The 2025 AGM took place on the 18 June 2025, via Zoom.
Thank you to everyone who attended, and also to those who volunteered to be on the Committee. We would like to take this opportunity to thank our outgoing Committee members for their years of service to the Association. We would also like to welcome Les McCracken to our team.
Your new Committee is:
Chair Peter Barrowclough
Deputy Chair Paul Rollin
Treasurer Michael Petherick
Committee Alison Bentley
Kasia Henderson
Les McCracken
Murray Redpath
Deb Whiteside
The formal matters were completed with reports from the Chair (Peter), Treasurer (Michael) and Executive (Christine), and then the new Constitution was voted in. HGANZ is now compliant with the Incorporated Societies Act 2022. The highlight of the evening was Alison Bentley’s presentation of her 7 year Hazelnut Field Trial in the Rotorua Catchment area, funded by the District Council.
At a Hazelnut Growers Association Field Day on 22nd June last year, Assoc Prof Clive Kaiser from Lincoln University told us that he had recently seen overseas the use of nitrate fertiliser to “burn” suckers off, achieving good sucker control.
I decided to experiment with this option. I have around 2500 whiteheart trees in Canterbury on good soils with irrigation. They are 17 years old.
I purchased a 20kg bag of 27% Calcium Ammonium Nitrate (CAN) from Farmlands. I made up a 17% solution in 120 litres of water and sprayed it on my suckers on the 11th of Nov. It was not very soluble and gummed up my sprayer. This took about an hour to clean out afterwards. But I did manage to get the spray on half of my orchard or around 1250 trees. The remaining half of the orchard was sprayed with Buster at my normal rates. The CAN appeared to be quite fast in acting and the suckers showed wilting within a day. I was encouraged.
Early wilting of suckers sprayed with CAN.
However the suckers sprayed with CAN recovered and required a second spray whereas the suckers sprayed with Buster did not.
I was wary of using CAN again because of its insolubleness so I purchased Sulphate of Ammonia. I made up a 10% solution and sprayed it on the suckers for the same half of the orchard I had tried the CAN on the 30th of Nov. It was much more soluble and the sprayer did not require cleaning out.
I also sprayed the remainder of the orchard again with Buster on the 7th of Dec to get a fair comparison.
We took an overseas trip during December and I was out of the country for a month. It was a very wet period with frequent rain giving good conditions for strong sucker growth.
I came back to strong sucker growth on the trees sprayed with sulphate of ammonia which were now reaching up into the canopy. Control for the Buster sprayed suckers was better, but not complete.
Strong regrowth after a month for suckers sprayed with Sulphate of ammonia
Better control for suckers sprayed with Buster during the same time period.
Conclusions.
For those of you that grow Whiteheart you will know that they are prolific suckering trees. While it would be preferable to control them with a fertiliser rather than an agrichemical, this limited trial would indicate more frequent applications may be needed, or more research done. Sucker control is a major issue and once they reach up into the canopy they can no longer be sprayed without impacting the tree. Suckers can then grow up into the top of the canopy restricting light and thus nut formation. I will be returning to my regular use of Buster for control.
The 2025 AGM of the HGANZ will take place via Zoom in June.
This year it is important for members to vote on the adoption of the new Constitution, brought about because of changes to the Incorporated Societies Act 2022. More information about these changes can be found here:
As well as reading and voting on the Constitution changes, now is a great time to consider joining the HGANZ Committee. Small organisations need everybody to stay curious and participate. Apart from Officer positions (President, Secretary and Treasurer) Committee members rarely have a ‘job’, their contribution comes from their experience and different perspectives – and often who they know in different organisations.
Meetings are held on a Tuesday, at 7.30pm on Zoom, and there are six per year.
We have members who are not receiving emails from HGA, and only discovering an event is on through contact with other HGA members. We think this is mostly a problem with the spam/junk filters at the recipient’s end. To ensure our emails are getting through, we plan a specific mail out to solve this problem.
In April we will send an HGA all-member email with a link to Google Forms. We ask that everyone who receives the email to please click through to the Google Form. It has one question – “did you receive this email?” and you reply “yes” because you obviously did.
For those that do not reply, we will follow up with a phone call/text to check that we have the correct email address. If the email address is correct, then we need that member to search their junk mail and then add the HGA email to the “safe sender list” (or other ‘not junk mail” function, depending on the email provider).
Thank you in advance for your help resolving this issue.
I have a turbo vac nut harvester for sale. I purchased the harvester in April 2014, and I am asking $2600 for the unit. I live near Rolleston in the Selwyn district.
Professor Shawn Mehlenbacher, the long-time leader of the hazelnut breeding program at the Universtity of Oregon, announces his retirement. He introduces his replacement, Gaurab Bhattarai.
Scientists in Spain are working on techniques to identify where a hazelnut was grown and the cultivar. So far it’s only for hazels from the European region. The first link is a general read, the second links to a scientific paper with more detail.
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