Hazelnuts a new trial crop in Alaska

Self-described "plant fanatic" Josh Smith is behind one of the new crops in both Palmer and Fairbanks: Hazelnuts.

Smith grew up in North Pole and has been growing food his whole life. During his Air Force career, he was stationed in North Dakota, where he noticed farmers growing hazelnuts, chestnuts, walnuts, apricots and pears in conditions that were not so different from Fairbanks.

"I started thinking, wow, there's so much potential in cold climates," he said.

He ended his career at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage and immediately started testing some of the crops he had seen in his travels, including hazelnuts. One of the hazelnut trees at his home in Chugiak is 7 years old. He's also growing walnuts and chestnuts.

“Hazelnuts are one of the most resilient crops you can grow,” Smith said. “They’re drought-resistant, they’re flood-resistant. They’re resistant to cold and heat and every extreme you can imagine."

Hazelnuts are low-growing, bushy trees or shrubs, topping out at about 15 feet. Although plants produce both male and female blossoms, they do not self-pollinate, so multiple trees are needed to produce nuts.

"Not only do they serve as a valuable food source, but there's biofuels, there's oils we can extract from the nuts,” he said. Hazelnuts can also be used in alley cropping, the practice of interspersing perennial crops with annual crops, which could sequester carbon, hold water and reduce erosion.

A North Dakota farmer who has been growing hazelnuts for 30 years in an area with winter temperatures of minus 40 degrees, gave Smith a bag full of hazelnuts, which he sprouted. Some are planted at the Matanuska Experiment Farm, some at the Fairbanks Experiment Farm, and others in various locations in both Southcentral and Interior Alaska.

"I've known (UAF professor emeritus) Patricia Holloway for years," Smith said. "She and I have go back and forth when it comes to talking plants. I ended up mentioning hazelnuts, and realized I had some extras." He asked if Holloway was interested in trying hazelnuts in some of the microclimates around Fairbanks to test their hardiness.

"Some of these could be reliable at Zone 2 or even Zone 1, but the only way we're going to find out is planting a large number of them across Alaska and see what sticks," he said.

Glenna Gannon, assistant professor of Sustainable Food Systems at UAF, and Katie DiCristina, manager of Georgeson Botanical Garden, agreed to plant hazelnuts in the garden, as well in the agriculture field across the railroad tracks and about 100 feet lower in elevation from the garden. Gannon planted the seedlings in late September, nestling the young plants in compost and layering with a frost cloth to protect them as much as possible.

Smith's hazelnuts in Chukiak haven't produced yet, but a friend in South Anchorage has picked ripe hazelnuts from his bushes.

"Part of this is we want to start developing new crops and part of this is we really want to hit the point home that things are changing here in Alaska and my big mission is food security," Smith said. "The fact is you guys don't hit negative 50 every year nowadays, and the fact that your growing season is getting longer, that's opening up a lot of potential that wouldn't have existed even 20 years ago. "How do you bring people into that conversation? You do something bold, and I think these hazelnuts are part of that."

Restoration of vetch infestations to pollinator-friendly habitat

— Gino Graziano

Bird vetch is commonly seen climbing fences and trees along roadsides in Southcentral and Interior Alaska. Unfortunately, this isn’t good for the trees and other plants that vetch climbs and smothers along roadsides and where it begins to grow into forests which has led many of us to consider the plant invasive and in need of management. On the other hand, those pretty purple flowers are fairly attractive to some pollinators, and because pollinators are so important, we don’t want to remove pollinator habitat when we remove the bird vetch.

Here is where research at the Matanuska Experiment Farm is helping to find solutions. Others have been working to increase the availability of native plants that are attractive to pollinators for use in the revegetation of roadsides, gravel pits, and even for use in home flower gardens. We are comparing visitations of pollinators on these flowers with vetch. It is commonly thought that diverse plantings of native flowers will attract a greater diversity of pollinators, and we want to understand which plants do the best job of attracting those pollinators.

That’s not all. Before the restoration with the native plants, the vetch is removed. We have compared the removal of vetch with three herbicides that could be used to control vetch on roadsides or forested areas. We will next use soil from the treated areas to grow the desired pollinator species for restoration and evaluate the impact of the treatments used to remove the vetch on the potential success for restoring native pollinator plant species to roadsides and forest edges.

Swiss team visits AFES forest reference stands

On Sept. 2, Glenn Juday led a field trip to AFES’ long-term forest reference stands in Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest for Professor Markus Stoffel and staff of the Swiss Tree Ring Dendrolab. The lab is part of the Institute for Environmental Sciences at the University of Geneva. Stoffel was on a trip across Alaska with his local research colleague Benjamin Gaglioti, research assistant professor at the UAF Water and Environmental Research Center.
 
The Swiss lab specializes in the application of tree ring information to geomorphology, climatology, ecology, archaeology and natural hazard assessment — especially gathering evidence to predict snow avalanche hazards in the Swiss Alps. The visiting University of Geneva Dendrolab group included Ph.D. student Mattias Coullie, and scientific collaborator Sébastien Guillet.

Juday prepared a series of field trip guides to each of the six forest reference stands in the experimental forest, and has been handing them out to 2023 season visitors to get feedback and evaluate their effectiveness. The guides are highly visual and are made up of color illustrations of graphs, air photos, historical photos, times series photos and key data series.

