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Post by crabbyoldgit on Oct 19, 2024 14:44:34 GMT
Being 70 in Jan I have come in the last few years to recognize immortality is not going to be for me , so one of the things I have started a few of years ago is growing native ish trees from seed and planting them out all over the island of Portland. Target was 365 trees a year, best achieved 150 ish. So last year I planted about 3000 various types of tree seeds in the old tomatoes pots and got 7, dam.
But now I am out and about gathering this years seeds and there are none, well I got about 30 seeds, honestly today I have been to 3 sites where in other years I could have filled a 5 gallon bucket with conkers and there we none , no empty shells on the floor , none up in the trees. So I went on to another site where I can get loads of oak, beech hazel ,again near nothing, whats wrong this year.Also spotted no Berry's on the hollies.
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travolta
Member of DD Central
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Post by travolta on Oct 19, 2024 15:14:21 GMT
My husband carries out your mission too.
He is outside at the moment tending his trees in 'the back field'.
Meanwhile,in the garden,I'm struggling with the offspring of sycamore trees,who fruit like hell,unlike the rest of the tree family . I have to admit other varities are very sparse in fruit compared to say 40 years ago.
There's a prodigious mixture in the back field ,gathered from' All Over',ranging from foreign climes to outside Sainburys in Shrewsbury.
I wish Jonny Appleseed would come down and help with all the weeding,but he's away trimmimg and thinning and tying up his offspring/or skulking with a rifle to stop the deer from eating stuff.
Squirrels??
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Post by bernythedolt on Oct 19, 2024 23:42:59 GMT
Whatever the reason, I can guarantee Brexit will be in there somewhere.
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Post by captainconfident on Oct 20, 2024 11:42:55 GMT
Being 70 in Jan I have come in the last few years to recognize immortality is not going to be for me , so one of the things I have started a few of years ago is growing native ish trees from seed and planting them out all over the island of Portland. Target was 365 trees a year, best achieved 150 ish. So last year I planted about 3000 various types of tree seeds in the old tomatoes pots and got 7, dam.
But now I am out and about gathering this years seeds and there are none, well I got about 30 seeds, honestly today I have been to 3 sites where in other years I could have filled a 5 gallon bucket with conkers and there we none , no empty shells on the floor , none up in the trees. So I went on to another site where I can get loads of oak, beech hazel ,again near nothing, whats wrong this year.Also spotted no Berry's on the hollies. Although I'm a doom and gloomist, I've been walking on acorns this year in Belgium, and as a professional hazelnut farmer, I can report this year as a good one. I will now bore with some hazel-facts. The crop seems dependent on the weather during a period when the catkins are releasing pollen and the flowers of the compatible hazel types are open. If its damp and still, it doesn't happen. Secondly, we lost in some years anything up to 50% of the crop to the Hazelnut Borer, a beetle. The caterpillar overwinters in the soil below the trees and the last waterlogged winter seems to have practically killed them off, leading to a bumper harvest. However, all the walnut trees in the lower field died due to waterlogged roots. These were mature trees, totally unexpected. Edit This is due to Brexit. I was running an export company until Brexit killed it, so now I'm a nut farmer. Happy I could help, bernythedolt ! May contain traces of nut indeed!
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Post by Penny Pincher on Oct 20, 2024 12:46:20 GMT
The variation in tree fruiting from year to year is thought be an evolutionary advantage. If a hazel tree produced a plentiful amount of fruit every year, then the local hazelnut borer beetle population would thrive, meaning fewer hazel saplings, a disgruntled nut farmer and the eventual decline of the hazel population (assuming no intervention from an EU sustainability fund.) By having regular baron fruiting years a tree puts its local scavengers under strain and hence keeps their number in check. Similarly, when a tree follows a baron year with a plentiful year, it greatly increases the chances of producing offspring as there aren't enough scavengers to devour the available fruit. Thus the tree population is sustained.
It may be that the variation of fruit from year to year is a direct consequence of the weather and other environmental factors but the fact that fruiting does vary from year to year is thought to be advantageous, for the tree.
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keitha
Member of DD Central
2024, hopefully the year I get out of P2P
Posts: 4,587
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Post by keitha on Oct 20, 2024 13:48:31 GMT
On My allotment shared orchard ( isn't that a cool idea) we got 6 cherries this year 3 plums, and about a stone of eating apples and pears, no cooking apples, but we had lots of rain and 2 frosts whilst they flowered.
the rain tends to keep the bees in, on which topic honey may go up in price, our crop is down 40% on last year
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Post by mostlywrong on Oct 20, 2024 18:34:39 GMT
I try to plant more than 50 acorns a year but failed last year because the crop was so poor (only 20 acorns found and they were pretty skinny).
Beech was poor last year as well.
I brushed past a horse chestnut last week and was surprised to see a good collection of conkers on the ground. So, I might just return!
Hazel - poor this year. Holly - good. Berberis - good. Walnut - good. Granny Smith - good. James Grieve - good. Plums good.
Greengages - poor. Hawthorn - good. Blackthorn - good.
MW
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Trees
Oct 22, 2024 13:34:45 GMT
Post by crabbyoldgit on Oct 22, 2024 13:34:45 GMT
" as a professional hazelnut farmer". .
Well captain I am glad we have a professional nutter on the forum. Pleased to say I have found a supply of about a 1000 evergreen oak acorns and for the first time am going to try stratification of them in the fridge for 12 weeks with sycamore seeds I hope to find. The wife will be ecstatic with joy. Evergreen oak acorns last year resulted in not a single success from a similar number of seeds , so nothing to lose.
