Black Walnut trees

[ditto_95]

We have about 20 acres with about a dozen black walnut trees (6 mature) in various spots. We have some open areas that we want to plant more.
Can someone tell me how to get trees to start from the nut?
I would like to plant a few rows to start a small orchard.

[BlueRidge]

Suggest you ask these guys. There are some VERY knowledgeable folks there.

[Pat]

ditto, Walnuts do not neccessarily "breed true" so going to all the effort of enhancing your grove only to spoil all that work with substandard nuts from the new trees after years of tending and waiting would be a shame.

If you have known good producing trees then you can plant your nuts in a seed bed or indoors under controlled conditions and transplant them in groups of 2-4 or so to your selected locations. Then when a few feet high and established at their new location you can graft on limbs from your known good producers. This makes the nut bearing limbs above the graft actually clones of the good prolducing tree and they should produce similar nuts in size, oil, taste, quantity etc, given egual growing circumstances.

For insurance purposes you plant multiple trees at each selected site and cull a year or two after grafting, selecting for the healthiest best growing tree of the group with a graft that "took" well.

If you check around you can buy cuttings to graft to your rootstock. This allows you to select the nut characteristics as you should get the same thing the donor tree produces. If your existing trees are native then they are probably well suited for your climate and will help the grafted limbs from trees not necessarily so rugged as yours to survive. Both disease resistance and temperature hardiness of the native rootstock is lilkely better than any randomly selected cultivar.

I recommend "four flap" grafting and that you include a "bird perch" stick tied so as to stick up taller than the highest of the grafted wood. The higher bird perch usually attracts birds to perch on the stick and not your freshly grafted walnut branch so as to not keep braking up the healing process.

Be sure to wrap your graft in plastic to hold in moisture and then wrap the plastic with aluminum foil to reflect sunlight/heat. You can use an "el cheapo" sandwich bag (don't waste money on zip lock types) to wrap the graft and hold it in place with bread wrapper twisties so you can get the foil wrapped without losing the plastic. Some folks like to wrap some damp paper towel around the graft under the plastic. Don't use duct tape or regular masking tape as it can girdle the tree. There is tape for grafting or you can use low stick masking tape, the blue stuff.

Using these tecniques you can graft various cultivars onto one root stock if you desire to get a variety of nuts from a single tree. Although yoiu can cross-graft pecans and hickory the walnut, although a close cousin to hickory and pecan is not close enough to cross-graft. You can graft between varioius culltivars of walnut.

I hope this helps spare you a lot of wasted work and frustration.


[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[ditto_95]

Pat, do I need to graft limbs onto a new tree? Will the growth from one of the fallen nuts not be similar to the parent tree?
I have read something about freezing the nuts prior to planting, is this required?
How long before I would see activity from the nut being planted. I am new to this so I need to start at the begining.

Ditto

[Pat]

Ditto, You'd probably be way ahead to Google around a bit and get some "free" experience.

Yes the tree produced from a nut will bear nuts similar to the "parent." Similar as walnuts from walnuts or pecans from pecans. In general there is no guarantee that fruit or nuts from a tree will be any where near as good as the original tree. The "NEW" tree could be way better than the parent but again it is a crapshoot. There is tremendous variation and you are just playing Russian roulette with your time and effort, years of it, before you get a good harvest!

What a lot of successful folk do is use hardy root stock that has proven itself by surviving the local climate and graft onto that little limbs pruned from a tree that is a known good producer with product that is desireable or has the qualities you are desiring. It is not unusual for someone to put in a hundred native trees and graft onto them cuttings from trees that are good producers. This is much much more of a sure thing.

Once as a pre-school child when my mom was canning peaches (once she filled me up with ripe peach halves) I took a spoon and planted a couple of the seeds. I have since eaten fruit from those trees. It was truly pitiful. Small little lumpy things barely with flesh enough to cover the pit. Not at all like the peaches from which the seeds came.

This was not an isolated event. I have a neighbor with several pear trees that apparently came up from seeds of fruit fallen from the original trees (no longer standing.) The trees and the fruit look to be the same as mine but mine are superlative in sweetness, flavor, juice, and firm crispness. His are like trying to eat a board. the cows eat them but the fruit is useless for humans. I have one tree that apparently is the root stock (top, i.e. graft died) and the tree produces only a small quantiy of fruit and the fruit is useless.

Again, a good way to get up to speed quickly on this is to Google around a bit and or find some fruit/nut orchard keeping forums.

I have attended seminars in grafting and have done some and trust me it is nothing a 6th grader couldn't do just fine with just a little instruction.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]