 

The Sept. 2 Bonanza Creek field trip's first stop was at Parks Loop South (200+ year-old white spruce stand), where the visiting team was delighted to learn about the interaction of climate, tree growth, spruce seed crops, squirrel populations, canopy ecosystems, insect outbreaks, and tree death and recruitment. After the rain stopped, the group managed to drive on the muddy Bonanza Creek Road and visit two stands burned in the 1983 Rosie Creek Fire – Reserve West (white spruce) and Burned Birch Control.

 

The measurements and monitoring in the AFES reference stands at Bonanza Creek Experimental Forest have been used in some national international research collaborations and syntheses, and the Swiss visitors may become part of another one.

Busy summer for Forest Soils Lab

The Forest Soils Lab had a successful summer of fieldwork in the boreal forest.

The team installed three new sites to monitor the spruce bark beetle outbreak near Cantwell and Denali National Park. This project is in partnership with Ahtna, the Alaska Division of Forestry, and the Geophysical Institute. Helene Thomas and Leo Ahlers collected weekly plant physiological data to monitor tree decline after they were infested.

Matt Robertson developed, constructed, deployed, and monitored the field installation, in addition to conducting weekly unmanned aerial vehicle flights to observe the physiological changes from a remote sensing perspective.

Jessie Young-Robertson, Sam Dempster and newest employee Nathaniel Bolter conducted weekly measurements at Caribou-Poker Creeks Research Watershed to monitor forest physiology, stress responses and growth. There are 10 long-term monitoring sites at the research watershed, including areas where permafrost is degrading and deciduous woody plants are moving in.

A long-term monitoring site was installed at an aspen stand at Bonanza Creek LTER, where half the trees were sprayed with a pesticide to reduce the impact of the aspen leaf miner and the other half were left to experience the full impact. Researchers conducted weekly measurements to monitor the impacts of the aspen leaf miner on tree growth, water use, and physiology. This work is in partnership with Diane Wagner.

The lab also established a research site with Jan Dawe and OneTree Alaska in a birch stand off Farmers Loop Road to provide sap collectors with information about real-time sap flow in the spring.

The Soils Lab recently purchased a lidar to use with the UAV and multispectral camera to monitor forest growth, stand properties, and physiology from the air. This will help the team scale measurements to larger areas and better interpret remote sensing data with on-the-ground plant physiology measurements.

Bolter will be getting his master's degree in Natural Resource Management, in addition to being a research technician on the dendrochronology project (in partnership with Glenn Juday). Bolter attended the University of Arizona tree ring course in June to learn the basics of dendrochronology and visited Dr. Greg Goldsmith at Chapman University in August to learn how to measure wood anatomical features (to relate dendrochronology to other physiology measurements). We are excited to have Nathaniel join the lab!

The entire lab took the Alaska Soil Geography course this summer, with Jessie teaching the plant ecology portion. The team collected samples, brainstormed research ideas, and dug soil pits and learned about soils and permafrost.

Young-Robertson also presented a talk on her wood harvesting project at the Alaska-Canada Wood Energy Conference in early October.

Second year of garlic trials gets underway

A few days before snow started falling in Fairbanks, Glenna Gannon, Kristen Haney and graduate research assistant Soumitra Sakhalkar planted garlic in a trial plot at Georgeson Botanical Garden.

It’s the second official year of garlic trials, Gannon said, which are a collaboration between UAF and the Growing Ester’s Bioversity group.

"We grow out the garlic as part of the trials, and at the same time we're also acclimating it for our growing conditions here in Fairbanks," Gannon said. "A portion of the seed that's grown goes to their annal fundraiser garlic sale. At the same time, we're testing different varieties to see how well they perform.

This year, they planted 23 varieties of garlic, three more than in 2022. The trials are in the early stages. Gannon said they are just seeing which varieties do well and aren’t replicating trials at this time.

Hardneck varieties grow well in Alaska, although Gannon is also testing one softneck variety, Chilean red, which is highly valuable in the culinary scene.

"There's been been a few farmers who have dabbled with trying it on their farms," Gannon said. "We're including that in the formal trial here to see how it compares to these much hardier hardneck varieties that have historically done better here."

A porcelain variety called North was the big winner in 2023, she said. Typically, 2 pounds of seed are ordered for each variety of garlic tested. The North variety more than doubled that at harvest, with 4.3 pounds.

"That was highly competitive with varieties that have been evaluated here in the past," Gannon said, noting that Music and German extra hardy are among their best performers.

Among the varieties being trialed this year are varieties that tend to do well in the Pacific Northwest and the Upper Midwest.

For each 2 pounds of garlic Gannon orders as seed, she said she can expect from 40 to 70 cloves. To try to keep the plots even, she plants about 60 cloves of garlic in each plot. The larger the clove, the better it produces, she said.

The soil is tilled well and the cloves are planted 5 to 6 inches apart, about 4 inches deep. She uses a bulb planter to punch the initial hole and backfills with compost. Soft and fluffy soils are key, she said.

"You really don't want garlic to be planted into hard, compacted soil," Gannon said.

Rows are spaced 12 inches apart, bisected by drip irrigation. The garlic will be harvested late next summer.

Garlic overwinters well, and in fact need a cold winter period in which to form a bulb, Haney said. And while it could be planted in the early spring, in Fairbanks, cold soils turn quickly to wet and then to summer, so there's not a good period that allows for bulb formation.

"Really, from a producer standpoint, it's so much nicer to plant something now that you don't have to worry about in the spring when you're doing everything else," Gannon said.