Another group out of the hot box and this one I left a few days too long, now I have juvenile foliage to protect from temperature fluctuation, must be frost free and not too much variation and temperature spikes.
This is one of the issues with hot pipe/boxes, callus can form pretty quickly (7-10 days in my system) but it does wake the stocks and scions up very quickly, if they stayed dormant it would be easier to handle them for the next two months.
In the foreground some juglans sigilata, 2 on j.nigra and 2 on some larger repurposed j.regia as an experiment, no difference in callusing.
We have some surplus bare-root stock for sale of Ronde de Montignac, Lara & Tulare. These vary from 60cm to 1.5m, Lara are very stocky smaller trees and the others taller of the same age.
We have a small surplus of large Meylanaise bare-root trees available this winter. We sourced some 200-250cm trees from France for our orchards and have some surplus, some are actually closer to 350cm.
Please contact us if you are interested, collection only.
This June we started installing a new washing line for walnuts from AMB Rousset in France. As it had to fit into a specific part of the old barns and link to the existing drier set-up a bit of creative thinking was needed to come up with a layout that worked, we still had to move the drier though which was fun.
The new set-up can handle 2 Tonnes per hour although we’re unlikely to need to do it that fast. Due to our harvesting methods at the moment we end up with a lot of husk both on and with the harvested nuts so we have to wash a bit more slowly, the new washer dehusks and washes and we also have a stick separator in the line to remove the larger rubbish.
As we progress to self-propelled harvesting system we’ll get more sticks and much less loose husk which will speed things up, the cleanest batch we did this year went through at easily a tonne per hour.
Deadline for orders for bare-root commercial cultivars is Sunday 9th November, we envisage getting trees at the end of the Month or Wk1 of December.
All these trees are collection only due to their size, nominally 1.2-2m but last year some cultivars were 2.5m+.
Chanbler, Ferette, Fernor, Franquette, Lara, Tulare, Ronde de Montignac
I have some small Cyril & Meylanaise for pollination in the ground here and additionally I will have some 2-2.5m Meylanaise from the Pepinoix nursery in France due in December. These have been sourced specifically for our plantings and the Fernor which seem to flower into mid June here with no pollination. I had to order a decent quantity to make shipping viable so contact me if you would like a few, this is a one off at this stage until we can get a regular supply.
This year is becoming a more serious drought than the hot summer of 2022. Then we had continuous rain until early May and then no rain here to speak of until late September, less than 50mm in 4 months.
This year we’ve had 120mm since December, 15mm in the last 4 weeks or so and our clay ground is now cracked like the grand canyon wherever it’s been wetter in the recent past. On top of our ridge and furrow we’re seeing cracks a foot deep that you can put your foot in.
For older trees that have their roots down there is less of an issue, a little irrigation every week and they’ll be ok if a little parched and not growing much now, but for the young trees it can be terminal as they’re roots systems are literally left hanging in hot air.
To that end I’ve been running around shovelling top soil into the cracks wherever I can so that when irrigated the soil retains moisture around those root systems, we’ll lose some newly planted trees but not too many.
The biggest issue may be the check to the young trees and the restriction of root systems, will they recover enough to grow properly another year?
Our drip irrigation is sufficient where the soil is solid but in reality with a year like this a bigger supply of water to each tree with a Nelson R5 type spinning sprinkler would be required and that would mean a much higher flow rate than our water pipes can supply. On top of that how would we protect them from the sheep and would the water cost be too high?
This isn’t a route we would want to go down and once the trees are established we shouldn’t need to unless we go for a heavily fertigated system like most of the commercial orchards around the world, is it even sustainable? The trees would certainly have a very short shelf life compared to historic natural plantings in the UK.
As in previous years we’re taking part in the National agroforestry open weekend 2025 we’ll be doing two tours on the 17/18th May, please book a place in advance, details below.
Well, following the last two very wet springs this yeas is the polar opposite, until this week we’d had 53mm of rain since December and started irrigating the newly planted trees in March.
Potted trees especially are very susceptible to roots drying out as they’re grown in fast draining commercial composts and although moisture will come in through osmosis most of the time this year there was little to get from the surrounding soil. Bare-root trees are the opposite of this as they have been root pruned and have little fine hair root so need moisture to stimulate root growth, critical when bud break starts.
The actual spring temperatures have been all over the place, upto 20C in March & April and down to around freezing often at night, although very few frosts. This has meant trees in our lower original orchard (86m) have been a bit later in bud break, the mid seasons ones by almost a week although they’ve also accelerated once awake, late ones like Fernor are still tight.
In the new Orchard which is higher (115m) trees have woken up to 7-10 days earlier, they’ve had the warm days but been also warmer at night with the cold further down the slope. This as one of the reasons we picked this field to plant as it wasn’t great for anything other than grass/clover, Lucerne just doesn’t last here as it’s too heavy. We didn’t expect the extra warmth and seasonal advance to be as pronounced though, we’ll see if that’s a regular thing or a one off.
What the lack of frosts this year (all finger and toes crossed still on 26 April) has meant is that all the small heartnuts, black walnuts, Carya etc have had a good uninterupted start, some years our late frosts have caused no end of die back and little growth. All the non J. regia cultivars and Carya are early to mid season bud break (in English walnut terms), none are as late to wake up as the late regia cultivars like Franquette, Fernor etc, probably due to the lack of commercial breeding in all these species.
You might think that walnut species from colder latitudes would be later to bud break but even Manschurica, Ailantifolia, Sigilata collected from colder climates just wake up in our climate all around the same time. Some Heartnuts for example even when listed as ‘latest’ into leaf all seem homogenous here, differences are measured in days, apart from an odd early starter. The image below is of Schubert which is the earliest into leaf and flower, this year there could be some self-fertility as well.
I document all bud break and flowering as often as I’m able even with very young trees, this allows us to build a DB of information to fill in all the very large gaps in information, not just in our country but world wide. Hopefully future plantings will be based on more cerain knowledge than the ‘plant and hope’ method!
Our peculiar maritime climate and a fairly high latitude means we have a lot of seasonal variation affected by the previous summer, winter and then spring each year, no two years are ever the same. All we can say at this stage is that our male pollination is probably more susceptible to seasonal change than the females flowers which seem more consistent regardless of seasonal differences. This has had the effect of us making efforts to source later pollinators for trial here in the hope that we’ll have good coverage as the trees mature. Most information out there is also very anecdotal and site specific so just because a cultivar in Denmark for example is very late doesn’t mean it will continue that pattern in quite the same way here.
