Growing Nut Trees (What You Need to Know)

Melissa: Hey Pioneers. Welcome to episode number 421. Today's episode, we are going to be talking about raising and growing nut trees on the homestead. And one of the reasons I decided to bring on today's guest is not only obviously his knowledge of nut trees, but he is dedicated to growing, cultivating, raising, and therefore also saving nut tree varieties that we typically don't see when you are just buying from large scale commercial nurseries. So he is going and finding the obscure, but that doesn't mean not as desirable, different types of nut trees. And so I love supporting and learning about different types of plants. So I love heirloom vegetable seeds. We've done episodes before on heirloom apple tree varieties. And so I'm excited to start to go down that path when we are talking about nut trees.

So today's guest is David Hughes and he has been having his nursery since 2010 that focuses specifically on nut trees and flowering trees for beekeepers. And also his focus is for mail order for small growers, homeowners, and of course that means us as homesteaders as well. So super excited to dive into that because I actually learned a lot during this interview about nut trees and varieties, as well as some things about the black walnut when it comes to gardening that is probably a little bit different than some of those blanket cases or things that you've heard about black walnut trees. So super excited for today's episode. I know that you are going to find it as interesting as I did.

And today's episode is sponsored by Azure Standard. As you know, Azure Standard is one of the places where I get the majority of our groceries of things that we are not already raising, growing, and producing here on the homestead. And when it comes to the topic of nuts, Azure has a vast variety of roasted, not roasted ... You can buy them in bulk. But lots of different nut options. Hopefully you will be inspired to put in some of your own nut trees, but as you will learn in today's episode, those can take several years depending upon the variety before you're actually going to get a harvest. So in the meantime, you can get your nut products at Azure and they have some of our favorite nut butters in more than just almond butter and peanut butter, which is typically what you'll find on most grocery store shelves. They have a pretty vast variety. So if you are a first time customer to Azure Standard, use coupon code Melissa10 and you will get 10% off your first order of $50 or more.

Now let's hop over to today's episode, which you will be able to find links to in a blog post that accompanies it at melissaknorris.com/421 because this is episode number 421. Well, David, welcome to the Pioneering Today Podcast.

David: Thank you for having me on.

Melissa: Yeah. I am excited for us to chat today. Because this is an area that I have no experience in on the homestead and that is cultivating nut trees. So how did you become interested or what's your journey towards cultivating and growing and using nut trees?

David: Well, I had a friend years ago who invited me to go to a Kentucky nut growers meeting, and it sounded interesting enough that I decided to go and found out that there's all kinds of things out there that nobody knows about. Pecans grow as far north as Iowa. There's all kinds of thin shelled black walnuts. There are Japanese walnuts. There's all kinds of stuff out there that just the general public doesn't even know exists.

Melissa: So for homesteaders, which is obviously not usually super large scale, what are some good nut tree options?

David: Well, it depends on the part of the country you live in. Pecans is what I ... I do that, and I do hickory nuts. I like thin shelled hickory nuts. The pecans usually from about Indianapolis south. If you look at that into southern New England, New Jersey along the coast, the Atlantic seaboard, the Piedmont area, the Atlantic seaboard up into southern Iowa and eastern Iowa, all the way down to the Gulf coast and west into California and up the west coast into Oregon and Washington. Black walnuts pretty much anywhere in the continental United States except maybe extreme northern Minnesota and upper New England. Hazelnuts to the north down to oh, about Birmingham or Atlanta. Almonds are good to zone five now. We have some hearty almonds who've come out of I guess the Middle East out of Iran and places like that. You've got Japanese walnuts, which actually do better up north. You've got hickories that do well all over the eastern United States. The choices are broad. There's a lot of things to choose from. It more has to do with what you like. What do you like and what are you willing to fool with? Some people like black walnuts. Some people don't like black walnuts. I haven't met very many people that don't like pecans.

Melissa: True.

David: It just depends on the individual, how much room you have, and what your goal is with what you're growing.

Melissa: Okay. And that's where I don't know with the nut trees. I know much more with fruit tree production. So on average, how much space does a nut tree require and are there dwarf, semi dwarf, standard varieties there are when it comes to your fruit trees?

