Hazlenut disease/problems

[DuncanM]

Hi,

I'm very new to gardening, having purchased my first home a few months ago I immediately got the bug and have started planting what seems to me a big array of edible plants.

I bought some hazlenut plants from Focus (to take advantage of them going into administration) and they looked fairly healthy when bought. I planted them with a good mix of compost and soil (which is extremely sandy) to help retain water a bit better than the natural sand on its own.

They've been in the ground around 5-6 weeks now and at about 2 weeks the a few of the leaves started turning brown, and with brown speckles (but not many) on them. I googled it (being my only resource at that time) and came to the conclusion it was leaf scorch, I've since put some slow-release all-purpose plant food in and around the soil of the hazlenuts to help. Although it's helped a bit there still is quite a bit of it. Am i on the right track and should I allow the plant a few more months to see how it progresses? I picked hazlenuts as I heard they were quite hardy.

Thanks

[vicky]

I wouldn't have thought you'd have too much trouble with hazels. Could well be scorch - we've had lots of rain and sun together recently which can scorch the leaves. I'd advise just leave them and see what happens!
Welcome to the vine too!

[endymion]

We have a red leaved Hazel that's been in the ground for about ten years. This year it's really suffered because the ground dried out, and we didn't think to water it - it's lost a lot of leaves. Now that we've had quite a lot of rain we're hoping it will recover.

Not sure how that helps you, but you have said you're on sandy soil - so could lack of water be the cause?

[snohare]

Could be that your soil does not have enough lime to keep them happy. They really do like much less acidic soil than most other trees or shrubs - chalkland is really their native habitat. You can get the occasional one that adapts to more normal acidity, but they struggle; the tree nursery I used to work for had a dismal record with hazels, even on sandy soil - almost certainly because it was acid soil underlying. So feeding them may be giving them a slightly higher chance of getting the nutrients that they are short of due to the wrong pH. (But that is a guess, not a diagnosis ! ) Maybe a dose of lime is your real "cure". If you don't want to buy expensive garden lime, try roasting eggshells and grinding them to powder which you then apply to the soil.
They certainly are hardy, I had ones outside my garden last winter but one that survived minus twelve and below for a week, lows of minus eighteen, and never showed the slightest signs of damage.