MacDaniels Nut Grove, Cornell University

MacDaniels Nut Grove
Cornell Plantations Tour of the Grove

September 26, 2004

Nut Grove Home

Special thanks to Mike Duttweiler for the images. See more images from the tour at Mike's website.

Click on images for larger view.

Ken Mudge demonstrates grafting a pencil sized scion onto an older hickory seedling understock. This is normally done in May, and is used to bring new hickory varieties into the collection.

After one year, shiitake-inoculated logs are soaked in the stream for 24 hours and stacked vertically. Here you can see many mushrooms that have grown out of the logs over the last few days. After the tour we harvested about 3 pounds of fresh mushrooms from this particular ring of 6 or 7 logs.

Shiitake mushroom "laying yard," where inoculated logs sit for one year while the fungus grows throughout the wood.

Ken Mudge plants ginseng seedlings into one of our two new raised beds, constructed for growing medicinal plants and ornamentals.

Ken Mudge shoots the giant arborist's slingshot to get a thin rope into the upper branches of a 70-foot-tall hickory tree. Then we can shake the nuts off the tree and harvest them before the squirrles do. The nut samples will be evaluated for quality as part of our Northern Nut Growers Association grant.

We sawed and planed this section of a grafted hickory tree we found lying on the ground. Apparently it died as a result of delayed graft incompatibility, which can be seen as the bulge and crack on the left and right edge of the trunk at about the the midpoint, where the wood makes the transition from scion genotype to stock.