Apolalypse-Grade Permaculture, Part Two -hazelnut

Engineer your landscape to produce food automatically.

Part two: The hybrid hazelnut-wildlife system.

This is another installment in a multipart series that is geared to permaculture for preppers and survivalists.

Why we should grow it: Hybrid hazelnuts are the undisputed kings of permaculture, in my opinion. Here are the top six greatest things about them:

One: They produce big, nutrient-dense crops year after year with no inputs at all. I planted about an acre of them 11 years ago. I put in some intensive work the first few years to get them established. Since they have established, I have done nothing but mow around them sporadically, and even that was not strictly necessary. Yet they produce a generous crop every year.

Two: Not only do they produce food, but they also attract food. What I mean is, hybrid hazelnuts are extremely attractive to deer, squirrels, rabbits, crows, ravens, and blue jays. The first three are staple foods, the second three you can eat in a pinch. Deer love to browse the branch tips, yet the mature plants are so hardy that this browsing does not hurt them in the slightest. I have noticed a major increase in the local deer population since my hazels came into maturity. So you can feed yourself on the nuts directly, as well as the wildlife that they attract.

Three: They are absurdly tough and long-lived. If you cut a mature plant flat to the ground, it will grow right back up the next year. This is because the American half of its ancestry is adapted to the wildfire biome of the American savannah, where wildfire used to be common.¹ They tolerate both drought and flood.² But it gets better. Hazel breeder Phil Rutter has reported that they also survive tornadoes, hailstorms, and downbursts.³ He mentions that it takes something like a backhoe to kill a mature hazel.⁴

They are also adaptable to a wide range of soil conditions. Mine are planted in poor soil, in an extremely poorly drained field. The drainage is so poor there, that of the 80 or so apple trees that I planted next to the hazelnuts, about 75% of them died. (Apples cannot tolerate soggy feet! I learned that the hard way!) The only soil amendment these hazelnuts ever got was wood chips, but they thrive like gangbusters.

Four: Storability and portability. Hazelnuts in the shell stay good to eat for at least three years, probably longer. Just keep them dry and protected from rodents. They are also lightweight and nutrient dense, making them an ideal way to transport bulk calories over distance. For these reasons, they will probably be a valuable barter item in a grid down scenario.

Five: Multipurpose. One of the core permaculture principles is the principle of stacking functions. This means you design your systems so that various components in the system perform as many functions as possible. A proper woodstove is a great example of stacking functions. It heats your home. And stacked on top of that, it also dries your clothes, dries fruit or meat, cooks food, boils water, provides light, provides cheerfulness, makes biochar, and can even be rigged to smoke meat.

Hazelnuts are really good at stacking functions too. If you plant them in a line about three feet apart, they will make an incredibly dense hedge that is extremely difficult to get through, except for very small animals. If you were to plant them in a hedge around your property, they would supply an (edible) line of security. Plus, they provide abundant fuel wood, (which will be extremely valuable if supply lines go down). Their branches are also quite handy for building chairs, tables, fences, and walls. The ancient wattle-and-daub style of house construction generally utilized hazel wood.

Finally, hazels are very well suited to silvopasture, which is the practice of grazing animals among trees or large bushes. For more on silvopasture, see the book Silvopasture, by Steve Gabriel.

Six: Wide range. Hybrid hazels are hardy in USDA climate zones 4-9, which means you can grow them in most of North America, other than Florida and the colder parts of Canada. Legally, you cannot import them to Oregon (and probably some other western states - check your local laws) because of a concern about spreading EFB. But that is ok, because in the western states, the European hazel appears to be a great alternative to the hybrid hazel.

History: There are several species of hazelnut. The European hazel is the one that produces the best, and the one that is grown commercially, but it cannot survive in the eastern half of North America because it is vulnerable to eastern filbert blight (EFB). The American hazel and the beaked hazel are immune to EFB, but they make much smaller nuts, with a poor shell to nutmeat ratio. So some enterprising breeders decided to cross the native eastern American hazels with the European hazels. The result was a hybrid hazelnut that yields well and is cold-hardy and disease resistant.

Size: 10-20 feet tall, 8-15 feet wide.

