After 5 years of anticipating the first harvest of hybrid hazelnuts, it finally happened! Twenty-eight of the 75 surviving plants I planted as first year seedlings in 2015 had at least one nut – and some had many more.
It was exciting to watch the nuts develop throughout the summer. Some of the larger bushes (5-7 foot tall) had a very obvious fruit set. Others I had to refer back to my notes to see which had had flowers in the spring and carefully search the plants’ branches. The clusters are beautiful aesthetically but also, as a farmer, it is great to see clusters of 5 or 6 nuts at almost every node on some plants. That indicates great yield potential.
Immature nuts 
One gorgeous cluster 
Clusters at each node
The total weight of the freshly husked nut harvest was 7 pounds but just three bushes accounted for 6 pounds. The size of the nuts was also encouraging. I went low-tech and drilled holes in the bottom of a couple of plastic storage containers – one had 5/8″ holes and the other had 3/4″ holes. The harvest from two of the heavy producers had a majority of the nuts between > 5/8″ & < 3/4″ with some > 3/4″. I dried down most for further analysis (% kernel, dried kernel weight, etc.), but kept nuts from 2 of the best for use as seed for next year.
One of the best individual bush harvests – just under 2# freshly husked 
Nut size – the notebook lines are 1/4 inch apart 
The husked nuts drying – some with 1-2 nuts and others with over a pound
Some plants were so heavily laden that I applied liquid nitrogen fertilizer two weeks before harvest so the branches did not cannabalize their own resources to fill the nuts and then die off. It was very interesting to see additional branches shoot out as a response – sometimes multiple branches 3 feet tall! More exciting news is that in an inventory I took just last week 80 plants have flowers for next year, including 60 from the 2015 planting and 20 from the 2018 planting. Time seems to pass faster as I age, but sometimes it doesn’t pass fast enough. Looking forward to 2021!
Red-leaved new sprouts will bear nuts in 2 years 
A substantial crop of catkins – next spring’s male flower clusters
If you are interested in more hybrid hazel information, you may want to check out the book I co-authored with my friends and former employers at Badgersett Research Corporation:
Rutter, Philip, Susan Wiegrefe, and Brandon Rutter-Daywater. 2015. Growing Hybrid Hazelnuts: The New Resilient Crop for a Changing Climate. Chelsea Green Publishing, White River Junction, VT. 249 pp.