My favourite nut is the hazelnut. There are four giant bush/tree at my mother's place and one of them yields quite outstanding nuts. In my childhood I usually eat only hazelnut for supper when it was in yield.

In the other hand I live in Budapest now in a terraced house what has a quite small garden infront of the house and an other small one behind the house. I have been planning for a long while to get my mother's hazel to my property somehow but serious problems arised as this hazelnut suckers extremely. The bush I'd like to propagate covers  about an area of our kitchen's size. In my small garden there is no place for tree having such a big volume . Fortunately there is a solution which is a very suitable compromise. The turkish hazelnut doesn't sucker but yields small nuts which tastes neutral. I realized that it could be used as rootstock for my mother's hazel. I ordered a small sapling which rooted well and this year it has reached the size what fits to requirements of grafting. My first attempt happened in march. I collected sprigs from my mother's tree and kept them in the refrig until 24th of march. Then I prepared a whip graft and a cleft graft on the turkish hazel with these sprigs. Unfortunately both of them failed in two weeks.

I was aware that grafting of hazelnut is very complicated. Practiced grafters claim that it has very low success rate. After my first unsuccessful tryings I decided that my next attempt would be budding. I got frigs with small buds secretly from gardener stores and made more than 10 budding on the rootstock. Unfortunately the turkish hazel has thick cork layer covered skin so I was not able to prepare T budding but chip budding. I am not sure that this extremely dry summer was the reason but all of them failed again although I watered the tree almost everyday. I tried it again in july and got the same results. August came and I spent a week at my mother's place. I cut some branches with seasoned buds on them from that hazel bush and brought them to my garden. Fortunately there were quite great rains in first week of that month so the turkish hazel's skin became looze. On 13th of august I peeled the cork from its skin and managed to prepare two T buddings and a green graft on the end of a small branch. After a week the green graft and one of the T buddings were still alive. I decided to complement the failed budding and got a small branch of a hazelnut bush from Zamardi, which is a village at lakeshore of Balaton. That bush yields a small but very tasty nut and has leafes coloured reddish. I made two another T budding on my turkish hazel. To fix it I used a cheap  insulation stripe and a wallpaper cutter for cutting. That happened on 20th of august. 

Today is 17th of september. One bud from the 13th of august's attempts is still alive so is the green graft and one bud from 20th of august. Here are the proofs.

T budding from 13th of august attempts:

Sorry for the weak quality of photo. You can see the living green almost 5 weeks old bud hangs out from the black insulation tape. Unfortunately a green leaf in the background  makes hard to realize where the bud is but check the right side of the tape covered area. This bud is from my mother's hazelnut tree.

T budding from 20th of august:

You can see that the almost four week old living bud has a pinkish color according to its parent reddish leafes. The black material around it is grafting compound. Also you can check a remain of failed chip layering below the budding. It's obviously healing, the new callus is visible at borders.

At last this is the green graft from my mother's tree on my turkish hazel.

Check the healthy green bud on the small branch. It is almost five weeks old. Actually it was only an experiment. Unfortunately its berth not so good but I leave it on to see it could bear our winter. So I have a hazelnut tree what has a potencial to yield three different kind of nut. Not mentioned the fact that this configuration really helps the cross pollination which is highly necessary at hazel trees.

To summarize my experiences I made a list of requirements of successfull budding or grafting hazelnuts:

• use seasoned buds only.
• do T budding or V shape green grafting
• use sharp knife or scalpel
• do it in summer. The warm weather helps the callus's growth. Best period is second half of August.
• water the rootstock everyday
• Bud young and thick branch on rootstock. Its skin is more loose than the old one's.
• Coil the wound tight. 

My next duty is to find a solution to save the buds from the cold in winter.

At last sorry about my bad english.

Part II. - a year later.

 Unfortunately the cold winter killed the successfully transplanted buds so this summer I had to try again. This time I did not attempt chip budding but T and inverse T budding. It seems inverse T budding works a little bit better than the usual one. Another important development that I realized the tight tying is very important. The callus of the rootstock tends to grow below the bud chip so it must be avoided by that. We have to rety the buddings  two or three week after the process due to the tight knot is not healthy for the tree in long term. So this time I used plastic rope instead of insulator tape. Generally the cuttings will have healed when three weeks pass under proper circumstances. The most critical factor is the temperature. The higher is the better. The second is the timing. I have one successfull budding from early july but the rate of success was quite low. In the other hand all off buddings in early august are successfull. It seems that in the case of hazelnut the age of buds are critical. Only seasoned buds can result successful buddings. Also an issue to select the proper branch on the rootstock for budding. I found that the main branch ("shudaar" in hungarian) gives the best result. Probably because of the streaming of wetness are the most intensive here in the tree. Now nine buddings will try to survive the winter. I hope some of them will manage it.

Part III - Results

 Success! Check the pictures below!

Part IV. The tree in 2014 autumn.