Calories: 2.848 calories/pound.⁵

How to grow: The most cost effective way to grow hazelnuts is to find someone who is already growing them, who you can harvest nuts from. Hazelnut growers tend to be pretty generous in my experience, and they are usually open to a barter arrangement, or sale for a reasonable price. Once you have several hundred or more nuts, they are easy to germinate. You drill a bunch of holes in the lid and the bottom of a five gallon bucket. You put the nuts in the bucket, mix them with sawdust, get the mixture soaking wet, and bury the bucket in a well drained place, leave it over-winter, and the nuts will germinate the following spring. See this video from Edible Acres to see how this is done.

A much more convenient, but also much more expensive option, is to buy hazels from a nursery in the spring. I bought most of mine from Badgersett, founded by Phil Rutter, one of the key developers of the hybrid hazelnut. I am very happy with the plants I got. Edible Acres and Twisted Tree also sell hazels; these two nurseries are great options because they do things in an ultra-regenerative way, and they both have a ton of practical knowledge. But there are many other nurseries out there, so look around.

When to plant: Both spring and fall are great times to plant. Fall has an advantage because with the cooler weather, you don’t need to irrigate very much, and when winter comes there is no need to irrigate at all. By the time summer rolls around again, their roots are so well established that irrigation should be unnecessary.

Irrigation: The basic rule for irrigation is once a day for the first week, once a week for the first month, once a month until the end of the first growing season. In my personal experience in our wet Upstate NY climate, this guideline works great. But hotter, drier areas probably need more.

Spacing: Back when I bought my plants, Badgersett recommended that hybrid hazels be planted six feet apart in rows, with 10-15 feet between rows. I now think that 10 feet between rows is way too little. The plants get so big, that the space between rows practically disappears, making it very difficult to get through, plus they are shading each other, which surely reduces yield. 15 feet between rows is little better, though I would recommend moving it to 20 if you have room.

Protection: Now full size plants have no problem with deer browse, but the small ones, like almost anything else, can get wiped out by it. New plantings must be protected by fencing till they have gotten chest high or so. There are a few ways to do this. One, you could fence off your entire planting area with 8’ deer fence. This is not a bad idea. In my case, I made individual wire rings about four feet high and four feet wide, and left them in place for the first three or four years. Another thing that I did was soak rotten garlic in a barrel of water for a few days and then spray that solution on the leaves. It seemed to work very well as a cheap deterrent.

The spray was nice, but still I think there is no way around fencing. It is ridiculously expensive - I’m sure I’ve spent several thousand dollars on it, all told. But the upside of the wire ring method is that it is portable. Once the plant no longer needs it, you move it to your next planting. You can keep reusing the same wire rings over and over for as long as they last, which is several decades.

A word about store-bought fertilizer. It is not strictly necessary to give your hazels any purchased fertilizer. But you may want to consider giving them a little organic fertilizer when they are young, so that they can outgrow the need for deer protection a little faster.

Soil prep: Mature hazels have no problem competing with weeds. Small ones do. So you’ve got to keep weeds at bay for the first few years. There are many ways to do this, but I think the best way is with wood chips and cardboard.

What you do is, a few months before you intend to plant, lay down a strip of cardboard about four feet wide where each row of hazels is going to be. Cover the cardboard with 4-12 inches of wood chips. When you are ready to plant, simply pull back the wood chips, dig a hole just big enough for the roots of your seedling, pack the soil firmly around the roots, push the wood chips back into place, soak with water, and move on down the line. The cardboard/woodchip layer accomplishes Five things: One, it softens up the ground and makes it easier to dig. Two, it smothers and kills all grass and weeds, giving your hazels room to grow. Three, it catches and holds moisture, making your young plants extremely drought resistant. Four, it steers your soil toward a fungal-dominant biology, which is what hazels (and most other woody perennials) prefer. Five, as the wood chips break down, they add fertility to your soil.