David: Okay. So the smallest thing you're going to grow is going to be something like a hazelnut. It's going to be 12 or 15 feet wide and 12 or 15 feet tall. After that would be an almond, which is going to be a little bigger than that. An almond is going to be about the size of a large peach tree because it's a peach. It's related. It's what they call a sweet pit peach is what it is. You can't eat the seeds out of a peach because they're toxic, but an almond you can. When you get into walnuts and hickories and pecans, those are full sized trees. Those get really big. So they get 90 feet tall, eventually, 70 or 80 feet wide. They just make a really big tree. So you don't need to put that in your quarter acre backyard unless that's all you want in your quarter acre backyard. So yes, they're big. There are no dwarfs. The USDA is supposed to be trying to come up with a dwarf pecan tree, which will still probably be 40 feet tall.

Melissa: Yes. Some of my dwarf fruit trees are quite robust, so yeah.

David: Yes. That is an issue with fruit trees a lot of times. We have to contain the growth on fruit trees. They're not going to do it on their own.

Melissa: Yeah. Which brings me to my next question. With nut trees, are they self pollinating? Are there certain types that do require different varieties cross pollinating like you do with fruit trees or where are we at with them?

David: Almonds will self pollinate. Everything else needs at least two varieties to pollinate. Oh, I don't remember the word that they use. But there are male and female flowers on all these trees, but they're open at the same time. So it's a strategy to keep the tree from self pollinating. And the idea behind this is you want ... I explain the genetics like this. They're like people. The genetics are very complex. You can have six children and they're all yours, but they don't look the same. They have the same parents, but they don't look the same, they don't act the same. Some are tall, some are short, all this sort of stuff. And wind pollinated trees, which all these trees are wind pollinated, you know who the mother is, but you don't know who the father is, so you get a lot more variation than you would think. So you can have blonde haired ones and black haired ones and blue eyes and brown eyes all right there from the same seed in the same cluster on the tree. So the diversity of genetics is so great. You definitely have to have two trees in order to get the pollination right.

Melissa: Okay. So this brings me to my next question because we mentioned black walnuts earlier and trying to maximize your property if you have smaller acreage, et cetera. So black walnuts can have the allopathic properties. So can you explain for those who aren't familiar with that, what it means if there's some considerations when planting black walnuts and then a follow-up to that, are there other nut trees that also have those allopathic properties similar to the black walnut?

David: The black walnut allopathy seems to have its biggest effect on tomatoes and potatoes and things in the solanaceae family. So peppers and eggplants and things like that. If you want to have really happy blackberries, plant them underneath a black walnut tree. They love each other. They love each other. They'll grow like crazy together. So it's not like you're going to plant a black walnut tree and have a desert underneath it. Okay?

Melissa: Okay.

David: It's certain things. A lot of grasses like to be under black walnuts. That allopathy is a strategy to reduce competition underneath the tree and it's only effective against some things. I haven't heard or noticed anything about anything with any of the other nut trees as far as hickories or anything like that. But black walnuts, English walnuts, heartnuts, all of the things in the actual juglans family have that allopathic effect. But it really is more directed at those tomato family type plants. I think you could probably grow lettuce underneath them just fine.

Melissa: Oh, that is interesting. We don't have black walnuts around here, so I've never got to actually put that theory to the test. It's more word of mouth. Not using those types of wood chips in your annual vegetable garden. So I should have known that blackberry would be immune. Blackberries here are considered a noxious weed. We have some non-native varieties that were introduced to our area and nothing kills them. At least they provide good food.

David: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I've got a black walnut out here by my driveway and there's black raspberries who've come up underneath it and they're just as happy as they can be. I hear this a lot about people who ... Oh, black walnuts are bad, bad, bad. It's a limited amount of bad. It's not a death sentence for the garden. You're not going to starve to death in the garden just because you got a black walnut tree in the back of the yard. And the further away you are from the tree, the better off it is. So it's a couple of hundred feet away, it's not going to bother anything.

Melissa: Okay. Fabulous. So this brings me back to our food production when you don't have any nut trees. Obviously this is somebody for the most part that would be starting them. How long does it take after planting before you get a harvest? And I'm assuming that there's probably some variants in there on variety perhaps. And are there any types that produce faster than others?

David: Almonds are a relative of a peach. So two, three years after you plant an almond tree, you're going to have a few almonds. Pecans trees, five to seven years. I tell a story, I planted trees, about five years later we had a literal handful of almonds that I harvested. I picked them, I watched them all summer and I picked them and I brought them up in my pocket and I showed them to my wife and I said, "We have enough pecans here to make a brownie. Not a batch of brownies but a brownie." Okay. We had like six pecans the first year. And then after that it got bigger and bigger and bigger. At 12 years I've got a Lakota pecan tree down there that I gathered about 25 pounds of nuts off of, and the crows probably got close to that many before I got them.

