growing a walnut tree

[Lynn]

Sitting here munching away on a bowl of walnuts got me thinking i would like my own tree. Anyone know if they will grow in a zone 5 (Canada)?

[Wolf Kirchmeir]

Yes, but you will wait quite a while before they produce. Go see your local nursery/garden center in the spring.

Good luck!

[Stephen Henning]

The ones you are eating are English Walnuts. You can't grow them. They are not that hardy. There is an hardy (zone 5) edible walnut called Carpathian Walnut. I have never tried it, but your local garden centers may know where to get them.

[Honeybee]

[Stephen Henning]

Not the best for eating either. The English and Carpathian are the best eating and cooking walnuts.

[Karl Warner]

I agree yet I found that first sentence jarring ... cannot let it pass. Perhaps the word "eating" needs clarification. I grew up in a farming community in the central US. As a child I earned pocket money by hulling, cracking and picking black walnuts. Very labor intensive but, hey, it was darn good money in those days. I doubt if they are available now, but to me, no other walnut compares. Comparable would be hickory nuts. (I supplied them also.) --- Karl Warner

[Frank]

I have 2 English walnuts (northern Delaware), about 20 years old, and never get nuts. They fall before mature and squirrels eat when immature. I've tried spraying and wrapping with squirrel deterents to no avail. Squirrels will jump maybe 10 ft between trees. Sorry I grew them. Frank

[Lynn]

great! I don't waiting, the winter time is a great time to make a wish list for the spring

[Lynn]

Thanks Stephen adding Carpatian walnuts to my spring wish list

[Lynn]

I live in a rural area so no problem there ticking off the neighbors with a messy tree.

[presley]

[Tom J]

I agree with you, black walnuts are the best tasting of all but the hardest to shell out. I also agree that hickory nuts are just as good, but even harder to shell out. After eating these all my life, I just don't like the walnuts that come from the retail store at all - like eating cardboard in comparison!! This year was a bumper crop of both black walnuts and hickory nuts in North Georgia.

Tom J

[Stephen Henning]

Most commercial walnuts are not species but hybrids. In California they use 30 different hybrids of English Walnut (Juglan regina). In addition to these commercial varieties, there are also different strains of Juglan regina including the German, Italian or Carpathian which are hardier and do well in colder climates. The original (English) variation of the species planted in England came from Persia or Iran and is much more tender. Hardier strains were collected from high in the Carpathian Mountains, which extend from Slovakia and southern Poland southeast through the Western Ukraine to northeast Romania.

The Persian/English strains will grow in the northeastern US where I live but nut production is very poor or non existent. Harsh winters leave a lot of dead branches. However, the Carpathian strains will do quite well. They are usually grafted on English walnut or black walnut rootstocks.

For a nice read on this visit:

parallel situation exists with Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) Christmas trees which are grown from seed collected in many different states at many different elevations from Canada to Texas and from sea level to over 6,000 ft. They are all the same species, but they are quite different. By knowing latitude and altitude of where the seed was collected, you can predict where it will do well.

The taxonomic handling of such variation is often handled by forming subspecies or groups. The difference is not enough to form different species, but quite significant when looking for source material for different areas.

[bamboo]

As kids we arrived at 2nd grade dyed up as savages with black walnut hulls. No doubt today they would expel you and attempt to imprison your parents for such non PC behavior.

[Karl Warner]

"Tom J" wrote

Ahh, delightful... glad to hear that some still exist. It has been over 70 years since I wandered south of the Ohio River. Apparently not all your woodlots have been converted to asphalt or soybeans. Do youngsters still go to school in the Fall with brown stained hands? Forgive me for running this off-thread. It is a lonely Christmas morning and I am wallowing in nostalgia. One last question: Do you know if anyone even attempts to harvest and market black walnuts? -- Karl

[Karl Warner]

"Karl Warner" wrote just a few minutes ago

Please forgive me. I should search before I ask. I am still learning to use Google and found an answer to my question. -- Karl

[Travis M.]

Black walnuts are available in little bags at my local supermarket.

[Tom J]

I see shelled black walnuts in bags in some stores, so I know they are being sold commercially. In some areas, black walnut trees are about all that does grow, because they can take over by poisoning many other plants.

It's been a long time since I was around country school kids, so I don't know how many hull out and crack their own walnuts anymore. I would guess that's done mostly by machine now.

For personal use, we still do our own walnuts, hickory nuts and pecans.

Tom J

[presley]

Well I'm still confused by your terminology. I took the following definition of hybrid from a biology link: hybrid (Science: biology) An offspring of parents from different species or sub-species.

An organism that is the offspring of genetically dissimilar parents or stock; especially offspring produced by breeding plants or animals of different varieties or breeds or species; "a mule is a cross between a horse and a donkey".

Produced by crossbreeding.

Commercial varieties of walnuts are not hybrids, since they all come from the same species. They are cultivars, or varieties - meaning, that some chance-mutation with a better taste, longer shelf-life, or some other distinguishing feature, showed up on a tree somewhere and was subsequently propagated by grafting or some other technique. In some few cases, there might be hybrids between sub-species - but I'm not sure that the Carpathian walnuts are sufficiently different genetically from the persion walnuts to merit sub-species title. If they were, some different cultivar might originate by crossing by hand pollination Carpathian with Persian walnuts. However, I doubt that has happened. Some species, like the walnut, have wide climate adaptability, and over thousands of years, the best-adapted plants have been more successful in surviving in any given climate. Therefore, it makes sense that walnut trees and their seedlings that have survived for

2000 years in northern Europe would have more tolerance for cold than walnut seedlings from trees in Iran. I'm really just nit-picking, because, for practical purposes, people in the Northern half of the US must use descendants of Carpathian walnuts if they want to get nuts, which I think we both agree on.

[Stephen Henning]

Species are not genetically monotonic. If they were they would be clones. My genes aren't the same as yours but we are members of the same species. The named varieties of walnuts grown commercially are clones of either cultivars or hybrids.

Carpathian walnuts and Persian walnuts are genetically dissimilar plants of the same species. They are different varieties. Tomorrow they may be different species. Taxonomists are making such decisions every day. When they are bred, whether they are different species or not, hybrids are formed. The reason they are hybrids is that they will not come true from seeds and must be vegetatively propagated.

Since a cultivar is a variety of a plant developed from a natural species and maintained under cultivation. Hence when different cultivars are crossed they are hybrids, and not cultivars. They are not natural species. Not all hybrids are mules.