Growing Organic Walnut Trees

Hi, I'm Tricia, an organic gardener. I grow organically for a healthy and safe food supply, for a clean and sustainable environment, for an enjoyable and rewarding experience. English or Persian walnuts are a lovely tree for fruit or shade, and the nuts are delicious. Plant your walnut in full sun and space them about thirty feet apart. This California black walnut is an example of a full grown tree that can reach forty to sixty feet tall. The California black walnut is often used as root stock for most of the bare root walnut varieties. Walnuts are native to the Balkans and they're hardy to USDA zone four. These beautiful trees need well-drained soil at least five feet deep. To ensure good cross-pollination and fruit set, it's recommended to plant two different varieties. Walnuts bear male and female flowers on the same tree, but especially when the trees are young, they do not tend to shed pollen at the time when their female flowers are receptive. Think about what's growing around your walnut trees. Don't plant them next to a vegetable garden. There's toxins in the roots of walnuts that can leach out and kill some susceptible plants. Walnuts like ample water. Water them infrequently but deeply. Using these mini sprinklers, you can get three inches of water about every two to three weeks to irrigate your trees. When placing your irrigation, be careful not to get any water on the trunk of the tree. That can cause some diseases. Harvest the walnuts when the hulls crack and then dry them out but not in the sun, either in these onion sacks or on a tray. Prune your walnut trees in late fall or early winter. Pruning your trees later on in the spring will cause them to bleed a lot of sap. Train your walnuts to a central leader or a modified central leader training system. For more information about that, check out our video on how to prune apples or our video on how to prune cherries. Mature walnut trees only need light pruning and that's just to thin out the canopy a bit. Cut the branch all the way back to the collar but don't cut into the collar. Avoid heading cuts where you just cut the branch to the beginning of a bud. If you are taking out or shortening a branch, use a thinning cut where you cut back to a branch. Take out these little upright water sprouts. Leave these short branches in the middle of the tree because those will produce flowers and pollen. In addition to cutting these low hooking branches, cut off any dead branches. If you need to take out a large branch because of damage and you need to use a pruning saw, there is a special technique. I'll show you how. It's important to preserve the branch collar. The branch collar is where the tree will grow wound wood and heal the cut. But it won't grow if the collar has been damaged. To take a branch out this size, we're going to use a three cut method so that we don't damage the tree. Starting about a foot from the branch collar, saw a third of the way through the branch from the bottom. Then switch sides and saw the branch completely through from the top a few inches beyond your first cut. Now that I've taken off these two heavy branches, I've eliminated a lot of weight so that when I make my final cut, I can cut and not worry about damaging the branch collar. See the ridge of this bark? Make your pruning cut with an equal and opposite slant. Do your final cut close to the collar at the proper angle. Avoid cutting branches that are more than four inches in diameter. This one at four inches is borderline. Two inches is normally the maximum size of branch you want to prune. Cutting a branch larger than four inches in diameter will increase your chances of decay. Plant your protein and grow organic for life!