News

2^nd June 2026

Spring this year has followed a continual recurring theme over the last 5-6 years, periods of wet early in the winter and then dry by spring time, last year from January this year from mid March.

This has reinforced the absolute necessity of having irrigation in situ before planting as transplanted trees are very susceptible to drying out and once those roots have been compromised they rarely recover. I missed irrigating some replacements this year early on and they’re pretty much dead from the graft union upwards despite being planted in December and having 2 months of steady rain.

From our experience here on heavy clay rain just doesn’t penetrate as deep as you’d expect, especially after such a torrid drought last year, many cracks in the soil still weren’t closed by March so rainfall just disappeared, missing root systems completely.

Drip irrigation and mulch are essential if you can, walnuts should grow 2-4 feet a year after the first year, our newest orchard has had a terrible few years of record droughts and heat and the wettest year on record, this year I’m irrigating in rotation every day and it’s finally having a shot at getting really going.

For a change from the last few springs we’ve also had regular light frosts since early March with the last on 12^th May, most were less than -1C and nothing harder than -1.9C but even zero can be enough to burn to foliage and catkins.  It’s stayed unusually cool especially at night from March until early May and although many had long broken bud full leaf cover has been very slow, 7-8 weeks for the early ones and Fernor is still only partly out, towards the end of June before full leaf and not flowering much yet.

In a month or so we’ll be able to tell how this has affected nut set but there are clearly less nuts on the early cultivars like Saturn and male catkins on some just fell off before maturing, Broadview as usual seems to have the most sensitive male flowers.

As previous years have indicated female flowering is later here than in most of Europe  so pollinators don’t work as expected, Lara amongst others is still flowering but the last male flowers finished a week ago, A117 Kesei seems to be the latest this year but next year we’ll have catkins on our new Meylanaise which should cover us until at least wk2 of June I hope.  Our late seedlings finished male flowers by the 26^th May and some are still presenting female flowers, usually they have male ones as well so probably the frosts affected them as well.

On a more positive note we have actually had some rain in May, almost 2” (48mm) and 22mm last night so at least it’s trending better, although irrigation will continue as we’d need 3-4” in a week to really penetrate through the rock hard soil.

I just realsied that I only put the new washing line on social media last year and not on our web site, so recified now.

Up to 2025 we’ve used a small PTO driven drum washer from Kadioglu in Turkey, but although this can handle 60-70kg at a time every 10 minutes it was too slow and not great for poorly sealed nuts.

This meant we’ve been looking at a new set-up for a few years that will cope with our increasing harvest here and the harvest we make eslewhere every year, presently 4-5T. Like all small farms it’s how to get there in as cost effective way as possible by reusing existing buildings and linking to the the 2 stage drier from AMB Rousset in France which we brought in 2020.

As part of this process I went to Veld4 in the Netherlands to see thei rset-up and their small self propelled harvester, they also showed be their washing line and advised to get a stick separator, shaking trees causes a lot of dead sticks and leaves to end up being collected. I then worked with Eddy Rognin at AMB Rousset on a design that worked with our restricted layout.

You can see above we ended up with a staggered layout due to our length restrictions, the stick separator is normally mounted directly on the washer in line so we have increased cost with an extra elevator unfortunately.

At the end of the line the sorting table empties into our existing drier elevator, the sorting table enables us to manually take out most bad or uncleaned nuts.

The video shows Joe loading by hand froma full trailer of nuts harvested the day before in Dorset.

Another very disjointed start to the growing season here, it’s been relatively mild this winter and led into a cool and dry spring. Not much frost but some cold dry days have led to trees bud breaking and then sitting almost still for weeks on end, much like a lot of the grass. Typical is the hickory below, this was taken on the 22nd April and on the 2nd May it doesn’t look too much further on.

Sychrov is always the first walnut to bud break about the 12th March and still isn’t in full leaf, everything else have at least their buds breaking althought the later cultivars like Fernor are hardly moving.

The drought last year damaged a lot of juvenile trees which seems to have affected their spring this year, lots of terminal buds are dead on some trees.

Flowering has started in many trees that are usually in full leaf by now but this year are still growing their leaves out. Apart from 1 tiny frost 10 days ago that burnt some little trees everything looks undamaged and male catkin production is good in most cultivars.

Time will tell what the female flower pollination will be like but one certain fact is that without decent rainfall in the next month we’ll end up with small nuts again.

Again in 2026 we’re part of the National Agroforestry Open Weekend

Click on the link below for more details and how to book a place on the 16th or 17th May.

TR Tame & Son – Warwickshire Walnuts

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.

Collection only £20 each. Call Tom 07816 674854

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.

We have sachets of mycorrhizal fungi available to buy with trees at £3.50 each, one will do for 2 bare root trees.

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.