Corkscrew hazel nuts

[gostiwooz]

Has anyone grown the nuts from their corkscrew hazel - do they produce corkscrew hazel plants or normal ones?

Just debating whether to plant them or eat them

Surprised you get the choice! Squirrel has all of ours.

Googling suggests that the contorted growth is the result of a recessive gene. So your contorted tree must have two copies of the recessive gene (because if it had one normal and one recessive, the effect of the recessive gene would be suppressed and the hazel would not be contorted). So there are two scenarios:

Your nuts are the result of self-fertilisation, so they will all have two copies of the recessive gene and be contorted.

Your nuts are the result of cross pollination with a normal tree. So they will all have a recessive gene (from the contorted tree) and a normal gene (from the normal parent), and none of them will be contorted.

Just conceivably there's a third possibility - the "normal" tree has a copy of the "contorted" gene, in which case half the nuts will have inherited the contorted gene from the "normal" tree and half will have the "normal" gene. So half the offspring will be contorted. But given the low number of contorted trees that have arisen naturally (Once, possibly twice in many centuries), compared with the huge number of hazels, this is vanishingly unlikely - a theoretical possibility only.

So to answer the question - eat the hazel nuts, and propagate by grafting.

There's only nine of them. Maybe I will plant them all this year, see what happens and if it is a fail, I will eat next year's crop

If it's a fail, and you grow on all 9 till they flower, and don't let them get cross pollinated only let them pollinate each other, the next generation should have 25% contorted. A long term project, though!