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All seedlings come from macadamia nuts. If you know someone with mature trees that produce nuts then you can get them. Otherwise find a nursery selling macadamia seedlings.

All of the trees are grafted.

They are all grafted. Almost all macadamia orchards in Australia have grafted trees. The most common root stock comes from a nut of the H2 variety. A few of my trees have died above the graft. I plan to try to graft them myself when I have time. and the root stock is better established. There is one tree I plant to try it out on, using H246 or H849 as the scion.

@@Karl_Degraa In India Grafted plants is so High Price.. It's not easy to farming commercially.

Hi. These trees had been in the ground around a year when the video was taken.

The flowers appeared by themselves. We did nothing to promote them. The next year there were a few nuts from the flowers.

This tree is a H849 variety tree. Yes it looks well structured and happy.

Its not really a tractor but more of a mower. The Iseki still works and is reliable which is really all you can ask for though I'd like to get the four wheel drive working on it. I don't have time to work on it though.

Hello Chant. I'd strongly recommend pruning a tree back to the strongest stem. After this video the trees in my orchard are generally looking like trees rather than shrubs. There is a video I put out around five months ago showing trees that have been pruned to a central leader. However some trees seem to have a more complex structure where they have one central stem coming up half a meter, then they go all over the place. I'm leaving them but pruning them on the following rules. Cut branches growing: Inwards Upwards Across

Most trees in this video were planted in May 2019. This video was filmed in January 2021 I think. So the trees would have been planted around a year and a half before filming this video.

We watered the trees when they were planted and have not watered them since. However its been raining pretty well non stop since September 2020.

Hi, the holes are around three quarters of a meter, 75cm deep. The trees were planted 4 meters apart and the rows are 8 meters apart. Spacing of trees is not a settled issue. The 8 by 4 is a traditional spacing. Modern spacing is more likely to be 10 meters by 5 meters as this gives the trees more room to grow and works better with modern farming equipment. We have a friend who came from Malawi. It sounds like a good place to live.

The price of macadamia trees depends on their size and where they are bought. We normally buy them in what I think are described as four or five litre pots and are anywhere from 75cm to over a meter tall. Their price in Australia are around $20 a tree. This is from wholesale nurseries. All these trees are grafted and are of specified varieties. We once got smaller grafted trees in very small pots. They cost us I think $7.50 each. The price of a single tree at a retail nursery will of course be more expensive than buying hundreds of trees from a wholesale nursery. In regards to seedlings I have seen some commercial nurseries sell them. They are described as H2 variety non grafted trees. They cost around $5 or something like that. Again they are selling many of them to one customer as they are a wholesale nursery. I've never bought them.

@@Karl_Degraa Great info thanks. Seems worth it rather than trying to stuff around with grafting yourself.

Leaves are long, wide and wavy margins

@@timhills5695 Hi Tim, I looked up the H246 on the Macadamia Variety Identifier guide. It says the following about nut bunches. Few bunches of nuts mainly singles - increasing tendency as tree ages. As this tree is old and has bunches of nuts then yes its not a 246 tree. I always thought these old trees were this variety. Looking at the guide this tree might be a H783 variety? I no nothing about the 783, whether it was a commonly planted tree 35 years ago or not. I quite like the idea of it being a different variety tree as these old trees are central in the orchard are in a good position to foster cross pollination.

Hi John, the Kubota tractor is good. We've only operated it for around 45 hours so can't comment on the long term. The only issue we had was after it was once taken out in very wet and muddy weather the engine would sometimes hesitate and die when the hydrostatic pedal was depressed. I asked about this on a FB Kubota forum and the advice was water had gotten into a safety switch under the seat. The tractor sat undercover for a few months and on the last time I used it it was working fine. So I think the water evaporated. Other than that it works great. Some people don't like the rocker pedals. I kind of like them as there is no confusion between forwards and backwards. My Iseki has forward and back pedals and overall I prefer the rocker pedals. The one bad thing about the pedal layout are the brake pedals. They are on the same side as the hydrostatic pedal. So to do a brake turn you need to have both feet on the right side. Its not too hard to do but it would be better if the brake pedal was on the left side, especially considering the clutch is only needed sometimes. Other than that the only other issue I've had is it was very difficult to change the hydro ranges from low to mid for example. However this seems to be loosening up. In regards to pricing if you are looking at a 30 HP tractor then there are L and B series machines. When shopping the L series seemed to be better priced as the B series seem to be a premium tractor. Id get a price from a Kubota dealer. Generally the impression is they are expensive machines, but they are comparatively not. This tractor cost me I think just over $42K. This was with a few extras besides the basic tractor. In comparison it would be hard to get a tractor of this power and size from another brand at this price. Overall I think the H246 is a great variety of macadamia tree. They just are a great all rounder. I mainly have H849s which are similar to the 246s, like a modern version of them. They generally are meant to start flowering around six years of age but a lot of mine are flowering that are less than half that age.

I have one of these, fuel tank is a little too small for my liking but good otherwise.

@@mattikelby5571 I ended up buying a John Deere tractor, 1025R and becoming more acquainted with it. It should do most things that I want to do.

@@johnmanera4097 How much did the 1025R cost? Recently we priced a Kubota BX2380. With a 4 in 1 loader, mower deck and rear hydraulic remote the recommended retail price was not much less that it cost us to buy the MX5200.