So that tree's going to produce 50 or 60 pounds of nuts a year at 12 or 15 years old. So black walnuts about the same. Hickories are going to be seven or eight years before they start making a few nuts. Hazelnut's about five years. Something like that. The thing is it's just like a fruit tree. The bigger they are, the more they're going to produce. So you want the tree to produce tree for a period of time and then produce nuts. A little tiny tree is not going to produce enough nuts to bother with anyway.

Melissa: And lifespan overall? Obviously if it's not gotten diseased or pest pressure or whatever, is it similar to fruit trees, like looking at 50 years of good virility or?

David: So starting with the almonds about the same lifespan as a peach tree. So 15 to 30 years, something like that. A pecan tree could live and a black walnut tree could live 200 years, 300 years. They grow to be gigantic. They were overstory trees in the river bottoms of the Mississippi River valley, so they were huge trees. And they live a long time if you don't mess with them. So this is a multi generational crop. You're going to plant these and your children are going to eat them and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren and your great-great-grandchildren. So it's a long-term proposition. You certainly want to put them where you want them to be because they're going to be there a long time.

Melissa: Well, I get excited when we start talking multi generational, so I love that. Now, maintenance for nut trees. Do they require pruning as often or in the same manner as ... And I'm assuming maybe the almond is similar to peach in pruning. But how about those other nut varieties?

David: Yeah. The almond is going to be similar to a peach. So the general theme here with fruit trees in general and nut trees is sunlight equals flowers equals fruit. So the more sunlight you have into your tree, the more flowers it's going to make, the more nuts it's going to make. I do some structural pruning when the trees are small, so anything that's growing back into the tree or cross branching or something that's going to rub or something that just growing really wonky and just looks stupid, I'll take that out. I took a large branch off of a major pecan last week because there was a real narrow crotch angle there at the bottom. It was growing really tight. And it was going to break off eventually better me to take it off than to wait for it to break off. But other than that, once the tree gets up to size, unless you've got a bucket lift, you couldn't prune it if you wanted to because it's a huge tree. So after that, really no. There's not a lot of major pruning to do. It's a big tree, so it's going to lose sticks as it gets older. So that's really more you're going to pick up what naturally falls off the tree more so than what you take off the tree.

Melissa: Okay. So do nut trees have a lot of pest pressure? My understanding is that the hickory horned devil isn't a severe pest, but are there any other caterpillars or insects that can really pose a problem to nut trees specifically?

David: Well, anything that we eat, something else eats more. There are always some sort of insect or pest. It more has to do with your tolerance. Okay. So what do you want out of this? So you want a hundred percent full production, then yeah, you're probably going to want to spray fungicides and keep every bug off of it that you can keep off of it. But if you're happy with 25 or 30 pounds of nuts a year, you're going to get that off of a mature tree whether you do anything to it or not. There's very seldom are you going to have an insect that just wipes it out.

There are some insects that live pretty much anywhere pecans live or walnuts live that will do a little damage, but nothing really takes the whole crop. You get webworms, fall webworms, that's one that people see. It's visible. You see the webs in the trees and whatnot. And if you can get to them and you take that first one that you see out, that's the first generation. There's about three generations here in Tennessee. If you get the first generation and throw it in the fire, then you may not have many more of them the rest of the summer. If you let that one make its thing, you'll be covered up with them by the fall. Every year is different. I see aphids some years and no aphids other years. I see webworms some years and not other years. There's a little beetle called pecan nut weevil, and he's really a hickory weevil is what he is. If you run the chickens under trees, they'll eat them all. So there's other ways to take care of these things rather than spraying things all the time.

Melissa: Well, that makes me very happy because that's the model that we do on our homestead that is very little spraying. Occasionally I have to use the Copper fungicide here for peach leaf curl disease mainly, but we try to keep it very minimal and as national as possible. So I have to ask this one. Not an insect, but do you have any tips for dealing with squirrels who like to steal all of the nets?

