful of fertilizer under the bush, and in the fall, to collect the grown crop. The only rule when planting: you need to plant hazel along the edge of the site and do not allow its proximity to cultivated trees and shrubs, which it oppresses.

Olga Rubtsova

gardener, candidate of geographical sciences, Vsevolozhsky district