They can be pruned - hazel will regrow from coppicing very well - but whether they need to be is another matter. The crop size is proportional to the leaf area, and therefore also to the crown size: the larger it is, the more nuts you get. Also if you do prune, you can expect a gap of several years before it starts producing nuts again.

Resin

One person's "Badly overgrown" is another's "just fine". Arbor Day Foundation is marketing them as hedges.

first.. either you want it.. or you want the space... make a decision ... i suspect it depends on garden space.. can it be put to better use ...

second.. get in there.. in early spring.. and dig up a sucker or two.. with some root.. and stick them in some one gal pots with good media. .. throw it in bright shade.. and water it like a tree ... a drink and near drying .... and see if you can generate a root mass by fall ...

if so.. in fall.. get rid of the monster.. hard labor.. and replant the babe ..

or by fall just decide.. the heck with it.. and move on ... no guilt ...

if you want the nuts.. figure out how to protect them.. so you actually get more ...

frankly.. simply cutting it down .. is only going to make a huger clump ... again.. i dont know your yard size .. and whether space is at a premium...

i suspect.. you should just get rid of it ... you can do much better.. in the typical smaller suburban garden ...

ken

You could remove all the largest stems and save the smaller ones, and by that reduce the size of the bush

"Then there is Turkish hazelnut that is actually supposed to be a tree... but most are bush form"

If they're bush form, then they're not Turkish Hazel. That is reliably a large tree, up to 30m tall with a trunk up to a metre diameter (example pic). I'd suspect shrubby plants are grafted specimens where the graft has failed to take and the rootstock has taken over.

Resin

I'd suspect shrubby plants are grafted specimens where the graft has failed to take and the rootstock has taken over.

That's a possibility as well. We cannot tell with the information provided.

If you are near Puyallup, there is a hobby filbert farm (actually more than a hobby, about 10 acres) on Pioneer Ave not too far off 512. He has his trees in 3s and 4s, no more than that. They also are much much taller than the ones here in the East. Mine (I'm in Penna.)were planted in 1989 and have never gotten over 20ft tall, but the climate there is much more conducive to their growth and they are probably 2X.

One nice thing about filberts is that they can be pruned anytime of year. After leaf fall is best because they make so many leaves it is hard to see what you've got in the summer. Once you get them to manageable size, the yearly sucker growth can be pruned easily. Once you thin them, they also produce better, although my overgrown clumps still make lots more than I can use.

Hazelnut trees in the Pacific Northwest are very likely either the European hazelnut or the native beaked hazelnut.

According to the WTU herbarium website, the beaked hazelnut, Corylus cornuta, is a multi-stemmed bush growing from 1 to 4 meters (13 ft) tall. Most in my neighborhood (in Snohomish county) are towards the upper end of that range and are quite wide. We seldom see nuts as the Steller's jays and squirrels get them first. But I do see seedlings under the conifers where these critters hang out.

The WTU website lists the European hazelnut, Corylus avellana, as naturalized here, and as a shrub to 5 meters (16 ft). Cultivars of this hazelnut are grown commercially, especially in Oregon, and are usually pruned to a single trunk. New varieties have been developed at OSU for compact size and resistance to disease.

If I were interested in nuts, I would plant a couple of different varieties (for pollination) of European hazelnut, which has larger nuts than the native one. The more compact varieties are listed as 10 to 12 feet. If instead I were interested in wildlife, I would let the native hazelnuts grow with abandon.

-m

Here is a link that might be useful: How to tell the beaked hazelnut from the European hazelnut

Hi ICG. The Filberts I refer to are/were (it's been 10 years) C. avellana. 16 ft doesn't begin to describe their height. I wonder if the orchard is still there (the gentleman was close to 70 yrs. old) and if it shows up on Google Earth. I think it was just west of 512 on a sharp bend in the road. The only orchard of any kind in the area, if it still there it should stick out.

Edit: Actually it is east of 512, the farm is/was the red barn in the center. It looks like the trees are at the very least untended, and some are gone. I would guess the old man is gone. I'll have to check it out when we visit next year. The map, if you are interested:
https://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&q=east+pioneer+road+puyallup,+wa&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x5490fbf90d899d3f:0xef3fce61a17ca133,E+Pioneer+Ave,+Puyallup,+WA&gl=us&ei=bCIHUbbwMMSL0QGq9YHADQ&ved=0CDMQ8gEwAA

This post was edited by Dzitmoidonc on Mon, Jan 28, 13 at 20:28

Dzitmoidonc, I believe you that the trees in that Puyallup orchard are a lot taller than 16 ft. I looked at the Google map, but couldn't spot the red barn and the orchard. I think the WTU herbarium refers to the height of C. avellana seen naturalized in the wild.