David: Well, I had a customer ask me that one time. He said, what do I do about all the squirrels? And I said, every tree comes with a lifetime supply of squirrel meat. And he said, but I got 10 trees. I said, you have 10 lifetime supplies of squirrel meat. So squirrels are just something that we have to deal with. You can try to shield the tree to keep them from climbing up the tree, but if there's anything close enough that they can jump from, they'll jump from a tree over into the tree. I've got a friend who refers to those as jumper trees. Anything that gets within about eight or 10 feet of his tree is a jumper tree and they'll climb up something that they don't want to eat and they'll jump over into your tree. There are ways to trap the squirrels. Live trap and otherwise. And they pay guys in Georgia to hunt squirrels in the orchards down there. So they train their hunting dogs, their squirrel dogs and whatnot. So there's ways to get other people to take care of your squirrels. But yeah, squirrels are probably a bigger problem, especially in an urban or suburban environment than they are, than insects are.

Melissa: Okay. So moral of this story is you're going to deal with squirrels, so prepare your heart.

David: Going to deal with squirrels. They're always going to be an issue. I have never seen a squirrel in my orchard. My oldest trees are 12 years old. They've been bearing for several years now. I've never seen a squirrel there. But I have two hawks that live down there and I think they take care of the squirrels for me. Now, will I someday see squirrels? Yes. I will someday see squirrels. There's a thousand acres of trees around me and they will eventually find my ... My bigger problem is crows. Crows love pecans. As soon as the shucks open up and that nut is exposed, they come and pick them out and take them over somewhere and eat them. Them and blue jays and woodpeckers. So birds are a bigger problem for me than the squirrels are.

Melissa: Okay. Yeah. When my trees are small enough, I use ... It's basically that tool netting like tutu skirts are made out of, but obviously they're made for fruit trees. And that's worked really well for deer pressure on the younger trees and the birds. But to your point, once the trees start to get really big, it doesn't work. I can't get any big enough and I can't get up high enough in order to net them. So yeah.

David: Yeah. Another little mammal that bothers young trees in particular is the meadow voles will actually eat the roots off of them. So I try to keep the grass away from my trees around the ground right around the trunk. Especially until they get up to two or three inches in diameter. The voles don't like to be seen. They don't like to have that bare ground above the top of them, so that keeps them away. But if you let the grass grow up tall around your tree, or if you have them in a pasture where there's a lot of field mice, you'll see your tree tilted over to one side one day and it'll look like a little tiny beaver ate the bottom off of it. But that is a pretty big issue with some growers, especially if you have a large field mouse population. They will be pretty hard on your young trees. And once tree gets bigger, they can handle it. But when the trees are young, it can be a problem.

Melissa: Okay. You know the little tree guards that you can put down low, do those offer much protection or just keep the grass and the foliage back and you're good?

David: The tree guard keeps the deer from rubbing the bark off of them. But the field mice do their damage under the ground. They burrow over to the roots. They love the bark on the roots. If you've got a bare area where the air patrol, the hawks and owls and the foxes and coyotes can see that bare ground, they move the ground a little bit when they're digging their tunnels and they can be smelled by predators and that keeps them back.

Melissa: I hear more barn cats are in order.

David: Probably so. Probably so.

Melissa: Okay. So next set of questions here. And this may be variety dependent. Maybe there's some general practices that are going to overarch. But what is the best way to harvest your nuts?

David: It depends on what you got. So your almonds still have a little bit of the shuck that sticks to them, so you've got to remove that. And a lot of people will shake the tree and knock them to the ground. There's a product called a nut wizard that rolls on the ground. It's a wire basket that you can roll on the ground. It'll pick up just about any kind of nut if you get the right size. There's a big one for black walnuts. There's a medium one and a small one for pecans, and then there's one that would do almonds. And you get them down to where they'll pick up little small acorns or brass from your shooting range or whatever. But it's a very nice product for that, especially if you just have one or two trees. You plant 50 of them and you're going to want something bigger. And kids absolutely love picking up nuts at that thing because they can just roll it around on the ground and there's a little wire dumper that goes on a bucket and it makes a lot of noise when they go in the bucket and everybody gets a kick out of picking up the nuts. It doesn't take long to pick up 20 pounds of nuts with a Nut Wizard.

Melissa: Okay. So for those two have never harvested nuts before when they're ripe, I'm assuming that they just fall to the ground.

