 Hey, this is Joel. I'm in my front yard today. It's lovely in Colorado. Things have cooled off a bit since we're getting into deep September. And today, I want to talk a little bit about these hybrid hazelnuts that I grow. There's really no other nut that most of us northern gardeners can grow, but this hybrid hazelnut that is a three-way hybrid between the European or Turkish hazel, the North American hazel, and the Beaked Hazel has done really well for me here on the Front Ranger Colorado. I'd like to show you how. But you need to see the nuts, right? That's what it's all about. So first, I wanted to show you, here's what hazelnuts, these hybrid hazelnuts look like in their husk hanging on the tree. I mentioned it's late September. This is about when they ripen up late September, maybe early October. But here, you can see the hazelnuts in the husk, but the husk is starting to dry down and de-hiss and show us the actual nuts inside. And then, just a view of a couple of the actual nuts themselves. You'll notice these are a little bit smaller than the hazelnuts you might buy at the grocery store, which are mostly produced in Oregon, because they are a different species, but they are very high quality, very tasty, and they actually have a higher content of hazelnut oil. I mentioned that this is a hybrid hazelnut. Let me explain a little bit what I mean by that. The hazelnut or the filbert that most people are familiar with, certainly the one I grew up stuff in my face with, is a species called Coralus Avalana, and it's native to Europe and Asia Minor, what we call turkey these days. That variety, that species, you can't grow successfully here. There's a disease and also some climatic problems, but we've got two North American native varieties that don't have either the climate or the disease problem. That's the beaked hazelnut, Coralus Cornuta, and the American hazelnut, Coralus Americana. Both of them produce reliably, just real small nuts and not very many of them. So by hybridizing those three species into this resulting shrub, we get good nuts of a good size with reliable production. Now let me show you one of the things that's totally different about this than the standard hazelnut. There's an absence of a big old trunk here. Your standard hazelnut, European hazel tree is a tree with a proper trunk. This here is a shrub with lots of canes. So instead of having one trunk and then pruning the branches up high like we would do on the European hazel, here the pruning to keep your shrub producing nuts well every single year indefinitely is to look inside at the different canes. You can see by both their diameter and their bark texture, this is an older cane. This one's about seven or eight years old. This one here is in its second year. This one is in its first year. Here's a third year cane. So the idea is each of these canes has about a 10-year lifespan. When a given cane reaches 10 years, you go right down to the bottom by the ground. You saw it out. That leaves a little bit more space in here and the younger generations of canes fill that in and they all are producing well for you and they basically become old-timers at age 10 and it's time to take them out. But the crown of the plant and the root system is going to live for you indefinitely. Okay, so previously we were looking at a different hazelnut shrub in the front yard of my house. Now we're in the backyard and I wanted to show you one of the other shrubs because it's really important that everybody understand the genetics of the hazelnut crop in production is a little bit complicated. And so whereas you may be familiar with apple trees, plum trees, etc. that need to have one pollinator variety, hazelnuts, especially these hybrid hazelnuts, turns out they need to have several or more pollinator varieties nearby. And so what I've been doing is growing a whole bunch of related but genetically unique sibling plants essentially so that they can cross pollinate each other. So just taking a look at this one here, you can see that because they're siblings and they're not clones of one another, this is the same age as the other one we were looking at. But differences you'll see. This one is shorter. It's a little bit broader. It's also getting its full color earlier. And whereas the other one ripened up all its nuts about a week ago, this one still has all of its nuts on. Not a single one has dropped on the ground yet, but they will in about a week's time. Also this one makes slightly larger nuts. That one makes more but slightly smaller nuts. So let's look at a close-up here of this branch that still got all of its nuts on it. And one of the things that's so fun about perennial horticulture is that while we're still waiting for this year's crop to ripen, if you see all these little kind of whitish structures here, those are the male flowers or catkins that are going to bloom next March. And so the tree, the bush is getting next year's crop ready while it's ripening up this year's crop. And then if you look at these little kind of football-shaped white-tipped buds, those are where the female flowers are going to emerge from. They're an unusual flower in that they're referred to as naked, meaning there are no petals, there are no sepals, there's no male parts, there's just a female pistil emerges from here. It's actually a really cool looking red filament. So those will emerge in March just in time to receive pollen, but not from here. It needs pollen from one of the other siblings that is genetically distinct.