How to plant and grow hazelnuts

Grow hardy cobnuts and filberts for perennial food

On our allotment I’ve started one of a few new areas on our farm for 2025, a little hazel nuttery with three cobnut bushes. We have other areas of wild hazelnuts on the farm, but I wanted to optimise yield with a careful new selection.

Cobnut is one of horticulture’s annoying jargon words, they are just hazelnuts from the species Corylus avellana, the wild tree seen growing all around Europe, including the UK. You’ll also come across the name filbert, which is the name for the other hazelnut Corylus maxima, which originates from Yugoslavia but has been bred for centuries all round Europe. Why hazelnuts need an additional two names when they are sold as hazelnuts, I don’t know.

The main difference to food growers is the husk, the green protective papery bit around the nut, which is longer around filberts covering most of the nut. This means more hassle removing the husk on harvest - I ain’t got time for that. I opted for the hardiest and most productive cultivars of the cobnut, Corylus avellana.

How to plant hazel nuts trees

The key information to know with hazel nut trees is:

• Full sun is essential to ripen the best crop of nuts, woodland edge can work too if they still get lots of direct sunshine

• Not too exposed helps pollination because they are wind pollinated (you might notice I have done the opposite and planted ours in a very exposed spot but we have lots of wild hazel all around our farm so they should be OK)

• Plant a number close together to help pollination as the pollen from one needs to reach the other through the wind

• Spacing is about 4 - 5 metres between hazel nuts plants

• Protect from rabbits and deer for the first year or two

You can buy hazel nut trees in pots of compost, and you just plant them to the same depth as they are in the pot. But I would always buy them bare root, which means they literally come with no pot or compost, just the plant and its bare roots dug out the ground. As a deciduous shrub or tree, hazels go dormant in winter allowing us to dig up and move the entire plant without them even noticing.

For gardeners, this means the plant and postage is cheaper as there is no cost to the pot and compost, and less cost to postage because they’re lighter. Which is also good for the planet in a little way.

The important thing with bareroot trees is to plant them straight away, to get their roots back into damp soil or compost. I would personally only order bareroot plants when I know exactly where they are going and have prepared the area. But if you do happen to receive or order them before you’re ready, you can temporarily plant them somewhere in the ground, or in a pot or bag of compost, and move them later in winter before they start growing again. Horticulture has unnecessary jargon for this too: heeling them in.

In terms of how deep to plant them, look at the stem and you’ll see where the old soil line was. Plant to the same depth being careful not to damage the roots.

Also, I’ve seen some people recommend soaking bareroot trees before planting, don’t bother, just get them planted. The ground is wet enough in winter unless you happen to live in the Sahara desert.

Which rootstock to buy

Bareroot hazelnuts come in a small range of age and shape - unfortunately this means more jargon, here are the essentials:

• Whip - is a very young sapling, 1 - 2 years old with no side branches, just a single stem

• Maiden - 1 - 3 years old with side branches

• Bush - probably 2 - 3 years old and has been grown to encourage side shooting

• Coppiced bush - 2 - 4 years old and the same as a bush except the main dominant stem has been cut near the base to encourage more shooting from the base

Any of these will do, as long as you choose the cultivar name you want, they are the same tree in different stages and you can easily train yours into a bush.

Personally I opted for bush and coppiced bush, which are basically the same thing meaning the plant already has lots of shoots ready to grow into a good shrub next year. Saving me one year of extra training myself.

Training hazelnuts into productive bushes

One of our wild hazelnuts in another area 1 year after being coppiced - you can see the new shoots growing from the base

Hazelnuts are one of our wild deciduous trees that are very happy to be coppiced. More jargon that simply means cutting down and reshooting from the stump.

Coppicing is one of humanity’s oldest partnerships with plants and can help extend the tree’s life by centuries with constant rejuvenation.

You don’t have to do this, you can let your hazel grow into a singular trunk tree. However, a tall tree is very hard to harvest unless you’re able to train squirrels to retrieve nuts for you without eating them. Which would be pretty cool, to be fair.

By coppicing a hazelnut and growing it as a smaller shrub at about 2m tall and wide with 4 - 5 main trunks, you can hand pick and beat the squirrels to it.

In future years, remove other shoots coming from the base to keep the main stems clear and the bush open. Also nip of the top shoot of the main stems to keep the plant to size and encourage side shoots with male catkins and female flowers, the flowers become the nuts.

There is yet more jargon for further training to encourage nut formation, called brutting, which means snapping stems in half but that’s for later. For now, let’s concentrate on planting.

Which cultivar to choose?

My best advice is to research nurseries or growers near you and see what they advise as the best hazel for your area. Though remember Corylus avellana is a species that evolved and is happy growing all around the UK, so you can’t really go wrong.

On our farm we do have a lot of wild hazel trees and they do produce nuts in sunny, drier springs and summer. For this new planting I wanted to increase yield however.

I used our local grower RV Roger, and chose two ‘White Filbert’ because it is particularly hardy and one ‘Cosford Cob’ because it is a good cropper. They are both known to crop particularly heavily in our West Yorkshire climate, which can be colder and harsher than other areas.

If you’re down south, ‘Cosford Cob’ is another good shout, and there are other good cultivars. I really like the purple leaf cultivars but I found they struggled for me on my old southern allotment compared to green leaves.

Rabbit and deer protection

We live in an area with some rabbits and roe deer. To stop rabbits eating your plants, you have to have a 1m high fence of metal wire to stop them jumping or climbing over, that also sticks out 30 - 40cm horizontally along the ground to prevent them digging under. This has worked for us perfectly on our allotment.

For deer, you have to do a bit more with 1.3 - 1.5m high fencing guards to protect young shoots. Using sturdy poles whacked a third of their length into the soil, staple wire mesh around them. Once the main stems are about head height and 3-4cm diameter, I’ll remove these guards. Alternatively, you can install 2m high deer fencing all around the growing area, but that’s a bigger task.

You can see both types of protection in the above photo if you look carefully. The rabbit fence line is just behind the hazels in front of our top meadow.

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If all the jargon hasn’t put you off, let me reassure you that planting a hazelnut bush is easy. Just buy it, plant it, making sure it’s in a sunny spot and 4-5m apart. That’s all you really need to know.

Stoneware by Studio Robert Hopper

I’m excited to be able to offer a limited run of ceramics from West Yorkshire artist, Robert Hopper. Hopper hand crafts different vessels out of various clay. They can be used as small shelf ornaments in their own right, or I use them for displaying dried seedheads, which contrast beautifully with the textures and natural tones of the pots.

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