David: They do. So walnuts are not ripe until they drop to the ground. If you see a walnut and the husk is black and it's still hanging in the tree and you reach up there and pull it off and take the shuck off, that nut's not going to be fully ripe. It's not going to be dried out. A pecan is ripe when the shucks open up, but the nuts don't drop until those shucks dry out. So the nuts may be ripe first week of October, but they may not start dropping until the first week of November after you had a freeze and they begin to dry out. When the trees are small enough, you can shake the tree, just give it a good shake and that'll knock most of them out. On bigger trees if you don't have a way to shake, you'll just have to wait until they fall out. And that could be all the way up to Christmas before all of them come out.

Melissa: Well the good news is it doesn't sound like you're going to bruise like you could get with ripe fruit. So yeah.

David: No. They don't bruise. You don't have to worry about that.

Melissa: So for storing your nuts is best practice with or without the shell?

David: That's a good question. A lot of commercial producers freeze them in the shell. Then they take them out and shell them and put them back in the freezer. They take up less room if you shell them first. If you vacuum seal them, they should be good for a couple of ... Three years, two or three years. Put them in a food saver bag and throw them in the freezer and they could be good for a long time. They are perishable. So the nut meats are perishable. If you crack the nuts and leave them on the kitchen counter in a week or two, they're not going to taste very good. So they have a high oil content and that oil will go rancid over time if you don't keep them at least refrigerated. Now we keep shelled pecans in a cooler at about 34 degrees and they hold up really well for a long period of time. But if you've got been a home refrigerator and you've got onions and garlic and other strongly aromatic things in there, pretty soon your nuts are going to taste like everything else in the refrigerator. So they'll pick that up.

The thing about pecans and hickory nuts in particular is they are so aromatic. You taste them through your nose. They've just got all kinds of these volatile aromatic compounds in them. If all you've ever eaten is pecans from the grocery store that have been sitting on a shelf in a bag for a year, you've really never had a good pecan or a good walnut.

Melissa: I've never had one then.

David: You've never had one. We were tasting pecans in our orchard this fall, and I've got a lot of different kinds because I grow my trees to grow graft wood to graft trees with in my nursery. So we're tasting nuts and oh, this one's really good. Oh, this one's got a higher oil content. This one's more aromatic. Oh, this one tastes a little bit like maple syrup. So you've got all of these different .... They're subtle differences. It's not like wow and wow. It's not like a sweet apple and a tart apple. It's more of a subtle difference. But everybody had their favorite nut. Robert likes this one and Katie likes that one and I like this one over here. And there's a middle of the road that everybody likes, but then everybody has their specific ones they like the best. A lot of people get hung up on the size. They want the great biggest nut they can find. And those usually have the least flavor. There's some great big ones out there that taste just like cardboard. That big nut has the same amount of oil in it as the little one does and the flavor's in the oil. So a smaller nut is actually going to be more flavorful than a big nut is.

Melissa: Okay. So size can help us determine if it's going to be flavorful or bland. But are there any other ways to tell other than tasting them fresh?

David: I don't know that I've had one ... When I tell you that one is more bland than the other one, it's still good. It's just not as good as this over here. So growing them yourself, all of them are going to taste better than anything you can buy. But no, I've never had one off the tree that was bad unless it had a bug bite or something in it where it had an off flavor for a different reason. But if the nut's good, it tastes good.

Melissa: Okay. Well I feel like I'm definitely missing out and I'm like, we need to have nut tasting, they do cheese tasting or wine tasting. We should have nut tasting tours at different orchards.

David: There is so much diversity out there. If you do fruit and do apples, you know that there's all kinds of different flavors in apples. I think apples and other fruits are a little more dramatic in their differences in flavor. But pecans, hickory nuts ... So many people are missing out on shagbark hickory. I love a good pecan, but a good shagbark hickory just ... It blows a pecan away. The black walnuts have a lot of variation in flavor. Some are real strong, some are not as strong. There's a difference in color. A lot of people want these great old big pecan halves. But you know what? A little pecan half on top of a cupcake looks a lot better than a great big pecan half on top of a cupcake. And I've seen people do pies where they make patterns in the top of the pie with the pecans and the smaller pecans you can make more detailed patterns in than the big ones. There's a lot of cool things you can do with these things as a food and it's just we need to be creative and think about what we would like to do.

Melissa: Okay. So this is my next question, which may actually be a two-part. One is earlier I heard you say thin-shelled. So do you recommend picking varieties that are thin-shelled? And that is my lead-up to the question on the easiest way to shell the nuts.