My father , sister and husband moved to Dorset from London in 1958 and so liked walnuts they climbed into Regents park one dark night with spades and liberated a few saplings , two of which now live, probably 50 ft tall at bottom of their now my garden. However in 30 years here we have never eaten a single nut. There are 100's of nuts but they are all soft and black , rotten . Any clues what we are doing wrong, thanks.
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Trees
Oct 23, 2024 22:38:19 GMT
Post by captainconfident on Oct 23, 2024 22:38:19 GMT
" as a professional hazelnut farmer". .
Well captain I am glad we have a professional nutter on the forum. Pleased to say I have found a supply of about a 1000 evergreen oak acorns and for the first time am going to try stratification of them in the fridge for 12 weeks with sycamore seeds I hope to find. The wife will be ecstatic with joy. Evergreen oak acorns last year resulted in not a single success from a similar number of seeds , so nothing to lose.
My father , sister and husband moved to Dorset from London in 1958 and so liked walnuts they climbed into Regents park one dark night with spades and liberated a few saplings , two of which now live, probably 50 ft tall at bottom of their now my garden. However in 30 years here we have never eaten a single nut. There are 100's of nuts but they are all soft and black , rotten . Any clues what we are doing wrong, thanks. Hum. Hum. Professional humming noises. What could that be? For some reason these nuts are falling while still immature. The kernel is the last thing to form and fill out. You wouldn't be picking these too early, so some condition is causing the tree to drop prematurely. Too dry late season? Having used the phrase professional nut farmer I should backtrack a little, we're far from breaking even. The money is in pressing nuts for other people. But even there it will be some years before we pay off the machinery. But nut oil has a future. About 50% of a properly dried nut is oil and the rest goes in a flour making machine and the shells in the wood burner.
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adrianc
Member of DD Central
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Trees
Oct 24, 2024 7:22:56 GMT
Post by adrianc on Oct 24, 2024 7:22:56 GMT
We have a mature walnut tree in the garden.
The first year we were here, we got 6kg of nuts from it.
In the decade since, we've had a cumulative total of... five nuts.
It's groaning... until... Bushytailtreeratb*st*rds. They turn up about a week before the nuts are ripe, and strip the damn thing overnight. The psycho cat has a good attempt (she left a demi-squizzle on the bedroom floor every other day last autumn), but one small moggy (no matter how effectively murderous) can't make that big a dent in their numbers.
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Post by geofft on Oct 24, 2024 9:21:33 GMT
I've been having a daily duty of sweeping up a bumper crop of acorns this year from an oak tree that overhangs my garden. Now the effin' squirrels are trying to bury the damn things in every pot plant and exposed piece of soil they can find, including the lawn. Look forward to next year with little oak trees growing in all the wrong places...  Surprised to hear somebody mention a lack of cooking apples, the Bramley on my allotment has been absolutely loaded this year, still trying to think of ways to use them up, but I fear many will end up on the compost heap. If you need a reliable plum variety, try 'Merryweather' I've got a mature tree on the allotment that fruits heavily every year without fail, unlike most other plum types. |
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Trees
Oct 24, 2024 9:28:00 GMT
Post by captainconfident on Oct 24, 2024 9:28:00 GMT
We live in a wooded Park area, but there were no squirrels here until about 3 years ago. Then wham! They are hanging off everything. They are the Belgian variety of red squirrel, tiny little whiff of a thing, but not bright orange red like the British ones. They are dark brown -red. I couldn't find Internet comment on this.
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travolta
Member of DD Central
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Post by travolta on Oct 24, 2024 16:12:23 GMT
Squirrels line their dreys with bark strips, so that babies can snack on them when they mature. According to my neighbour,who gets into a rage over our filling a perfectly good field with trees, instead of livestock, (preferably hers).
I smile sweetly, swallowing comments on her overloading upland hills with cattle rather than sheep and polluting my watercourse by 'spreading ' their muck to get their barns emptied after overwinter intensive rearing.
I should report them . The've already been fined twice,but the profits outweigh the risks.
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Post by mostlywrong on Nov 2, 2024 16:08:04 GMT
" as a professional hazelnut farmer". .
Well captain I am glad we have a professional nutter on the forum. Pleased to say I have found a supply of about a 1000 evergreen oak acorns and for the first time am going to try stratification of them in the fridge for 12 weeks with sycamore seeds I hope to find. The wife will be ecstatic with joy. Evergreen oak acorns last year resulted in not a single success from a similar number of seeds , so nothing to lose.
My father , sister and husband moved to Dorset from London in 1958 and so liked walnuts they climbed into Regents park one dark night with spades and liberated a few saplings , two of which now live, probably 50 ft tall at bottom of their now my garden. However in 30 years here we have never eaten a single nut. There are 100's of nuts but they are all soft and black , rotten . Any clues what we are doing wrong, thanks. I am puzzled by that story.
Dorset is way south of the northern limit for walnuts and I think you should get a good crop most years. My walnut has companions in the general area - probably 2-300 yards away. And, like adrianc, I get a big crop most years and just like adrianc, those pesky little furry things usually beat me to the nuts.
This year was so wet that I didn't venture down the garden until after they had stripped the tree.
It sounds as if your flowers are not being fertilised. If your parents "liberated" two trees from Regent's Park, is it possible that they are one of the more foreign species of this planet?? And, then, if they are of the same sex, the fruit will not set. My walnut has now mostly dropped its leaves, after that first frost, but you are much further south and you could try and find a couple of good examples, press them and ask the Natural History Museum for an opinion.
Just don't mention the theft of 2 valuable trees from a Royal Park...
MW
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