Apparently the selection 'Barcelona' of C. avellena makes an especially large tree. It was introduced to NY in 1737 and starting in 1905 was extensively planted in orchards in Oregon and is still available. Jacobson ("Trees of Seattle") measured a C. avellana on the UW campus at 32 ft, so I would expect that there are even taller ones out there. (He measured a Turkish hazelnut, C. colurna, at Volunteer Park at 62 ft).

Newer more compact blight-resistant cultivars are listed as maturing at 15 - 20 ft, while the smaller 'Dorris' is listed at 10 - 12 ft. If I weren't convinced that the critters would get the nuts first, I would plant some.

Here is a link that might be useful: Some of the hazelnut cultivars available

This post was edited by IshCountryGal on Tue, Jan 29, 13 at 0:16

Ish, if you have the space, I highly recommend C. avellana. The limiting factor here in the East is the Filbert Blight. The one saving grace is that my trees grow faster than the blight can kill them. My understanding is that the Pacific Northwest does not have the blight. What follows is my paean to the Filberts.

What you will get is a fast growing small tree that makes a dense canopy of corrugated green leaves. The leaves are dark green, somewhat hairy, fairly stiff and toothed. The new growth is fuzzy red, the dense branch structure invites nesting birds.

The trees bloom from February to late March for me, depending on the winter. The catkins elongate fairly fast and are like waving yellow earthworms on the naked branches, heralding spring when they ripen. The female flowers are interesting for their red color and their small, threadlike structure.

The nuts are desert like IMO. In Europe they eat them long before ripe when they are still green. I prefer to pick them and put them in an airy part of the barn to dry for a month or so starting in mid-September. You have to lock them up pretty tight because they are a favored food of all the rodents as well as deer, raccoons, etc.

The only drawback to the trees from my point of view is the pruning they need. Once you get a few stems grown into trees, the job is more manageable because the shoots grow slower and are fewer. You also need 2 varieties to set nuts. A single clonal group makes few nuts. One man I knew had only one clone, and he got fewer than 10 nuts/year. He blamed it on the wild growth of his clump. I gave him a branch in bloom, and his tree was nutty that year. The variety that makes nuts with a cross section of an elongated oval (the sides are flattened) taste best. The ones that are almost perfectly round yield better, but their taste is more pedestrian. I would encourage anybody who has the room to grow some.

Dzitmoidonc, I enjoyed your description of the hazelnuts you grow.

Eastern Filbert Blight has infected C. avellana in Washington and Oregon. In Oregon they take filberts seriously as it is an important crop (30,000 acres according to this article: http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2012/07/oregon_hazelnut_industry_sides.html ). Since EFB has been around for awhile, there's been enough time for OSU to develop resistant varieties.

Our native hazelnut is thought not to be infected with EFB.

Although we have enough room for hazelnuts, I don't know if I will plant some. But reading your last paragraph sent me to the cupboard to snack on some nuts. These are 'DuChilly' which I order from a Bellingham WA grower. They're very nice and have the oblong shape.

-m

Here is a link that might be useful: Some new EFB-resistant hazelnuts

For clarification:

European Hazel - Corylus avellana

Filbert - Corylus maxima

Filbert is much more like Beaked Hazel in that it shares the long tubular involucre: (pic by Fritz Geller-Grimm at wiki commons; cc-by-sa license)
{{gwi:327922}}

A lot of the commercial nut cultivars are hybrids between Hazel and Filbert.

Resin

Resin, I wondered if the new cultivars (and the old ones) are hybrids rather than just C. avellana as sometimes stated.

I found this: "OSU and USDA have assembled the best hazelnut collection in the world. Recent additions include seedlings from nuts collected in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia, Russia, and the Crimea. From this collection the breeding program continues to identify sources of EFB resistance". It appears that perhaps several of the dozen or so species of Corylus are currently being used in hybridizing. I think cold hardiness is another target trait.

-m

Yep, even some of the very old cultivars like 'Kentish Cob' (raised early 1800s) are Hazel x Filbert hybrids. In Britain, Hazel is native, and Filbert cultivated since at least the 16th century, so hybrids could go back even further.