David: Okay. So what I was referring to in particular was hickory nuts. So a lot of people have found a hickory nut in the woods and they went into their building and they got an anvil and a sledgehammer and they cracked this thing open and they got these teeny tiny little pieces of nut meat out of there, which taste really good, but they're nowhere near worth the effort. Okay. Well since the late 18 hundreds, there's been a group called the Northern Nut Growers who have been scouring the country looking for all of these new and interesting varieties of things that are the background noise of the eastern forest. They started finding shagbark hickories and shellbark hickories that cracked out in whole halves just like a pecan. And in my nursery I've got nearly 40 varieties of shagbark and shellbark hickory that crack out in whole halves. All of the pecans I have would be referred to as paper shell pecans. You can crack them in your hand. Just take two nuts and put them in your hand and crack them.

I was at a guy's place a couple of weeks ago and he had a black walnut that the shell on the black walnut was less than a 16th of an inch thick. He said, you can't put them in a huller or you'll break the nuts open. They're so thin shelled. So this is the reason that I started a nursery was because there are all these things out there that are not generally available. They're in collections of old guys who are nut tree enthusiasts and they're scattered two trees here and four trees there and all over the country and there's not really a central clearing house to where you can begin to get these things. And that's how I really started doing what I'm doing was to bring all that together and make a source for that for people. As far as cracking the nuts yourself, there are a lot of little tabletop nutcrackers that will work on pecans and almonds and things that crack pretty easy. And then there's a couple of what they call hard shell nutcrackers that people use on black walnuts and hickories. And even the thin shelled hickories are a good deal harder than a pecan. You can't crack them in your hand. But those hard shell crackers.

So the Native Americans, those hickory nuts that nobody can seem to get anything out of, they would just bash those with a rock and scoop them off into a pot and simmer them and make what they call nut milk. So what they call hickory nut milk. And the oils and the nut meats would float to the surface and the shells would sink to the bottom and they would drink that like a tea or like a milk or a coffee or something like that. And it's a really, really wonderful way to enjoy a hickory nut. But they also collected the thin shelled ones so they could eat the nut meats too. And a lot of places they find these improved varieties near areas where Native Americans had large habitations. So the genetics is better in areas where the Native Americans lived.

Melissa: Oh, that is really interesting. And I have a podcast actually on pressing your own nut and seed oils. Is there a specific nut that lends itself better for pressing oil or has I guess I should say more oil in it?

David: Well there are some people pressing pecans for oil. What they're usually using is the little tiny native nuts, little bitty nuts. And they run them through a press and press pecan oil out of them. There is a developing interest in doing hickory nut oil and they're actually using pignut and bitternut, which are not normally what we would think of as a desirable nut to eat. But the oil doesn't have any of the astringency that the bitter nut has. So when you press the oil out, you get hickory oil flavor. So the oil carries the flavor and the nut. Once you press the oil out of it, it's just starch. But these nuts, they're decent size. They have a very thin shell on them. Bitternut is bitter. It has a very strong astringent flavor to it. But if you press the oil out of it, you get hickory oil and it has a very high ... Well, my brain's not working right now. Smoke point. So you can get the oil very hot before it-

Melissa: Nice.

David: It does have enough flavor to flavor whatever you're cooking with it. I haven't tried it, but I would imagine it would make an excellent salad dressing because it would have that hickory flavor to it.

Melissa: Yeah.

David: There are people who take the outer bark off the shagbark hickory and boil it or simmer it and add a little sugar to it and make hickory syrup. I had some of that a couple of weeks ago and it tastes just exactly like the wood smells. It's just delightful. And hickory and pecan wood was the traditional wood that they used throughout the middle of the country to cook barbecue with because the hickory flavors the barbecue.

Melissa: Yes. I love a good smoked meat. It's fascinating how much you can ... You just change the flavor by changing the wood that you're using. That's probably a whole episode.

David: That's a whole thing.

Melissa: It is. That's a whole other topic. Which brings me to one of our last questions. What benefits do nut trees have ... Excuse me. Besides providing nuts is food? And you actually just gave me one there when we're talking about using the bark, but are there other benefits?

David: Well, they make a great shade tree. So as far as that is concerned, they're beginning to use nuts and silvopasture so your livestock's going to gain more weight if there's a little shade in the pasture. Well what better way to do that is to have a nut tree that produces a crop as well. The wood is useful. Of course the nuts are useful. I've forgotten chestnuts all together through all this stuff. But chestnuts are ... Some of the finest pork in the world is produced in Spain in chestnut orchards where they finish the pork on chestnuts. So feeding it to stock that is able to process the nuts. A lot of people, they crack their nuts and if there's little pieces in there, they throw it out to the chickens and the chickens clean it all up.

