hazelnut

When to prune hazelnut trees?

Botanical name
Corylus avellana
Family
Betulaceae

Hazelnut trees are pruned from January to March. They are planted from October to March. They are harvested from September to October.

Hazelnut trees are woody perennials. The edible parts are the seeds.

hazelnut
Photo: Lemmikkipuu · CC BY-SA 3.0

Hazelnut trees through the year

JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
Pruning
Planting
Harvest
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  • pruning
  • planting
  • harvest

In short

Pruning
from January to March
weeks 5 to 12
Planting
from October to March
week 40 to week 13 of the next year
Pruning cut
a renewal cut
Spacing between plants
4 m
First crop
after 3 to 4 years
Harvest
from September to October
weeks 39 to 44

Growing conditions

🪨
Soil
loamy
🧪
pH
6.5 to 7.5
☀️
Sun
full sun
💧
Water
little water
❄️
Frost
overwinters outdoors
📏
Height
3.7 to 6 m
🐝
Pollination
needs a pollinating variety nearby

Pests and diseases

Listed here is every problem for which the sources name this plant as a host. The problems are not listed in order of how common they are.

Aphids

pest
Signs
Colonies of small aphids sit on the shoot tips and the underside of the leaves. The leaf curls and puckers, and sticky honeydew is left on everything below. The viruses they carry are more dangerous than the feeding itself.
Prevention
Go easy on nitrogen, because soft sappy growth is what aphids are looking for. Encourage the predators (ladybirds, lacewings, parasitic wasps). Use a reflective mulch, which puts them off settling, and a strong jet of water to knock the colony off the tips.

Honey fungus

disease
Signs
The plant dies suddenly, often in mid season and without any decline beforehand. Peel the bark at ground level and under it there is a white or cream sheet of fungal tissue, thin as the skin of a mushroom. In the soil there are black or brown strands like bootlaces. In late summer and autumn tufts of honey brown mushrooms with a whitish ring on the stalk appear by the stumps or over dead roots.
Prevention
The fungus spreads through the soil with its strands, from a few centimetres to a good hand's width below the surface, and infects the roots of a living plant when it touches them. So do not leave stumps and dead roots in the ground. No plant is completely resistant, but the source names privet, lilac, viburnum, weigela, forsythia, butterfly bush, rhododendron, thuja and walnut as particularly susceptible.
What to do
There are no products. The only thing that works is digging out and removing every infected root and stump, which takes away the food without which the strands in the soil do not grow. A vertical barrier of rubber or thick plastic sheet, buried about half a metre deep and standing a few centimetres above ground, stops the spread into an unaffected part of the garden.

Powdery mildew

disease
Signs
A white, floury coating spreads over the leaves, first on the lower and older ones. The leaf under it yellows and dries up. The fruit stays small, because the plant loses leaf surface.
Prevention
Plant resistant varieties, leave an airy spacing and sun, and clear the debris at the end of the season. Unlike most fungi it is not helped by wet foliage, since it spreads in heat and high air humidity, in a dry summer too.

Silver leaf

disease
Signs
The foliage on one branch takes on a silver sheen and the branch then dies. Cut across, the dead branch has an irregular dark stain in the middle that does not follow the rings. On old dead branches bracket fungi grow later, with a whitish woolly upper side and a purple brown underside. A silver sheen without the dark stain in the wood is not this disease but the result of drought or cold.
Prevention
The spores are active from September to May and enter through wounds, above all through pruning cuts. Remove dead wood before fruiting bodies grow on it.
What to do
Cut the affected branch off as soon as you can, well below the point where the dark stain in the wood ends. Disinfect the tools as you go and remove the cuttings at once, because fruiting bodies go on developing on branches left lying about. Do not paint the wounds as a matter of routine, but do it where the disease keeps coming back.

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Related plants

The plant below is in the same botanical family (Betulaceae).

Sources about the plant: GBIF Backbone Taxonomy, NC State Extension Plant Toolbox, Oregon State University, Penn State Extension, Royal Horticultural Society, Utah State University Extension, Wikidata. Checked between 14 and 28 August 2026. The problem descriptions also draw on: Clemson Cooperative Extension, EPPO Global Database, KGZS, UF/IFAS Extension, University of Maryland Extension, University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Extension.