Reclaiming Feral Hazelnut Trees

Hello!

I have an old orchard on my property that I'm working to reclaim. 9+ very old apple trees, at least one pear, and a number of hazelnuts that seem to have been part of the orchard, as they were placed in logical spots in the orchard. The hazelnuts have gone totally wild though, and I'm curious if I'm dealing with disease, or just behavior that would be normal for a wild hazelnut.

So every hazelnut tree on my property has more or less the same shape - a whole bunch of broken trunks coming out of the same spot. It seems that they will send up a sprout, it will grow until it's maybe 4 inches in diameter, then die and snap off somewhere between the top and the ground. Sometimes the bottom half will survive and send up more sprouts, but the base is always sending up sprouts, and some of mine have 20+ trunks coming out the same spot. Others will tip over and grow from there, with multiple branches taking on the leader role for just that trunk. They remind me more of a big bush at this point, and are ugly and hard to deal with haha.

Is this normal hazelnut growth? I would much rather have a single-trunked tree I could prune, harvest from, take care of, and have them take up less room in the orchard. My concern is that I might have a disease in the area that's killing branches when they get to a certain size, and if I prune them down to one trunk it'll kill them. It's also possible that these trees are WAY older than I think - we're still working on getting the history of the property, but my aunt (who is more knowledgeable than me about fruit trees) estimates that my apples are 50-80 years old.

Any advice?
Thanks!

hazelnuts are naturally pretty bush-form. i doubt they’ll react that well to being tree-form, as they will always be sending up new branches from ground level. they’re frequently managed as a coppice - once an individual is big enough to make harvesting and other management difficult, cut the whole thing to ground level and let it start over again. the idea is to rotate which plants you do this to, so you’ve always got a few producing while the others are growing back.

Bartholomew Olson wrote:Hello!
..... It seems that they will send up a sprout, it will grow until it's maybe 4 inches in diameter, then die and snap off somewhere between the top and the ground. Sometimes the bottom half will survive and send up more sprouts, but the base is always sending up sprouts, and some of mine have 20+ trunks coming out the same spot.
......

I don't know if this also might fit with symptoms of Eastern filbert blight...?  Or how much of the current stocks of Hazelnuts in the PNW are blight resistant.  If these are older stands, they likely don't have resistance and my just be growing new sprouts until the infection kills the older shoots.

https://pnwhandbooks.org/plantdisease/host-disease/hazelnut-corylus-avellana-eastern-filbert-blight

Interesting, I've never heard of the hazelnut blight - seems like every useful tree has a blight though so I should have assumed!

I think you're correct, but I took some pictures to have the internet help confirm.

For the last one I found some branches that are showing evidence of the infection - the top one was still alive, and the others were dead. I wasn't able to find any with active infections, but it seems like evidence enough that they're black pockmarks down the bark that look like they popped open.  The other two are full trees that show the full picture of just how much dead wood there is.

Thank you for pointing out the blight, but now I'm sad that I both know about it and have it in all my trees. :(