The timber is valuable on the black walnuts. It's a little less valuable for the hickories and the pecans, but it's still useful. We're now doing pecan kitchen cabinets and pecan flooring and all that other stuff. So the wood is useful. In the long, long term when you get ready to harvest these trees at the end, pecan and hickory has some of the highest BTUs as firewood as anything in the United States. They're native trees, so they're good for bees and butterflies and birds. A lot of native wildlife, native insects use these trees as habitat. Actually the shaggy bark on the shagbark and shellbark hickory is nesting habitat for a lot of bats in the eastern United States. They raise their babies underneath that shaggy bark. It really is sad that we don't use these trees in our regular landscaping because they're so valuable. They were here before we were and they're perfectly adapted to where we live and they do a good job for us. A lot of people think they're messy because the nuts fall and the shucks are laying on the ground and all this stuff. Name me a shade tree that doesn't drop something. They all drop something.

Melissa: Yeah.

David: Leaves or something.

Melissa: Why not have it be a food production for people in livestock? I think about all parks and urban environments and everything, and if we had fruit trees and nut trees there instead of just ornamental. Anyways, that's again, it's another subject. But I love that you are cultivating and making available some lost varieties for lack of a better term. So for folks who are interested in learning more about those varieties, more about what you're doing, more about nut trees, what's the best place for them to find you, David?

David: Well, I've got a website, rockbridgetrees.com. And you can look up the website. I've got a lot of different varieties on there. I have some blog posts about things. Some pollination charts and other things. And we do a lot of native edible pawpaws and persimmons and a lot of other things. We do a lot of flowering trees for beekeepers. But we've been doing that nursery now for about 14 or 15 years and we ship all over the country except for places that won't let me ship there. So California's a little narrow-minded about things. There are a few places in the country that I can't send pecans. But pretty much everything else can go just about anywhere else.

Melissa: Okay. And I have to ask this. I meant to ask it earlier and I forgot. When we're talking about flowering and bloom times with nut trees, the only one that I know of this is a crab apple, which will pollinate any other apple variety. Is there any varieties like that within in the nut trees? Like if you get this variety, it's going to pollinate any type of almond for example, or is the crab tree really the crab apple I should say, the only one that really does that?

David: If you were to go and look at my pollination chart, you'll see that every tree is very different as far as when it produces pollen and when it has female flowers available to be pollinated. Some varieties have pollen available for three days.

Melissa: That's short.

David: And it's done. And then you have some that are more than two weeks. So you have to look at what has pollen available for the longest time and that will grow. The other issue with pecans in particular is when do they ripen? Are they going to ripen? If you're in southeastern Michigan, you need a pecan that ripens in September.

Melissa: Yeah.

David: If you're in South Georgia it could ripen in November or December. It doesn't matter. You're not going to get cold enough to get frozen anyway. So looking at ripening dates is one of the key things. And then you've got to have two that are pollen compatible. And you can have one that pollinates this one, but this one doesn't pollinate that one. So you want this one to pollinate this one and vice versa. And the chart helps that out a lot because it used to be just any type one and any type two, which was how they refer to the pollination types would pollinate. And that doesn't exactly hold true a hundred percent.

Melissa: Okay. An excellent point on your location. I'm in Western Washington and we're pretty close to the Canadian border, so I would need something that would be coming on in September and not that later winter so good point for that. Well thank you so much. I think there's a lot more that we could dive into, but this is a great starting place and I'm going to have to go and check out some of those varieties.

David: Okay. Well thank you for having me on again. And anytime you want to talk about these things again, we can dig in deeper anytime you want to.

Melissa: Awesome. I will probably take you up on that.

David: All right. Thank you.

Melissa: Well, I hope that you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did. David has so much information and we are going to be continuing the series next week highlighting some different crops that aren't maybe as traditionally thought of or talked about growing them on the homestead. So next week we're going to be talking about something that is highly edible and very much delicious, but also has medicinal properties to it as well. So we'll leave you with a little bit of a teaser there. And then we will be diving into ... Many of you commented about last week's episode and had lots of ideas for some of the homestead foundational or basic deep dives. So those episodes I will be working on them and those will be coming your way as well. I will see you next week. Blessings and mason jars for now, my friends.