Hazelnut
Corylus avellana
The squirrels know when the nuts are ready before you do — that, not the growing, is the hard part.
- Type
- Fruit · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Green · Gold and chartreuse
- Sunlight
- Crops best in full sun; partial shade is tolerated.
- Watering
- Water while it establishes; once settled it copes with dry ground.
- Feeding
- Compost mulch in spring; it seldom needs feeding at all.
- Frost tolerant
- Yes
- Flowering
- April
- Pruning
- Winter prune into an open goblet, and pull off any suckers.
- Apr–Apr Bud Break
- Apr–Jun Flowering
- Jun–Aug Fruit Set
- Aug–Sep Harvest
- Sep–Dec Leaf Fall
- Jan–Apr Leaf Fall
- Plant spacing
- 12 ft 4 in
- In-row spacing
- 12 ft 4 in
- Between rows
- 17 ft 3 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Woody and fibrous
- Working depth
- 12–24 in
- Can reach
- 3 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 20–26 ft across, about 1.5–2× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 20 in of soil
A shallow woody framework with the fine feeding roots in the leaf litter above it. Those feeders are mostly under the outer half of the canopy rather than against the stem, which is where water and feed should go.
It suckers from the base by nature, and that habit is the whole of coppicing: cut a stool to the ground and it sends up a crop of straight poles. Left alone on a nut tree the suckers are simply competition and are cut out each winter.
The habit is Hazelnut’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
Beneficial predators that hunt this plant's pests — grow their favourite flowers nearby to recruit them. companion plant
- Beneficial nematodes Steinernema & Heterorhabditis spp.Hunts Vine weevil
Microscopic worms watered onto damp soil that hunt down soil-dwelling grubs and release a bacterium that kills them within days. Timing is the whole thing: warm, damp soil and a small target grub, which means late summer for most of what they are used against.
- Frogs & toads AnuraHunts Vine weevil
A resident toad works the beds every night for slugs, cutworms, and weevils. Recruit them with water — even a sunken basin pond — plus damp shade and an upturned-pot toad house; skip the slug pellets that poison their prey.
- Ground beetle CarabidaeHunts Vine weevil
Fast, glossy night hunters that patrol the soil surface for slugs, cutworms, and root-fly larvae. Give them daytime cover — thick perennial edges, stepping stones, a log — and skip the tillage that wrecks their burrows.
- Hedgehog Erinaceus europaeusHunts Vine weevil
A European animal, and worth saying so plainly: there are no hedgehogs in North America, and the ally that does the same night shift here is the toad, the opossum or the ground beetle. Where they do occur, cut a gap in the fence and skip the pellets.
Comfrey, Foxgloves, Bluebells
Green-leaved fruit, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com