Weed suppression: Keep your wood chip layer thick for the first few years, in order suppress weeds, as well as get the other benefits mentioned. After a few years have gone by, this treatment is no longer needed. The hazels will be just fine on their own. Note: Be careful that the wood chips are not too thick where they contact the stem. Rutter has observed stunted growth in young hazels where the stem is buried too deeply in chips.⁶

By the way, there is a garbled myth going around that you shouldn’t use wood chips, because they will steal nitrogen from your soil. This myth is based on a gross misunderstanding. If you mix them into the soil, then yes, they will temporarily lock up nitrogen. But I am suggesting that put them on top of the soil, where they will definitely not rob nitrogen.

Harvesting: There are several important tricks to harvesting hazels, and if you get them wrong, you will be very disappointed. Number one, you have to get them before the squirrels do. Squirrels love them because they are so nutrient dense and digestible. So the moment they are ready, you’ve got to harvest them as fast as you can. Here is a link to an easy way to tell if they are ripe. Basically, what you do is try to pry the nut loose from the husk with your fingers. If it comes loose easily, it is ripe. Repeat this test with a few more nuts on the same bush. If they also come loose easily, then that bush is ready for harvest. Watch out, not all bushes ripen at the same. This is good, because it gives you more time to get your harvest in.

Drying: The edible part of the hazelnut, called the meat, is inside the shell, and the shell is inside a husk. The most convenient way to harvest is to grab clusters of husks, and separate shell from husk after they have dried. But while they are drying, they are extremely susceptible to mold. You have to spread them out in very thin layers so they can dry without molding. But they are also very vulnerable robbing by rodents. So you need a rodent proof drying setup. Sean Dembrosky of Edible Acres has invented the best system for this that I know of. Here is a link to it. Basically the system consists of 2’ by 2’ square wooden boxes with hardware cloth stapled to the bottom. You spread a thin layer of nuts in each box, and stack these boxes on top of each other. You block the bottom box up off the floor to allow air flow. Each layer of nuts is surrounded on all sides by either wood or hardware cloth, thus protecting them from rodents, while allowing air flow to dry them out.

Maintenance: In order to qualify for survival permaculture status, a landscape element must be extremely low maintenance. Hazelnut definitely fits this bill. It is useful to mow around it once a year or so, just to maintain easy access. But in a disaster situation you can abandon this practice if you have to. Also, to maintain optimal yield, is it helpful to coppice the plant every 12 years or so. But again, this practice can be neglected if need be. Overall, many years can go by with no maintenance whatsoever, and they will be just fine.

Yield: Rutter estimates 200-1,500 pounds dry nutmeat per acre, depending on level of care To get the higher yield, fertilizer has to be applied, and woody weeds cut back. So you have the option of giving your planting extra attention in exchange for extra yield. But if emergency strikes, and you give them no attention at all, they will still feed you for at least a couple decades, probably longer.

But there is also the yield in wild-harvested meat. unfortunately, this has not been quantified, as far as I haver heard. So I Don’t know, but you might conservatively estimate an extra deer per year per acre of hazelnuts.

Interplanting: Another central element of permaculture is the idea of polyculture. That is, the practice of interplanting different kinds of compatible plants together, with the combined result being greater than the sum of its parts. This subject deserves a section all to itself, but suffice it to say, hazelnuts are compatible to interplanting with many things. Chestnut and autumn olive are two other good choices to accompany your hazels.

Summary: Ok so let’s recap some of the bomb-proof benefits of the hazelnut system:

1: Nutrient dense nutmeat year after year with no inputs on your part. 2: Food that keeps for a long time without any special preserving. 3: Increase in the edible wildlife population (Deer, rabbit, squirrel). 4: Fuel wood (and at a convenient diameter for burning - no splitting required). 5: Building materials. 6: Ultra-dense hedge if planted close together in a row - perfect for privacy, a wind-break, or keeping large animals (or humans) out of an area. 7: Incredibly tough - requires a backhoe to kill. 8: Easily adapted to silvopasture.

All this to say, hybrid hazelnuts deserve first place in any temperate climate apocalypse-grade permaculture system.

Coming next: Part three; the sun-choke component.

1. Growing Hybrid Hazelnuts, Chelsea Green, 2015, Philip Rutter, pg 7.

2. Ibid, pg 35, 36.

3. Ibid, pg 219.

4. Ibid, 145.

5. https://www.verywellfit.com/hazelnut-nutrition-facts-4628471

6. Ibid, 98.