Author: Tom Tame

Another spring gone and the rain has given the trees a boost after a really cold dry spring. Most of the earlier leafing varieties got frosted this year which really knocked them back and even the late varieties were held.

Some varieties have lost all their female flowers which is unusual but gives us an idea of their cold hardiness which hasn’t been documented before, Saturn in particular has no nuts even though the trees are in full leaf and have recovered well from being twice frosted.

Our young potted trees by contrast have been growing madly and although we’ve sold a lot the remaining ones will need taller boxes unless they’re sold locally! We still have some Mars, Chiara, Lake & a few other Red & Giant walnuts.

We’re just finalising our new stock list for this summer and should have newly grafted trees available from August, all pot grown cultivars including Heartnuts which have been very popular.

The long and tedious job of guard maintenance takes another step this spring as many of the older trees have their guards reduced now that the are (hopefully) safe from browsing sheep.

It also allows us to change the strapping to one point now whereas with the taller mesh guard they had to be strapped centrally to stop the young growth from being damaged by it’s own protection!

The frosts at the end of March and first 2 weeks of April have burnt a lot of the earlier walnut and heartnut varieties but thankfully they are all now starting to show signs of revival.

The juvenile male flowers on some varieties were destroyed but not totally and because we have such a range of varieties there should be pollen to cover everything. We don’t yet know if any female flowers were affected but we’ll see in the next month or so.

Many of the trees were just stopped in their tracks and some have escaped damage even though buds had broken, good to know!

After 5 years we’ve finally filled our orchard and even extended a bit by expanding our collection of other Juglans and Carya cultivated nuts with more Heartnuts and Butternuts and Northern Pecans.

Now we just need to carefully manage them and hope we don’t have too many difficult years like this one.

A full list of all our Walnut cultivars and the other nuts is now on our Trees & Trials page.

I’m sure we’ll add a few more trials if we can get hold of them and we have space. In the meantime we will carefully document each variety through the year so we have a good database so that in the future decisions can be taken on cultivar selection based on solid data.

Have you got the space to grow your own healthy walnuts for future Christmas’s.  We still have grafted walnut trees for sale so you can have your own, we also have Heartnuts, Hicans and Northern Pecans!

We’ve  now got our first batch trees, mostly walnuts but also a small amount of Heartnuts, Hicans and a Buartnut.

We’ve also taken delivery of some more trial varieties if Walnut and a few new Heartnuts but the really interesting  trees are some butternut and some northern pecans.  De Smallekamp have these growing and fruiting in the Netherlands and we’re very hopeful we will be able to do the same!

We’ve just received our delivery from Holland and now have stock of trees.  These have all been grafted this spring and are in 2L pots (shortly to re-potted), generally between 30-60cm high.

We have a dozen different walnuts including Red Kernels & Giant nuts along with Dwarf trees, Heartnuts, Buartnuts & Hicans ansd most trees are new to the UK but growing in Europe.  Details to follow shortly.