Filberts

Last year at this time I was looking at our filbert (hazelnut) trees and remarking that the trees looked healthy and showed no signs of the filbert blight that had decimated many stands of trees in the Willamette Valley.

The blight was diagnosed in the 80’s, I found an old  write up about the blight in The Salt Magazine NPR/OPB from 2013;

Growers estimate that 99 percent of the United States’ crop comes from Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Just a few years ago, the industry was on the verge of collapse due to a disease called Eastern filbert blight. Now, years of research have brought blight-resistant breeds to fruition.

The disease first hit the region in the late 1980s. Infected trees develop cankers, which gradually kill off the branches.

“It’s just like cancer for trees, there’s no real answer to it yet,” says Tanner Koenig, a young farmer who grew up fighting blight. “It’s just some of them have a 20-year lifespan left, some of them, it’s five. Some orchards, we’re taking trees out already.”

The Valley had changed a lot over the last seven years, many orchards were replaced with strains of trees that are blight resistant. The news this year is that this will be the best, biggest filbert crop for Oregon ever. Our four trees are not doing so well.

The old trees in our orchard looked good last year and even this spring leafed out well, but it is obvious now that many branches are sick. The leaves are falling off and the bare branches are brittle dead already. It looks like we may still get some of a crop if we can keep the j-birds out of the trees, but our line of trees that lined the side of the shop for more than 80 years are coming to an end.

This fall we will be on the lookout for replacement trees but it takes between five to eight years for the first crop.

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