Resin

That explains some of the behavior of some of the trees here. Two of the clumps have nuts with long tails, and they are hard to get the nut out. All the others (about 12 clumps) have nuts that fall out of the 'burr'(?) onto the ground.

I'd love to know which two varieties to try and put in here in N. Central CA--I want to espalier them against a solid 8' wooden fence on the west side of the property, if that makes sense...I can easily keep suckers under control by nipping them to feed to my rabbits...

Just another addition to the delights of the hazel. The red hazels are truly a fabulously decorative tree (altho' I draw the line at C.contorta)

Since the tread came back up, here is a photo I took yesterday.
These are the male catkins elongated.

Here is a middling pic, the link (if it works, will take you to a bigger picture. The Thumbnail that sorry photo site, Photobucket, is not clickable. And don't tell me to use the other code, that doesn't work either. Photobucket disgusts me.

I have been trying for 45 minutes to upload from the sorriest photo site on the internet, namely, Photobucket. Do not use them because they change things, you cannot access any support, and their links to you photos only work randomly. To think I pay money for that.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v280/AlbusAlbuseser/DSCF4908.jpg

[IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v280/AlbusAlbuseser/DSCF4908.jpg[/IMG]

[URL=http://smg.beta.photobucket.com/user/AlbusAlbuseser/media/DSCF4908.jpg.html][IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v280/AlbusAlbuseser/th_DSCF4908.jpg[/IMG][/URL]

{{gwi:327923}}

This post was edited by Dzitmoidonc on Sun, Feb 17, 13 at 19:57

ok, I'm new to the site and I read the posts but I still need help.
On eastern Long Island, New york, I have two trees ( I will get more) about 5years old . We have had two years of nuts then nothing. The last two years saw summer droughts so I'm thinking I should have watered more and mulched. My trees have gotten overgrown. I'm afraid to prune and don't know when to prune so that I do not interfere with the nut catkin production. We want nuts. I will prune what are clearly suckers. Any input is more then welcome.

bruce.. welcome.. start your own post next time ...

first a proper ID of your tree.. is imperative...

it can be done with pix of the leaves ... and trunk ...

nut production .. just like cone production is variable.. year to year ... and there is NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT ... and they rarely have two good years in a row ....

it is usually the year AFTER drought.. that nut production.. or procreation.. is abundant ... some might suggest.. a survival instinct ....

so if you want to ID your plant.. and discuss it more specifically.. start a new post with some pix..

nut trees grow in the wild.. they dont need fert or anything...

besides.. if you fert your lawn.. it steals whatever it needs... as its root mass is easily twice what you see above ground.... IMHO.. do NOT fert it ...

water never hurts.. but it wont change nut production.. other than making your tree happy ....

ken

Hello, I have a small farm in Olalla.....with about 75 hazelnut trees...

Two years ago the Orchard started to look sick....had an arborist out and he said it was eastern gilbert blight. Can I do a hard prune to force new growth?

These trees are huge like umbrellas....but unhealthy with lots of dead and dieing branches...I really want to save this once magical orchard. If only for the wildlife.

Melissa

Sorry...me again...eastern filbert blight...

There are treatments for EFB, but they seem like a hassle. If all you want is to feed the wildlife, consider planting American Hazelnuts - they are EFB resistant. If you want bigger nuts to eat, there are also intermediate American x European crosses that are EFB resistant AND yummy at the same time.

EFB management (OSU)

Friend of mine has a Harry's Walking Stick that has turned into a monstrously huge, suckering tree (never realized a filbert could get that big). I explained it was the rootstock that had grown & the original graft was long gone. Fortunately or not, it doesn't produce a single nut, prb'ly for lack of any nearby pollinator. Don't really know if the rootstock is European or American filbert -- prb'ly European.

I have small American filberts -- nuts are tasty, but the shells require a vise to crack.

first .. posts are free.. you should have.. or next time.. start your own ...

presumably.. you paid an arborist to come look at them ... what did he recommend as to treatment ...

finally.. how many thousands of dollars are you willing to spend.. to save such???

ken

ps: i dont understand how.. a hard prune.. will stop a blight ...

Thankyou for your comments,

My other question is, can I plant the disease resistant ones next to the large dieing trees....which are planted in rows....and allow them to grow into the old ones?...some are still producing nuts and I hate to lose the grand look of the orchard.

I don't see why not, but you might want to label or map them so you know what is what. It SEEMS obvious when you plant, but after 10 years you will have no idea.