sutton023

Executive Summary: Plants: Standard tubelings still available for all categories ( Hazel , Chestnut and Hickory-Pecan ) except MP-BFL-Haz. We expect most orders taken now to ship around mid-June, some categories still available earlier. Bare-root dormant tubelings SOLD OUT for 2013. Nuts : A few hazels and hickories still available from the 2012 harvest. Chestnuts from 2012 sold out. Details to come, but right now we're preparing for the Short Course that starts tomorrow!

A long time in the making, we are now ready to open our Amazing Hazel Maze for the month of October. The season has been good enough for our chestnuts that we have some available for pick-your-own for the first time as well- definitely exciting to pick that food out of the leaves on the ground! Below is the note we just sent out to our email list. For directions, check the "About Badgersett" page on the main web site We hope to see you here, and we'll post more details here as we can. This Sunday October 7, and the remaining Saturdays and Sundays in October, from 1PM-5PM. Hello folks, This is a quick note going out to our "nearby" friends from us here at Badgersett– this Sunday we will be opening our hazel maze for the first time, and we'll have pick-your-own chestnuts available for the first time ever as well!  The maze will be open for the rest of the weekends in October, but chestnut harvest is tapering off and they are likely to be harder to get, and ma...

This Saturday, February 18, our CEO and Chief Scientist Philip Rutter will be giving a talk at the 2012 annual conference of the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota . Badgersett will have an exhibit table as well. Philip's talk is currently slated for 2:30, and titled: "What's All This About Hazelnuts?" The short description of the talk is as follows: "In the past few years buzz and investment in hazelnuts for the Upper Midwest have increased dramatically. All of the interest originated from the investigations started at Badgersett Farm 30+ years ago; and all the crop genetics currently producing, also. Do hybrid bush hazelnuts have a future in sustainable farming practices in Minnesota? The talk will cover whole-system theory, practices, the current state of the art, last year's first machine harvest, and several different paths forward. Is this the first real perennial agricultural crop? Badgersett is now expanding plantings, and experimenting...

As you know, we're experimenting with incorporating livestock of several kinds into the nut crop practices. The goal being to find pathways that make economic sense, and to sort out at what scale which practices might make sense. Livestock require attention; 365 days a year; unless you are just buying feeder stock, selling them on, and not over wintering anything. In our case, we're still learning what makes sense, and therefore we do winter chickens, guineas, the sheep, and of course the horses. About a month ago we suddenly hit an urgent need to increase the protection of our sheep from the local coyotes. In fact the first livestock we acquired were dogs- specifically trained and intended to be livestock guard animals. We have two, who are well trained (now), roam free on the farm 24 hours a day, and who have been doing a fine job of keeping predators at a distance, from both sheep and poultry. There have been coyotes here from the outset; and while the dogs have been...

Hazel grower Don Price called us this morning to let us know that he will be bringing a harvest processing tool he's been working on with him; and we'll set it up and run it. Don's been working with rebuilding and adapting what used to be a standard tool for all farms, a fanning mill . He started working with one at least 3 years ago, and provided one for us to play with here at Badgersett, too. We haven't had the time we've wanted, to work with the really excellent machine he brought us; but he's done some tinkering with his, and has been using it to clean (at least) his hazel nuts. It's likely that with a bit of remodeling, these things can be made to size nuts, also; and remove blanks and lightweights. It'll be here, set up and demonstrating, for the Field Day. Item 2; Sue Wiegrefe has been systematically collecting data on soil pH in a variety of our hazel plantings, with known fertilization/lime treatments. And- we've got results t...

(click for larger view. low-resolution details of larger drawings) These are all paintings of Badgersett hybrid hazels; we've worked with Ms. Walser-Kolar to provide material for the past two years. Now, we are extremely proud to announce, she has been invited to show her work at the Royal Horticultural Society Botanical Art Show , in London; this March. This event and her work were covered in the Rochester Post Bulletin, a week ago (link no longer working). We've seen small-scale proofs of all of her works for this exhibit, and they're really quite outstanding! As soon as I get the database updated, we'll be offering at least some of the earliest of this series she did as greeting cards; possibly prints and (with some further work) calendars as well. I also very much look forward to seeing these works in person. Congratulations, Denise! UPDATE:  She won!!  A Silver Gilt Medal; one of the top awards, which carries with it the right to show any of her work at this s...

Hello folks, It's late, I know! We did just get most of our outstanding nut orders shipped today, and although we expect to sell out by Christmas we do have a few left that you can snatch up, if you haven't already. We thought we should let you know: DATES: If you make your e-mail order by 5 PM Monday, and you made it early enough that there are still nuts left, we should be able to get it shipped on Tuesday for Christmas delivery via our standard nut shipping (that is, at least, according to USPS). Barring, of course, further blizzards. What we've got available: FIRST TIME: BADGERSETT HYBRID HICKORIES! These look mostly like shagbark or shellbark hickories, but the shells are thin enough to crack with a hand cracker! Most nuts taste like premium pecan, some will have a good real hickory taste, and some will even taste like black walnut. Limited supply, and in 1-pound bags only. NOTE: though they'll crack with a hand cracker, you'll want a nut pick. We still have...

Here's the very quick skinny on how the hazelnut harvest went at the Illinois planting: really good; considering. Sorry to say Dr. Brandon has all the photos at the moment, and he's up to his neck in the regular alligators; and I'm in Virginia. Details: alas, only about 20% of the nuts we saw in mid-August were still on the bushes when we arrived Sept. 4. Three factors; we'd had several days of very high winds just before (the kind that blows semis off roads); deer had been eating a couple specific breeding-lines of the hazels far more intensively than we'd ever seen before, and there were more tree squirrels in the plantings than we'd expected (gray squirrels, is what we saw). We did pick up a fair number of good nuts from the ground, but only a tiny fraction of what had been blown off, of course. Sept. 4 is extremely late to start harvest, of course, so this was not entirely unanticipated. We kept hoping a machine would materialize, which made us pu...

First; look at this video . It'll take a few minutes. The first 30 seconds or so of film show UNfertilized row; after that (when the bushes get big and green) the rows were fertilized. That is our Badgersett Research Corporation expansion farm in Illinois. You are looking at some 3-4 miles of harvestable hazel bushes; with a substantial crop ripe; right now today. So far, both BEI and Korvan have failed to respond to our repeated requests for a picking machine, to start working on real machine development (in spite of our offer to pay up to $3k in costs). We will be picking these rows by hand; on Sept. 2/3/and 4. All day; fast; all the people we can get. Almost everyone there will be volunteers. We're expecting to harvest up to 2 tons of dry nuts; perhaps more. These will finally give us the nuts needed to work seriously on cracking/sorting etc. machines. We're hoping Lee Pothast will be working on this harvest to develop his husker further. If you want to see what a...