The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

Hybrid hazels save the day

Hybrid hazelnutsMany of you have probably heard of the breeding experiments currently underway to cross American Chestnuts with Chinese Chestnuts and hopefully develop a hybrid that can be reintroduced to the woods without succumbing to the chestnut blight.  Scientists are taking a page out of the chestnut project book by crossing American, Beaked, and European Hazelnuts, hoping to develop a hazel variety resistant to the Eastern Filbert Blight but capable of producing high quality nuts.

Efforts have been underway for twenty years, and the hybrid hazelnuts are finally beginning to bear fruit.  According to Badgersett Research Farm and the Arbor Day Foundation, the results are delicious!  Good quality nuts, thin shells, and disease resistance --- just what I was looking for.


This post is part of our Hybrid Hazelnut lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries:





Anna Hess's books
Want more in-depth information? Browse through our books.

Or explore more posts by date or by subject.

About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.






profile counter myspace



Powered by Branchable Wiki Hosting.

Required disclosures:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn a few pennies every time you buy something using one of my affiliate links. Don't worry, though --- I only recommend products I thoroughly stand behind!

Also, this site has Google ads on it. Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to a website. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to various sites. You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting this site.