Growing chestnut and hazelnut from seeds

Hazelnuts and chestnuts, are tasty nuts for baking, cooking and eating out of hand. They can be grown successfully in zones 4 through 9. The hazelnut and chestnut is easier to harvest than some other homegrown nuts, as most varieties grow as a bush instead of a tall tree. Hazel and chestnut trees can easily be grown from hazelnuts  and chestnuts you pick in the fall. Getting the nuts to germinate is a long process designed to imitate a what nature does to each nut, but the results can be a grove full of tree with minimal effort. While most hazelnuts and chestnuts do not reproduce as an exact copy of the parent trees, you will still produce hazel trees with hazelnuts using this method.



Pick hazelnuts and chestnuts about one week after they begin to drop from the tree. The first nuts to drop are often empty shells, so avoid them and wait a week before harvesting. Most hazelnuts and chestnuts drop their nuts early in the autumn, about August or September.



Fill a bucket with water. Remove the husks from the hazelnuts and drop the nuts in the bucket of water. Some nuts will sink and some will float. Remove the floating nuts and discard them. Drain the sunken hazelnuts and chestnuts and package them in a paper lunch bag. Store the bag of nuts in the refrigerator.



Remove the bag of nuts from the refrigerator in November. Fill a bowl with the nuts and cover the nuts with water to soak. Allow the hazelnuts and chestnuts to soak for four days.



Drain the nuts after four days. Mix the nuts with sand or vermiculite, mixing one handful of nuts with one handful of potting materials. Pile the nut mixture in a plastic box or flower pot and place it in the crisper drawer of your refrigerator.



Remove the box from the refrigerator in February, after three months in the cold. Allow the nuts to sit at room temperature for five days. Inspect them after five days to find the nuts that are starting to sprout. Remove the sprouted nuts and place the dormant ones back in the refrigerator for another month.



Fill seedling pots with sterile potting soil and plant the germinated seeds in the pots. Repeat the warming process on the rest of the refrigerated hazelnuts and chestnuts after one month and, if needed, after one more month if there are any left. This will give you two or three batches of seedling trees growing.



Zeljko Serdar, CCRES