@@Karl_Degraa Hi the John Deere 1025R which just included the FEL and ballast box nothing else for $24450. I will still need to buy a slasher and maybe a carrier of some sort for carrying 200L water barrels or other things. But I’m not sure if that was a particularly good price, but I think it was somewhere around the recommended price. Though not a demo model it was however over 1 year old, so I didn’t get a discount for that. The reason I didn’t chose a kubota came down to not liking the rocker style pedal for forward and reverse and the fuel filling was on top of the motor. The John Deere had a good position for filling the fuel and 2 pedals, one for forward and one for reverse. I was going to check the New Holland tractor again, but it was a bit more expensive than the John Deere 1025R.

Hi Prakash, I can't help you out as I'm only a very small grower with very limited means in Australia. Maybe there are macadamia growers in India you can contact?

Hi, we still have it. We still use the Iseki to mow between trees. However we are looking for a mower to attach to our tractor to do this job. Till we find one we will have to keep the Iseki. If we sell it I guess we’d ask for around $3k for it but would be willing to negotiate. I think it cost us around $4k to buy the Iseki back in 2019. It’s going fine but be aware the 4wd function doesn’t work so if you have steep land it’s not the machine for you.

@@Karl_Degraa Can you get in touch with me somehow mate if that's ok, you tube won't let me send my number

​@@monaco1414 my email address is bombora270@gmail.com

Hi again mate Just wondering if you are still thinking of selling the mower Shaun

@@monaco1414 Hi Shaun, I think I'll be keeping this mower till we have a replacement of some sort at hand. This might be a while as I might have to pay for some other things before I can spring $20K or so to replace the Iseki. I've seen a few similar machines for sale online so keep an eye out.

The seat is probably as far forward as it can go. Maybe the seat rails can be modified to allow the seat to go a bit more forward. Its probably a good idea to do this if possible as she likes driving the tractor so it would be good to make driving it as easy as possible.

The spacing between trees? We planted the trees in this area in rows 8 meters apart and 4 meters between each tree.

Look to my reply to Mohan Patel.

Yeah I regularly see the tree at the end of this video. It does not receive any attention or care, is on the side of a suburban road and next to a concrete driveway. It looks to be doing fine and drops plenty of nuts. Some maca trees are just good.

@@Karl_Degraa thankfully I'm lucky then I can't get citrus to grow properly despite a decade of trying And the Macca was unstoppable in the same soil ..its clay largely. I see the tree at the end of the video isn't grafted it's got a prickly leaf edge

The main reason why macadamias growing from seed look different to productive trees is productive trees are grafted. So known good trees have a branch removed from them which is then grafted onto another tree that has been grown from seed. The seed or nut the root stock tree is grown from comes from a known variety of tree that is very hardy and strong. I have one video where I talk about this and how grafted trees of the same variety are genetically the same as each other if they come from the same variety of tree. So for example in my orchard there are the following varieties, H246, H849, A4, A26 and MCT1. I've read the narrow genetic diversity of commercially grown macadamia trees is of concern. There are efforts to broaden the genetic diversity of commercial varieties with people going out in the Australian bush looking for wild macadamia trees. An organisation called the Macadamia Conservation Trust has volunteers looking for these wild trees. There is one tree in my yard that we planted from seed. This seed comes from an old macadamia tree at my workplace. I have no idea what variety it is but it doesn't produce many nuts. I don't think nuts bought in shops that have been shelled would be fertile. You would be better off planting a nut that is still in its shell.

@@Karl_Degraa great answer thank you so much. I live in Morocco we don't have this tree so we don't have complet seeds too. Unfortunately !! I will try plant uncovered seeds. I want plant them in my country not for agriculture production. but for personal love of rare plantes like macadamia Brazilian nut .. I planting now many avocado seeds of Hass to looking for New varieties after years I don't care if they are good or not. I want give them the chance to live as my family.

@@espoirespoir3710 I’m not sure where you can get uncracked nuts in Morocco. Possibly you could get them from America. Macadamia trees are grown in Florida. If you do find someone who can for example sell you a kilogram of nuts, try to get nuts of the H2 variety, if you get a choice.

Not from Australia. I'm not sure how you'd get macadamia trees where you are. Maybe get someone to send over some H2 or Beaumont nuts and then plant them so the nuts from them can be used as root stock in India? Look at how the macadamia industry got going in Hawaii.

The spacing for these trees is 8 meters between each row and 4 meters between each tree. We have some older macadamia trees approximately 35 years old. They have not reached over and crowded out out each other.

We are in Australia. Planting is worked out per hectare. I looked up hectares to acres and it works out to be around 130 trees an acre. Some trees planted in 2020 flowered last year and at least one had a few nuts on it this year. But yeah we expect them to be productive around the year 2026. I quite like looking at this video as it shows the trees as they were just after planting. Some have grown a bit since them, some have not. I'm not too worried about their progress as slow and steady can win the race. Thanks for watching.

If there is root stock to graft to then yes. We will try to graft some trees maybe in two years time. We had a few trees die above the graft. They are coming back as root stock. The nursery we buy most of our trees from will come out and cincture some branches we will be pruning for their own grafting and show us how to graft. Cincturing is basically ring barking a branch. Horticulturalists do it to so the branch gets full of sap and sugars so will be full of energy when its grafted to the root stock. Here is a video on cincturing. th-cam.com/video/kFqW2SAL9vg/w-d-xo.html

My friend is using a solar powered bug zapper.

Possibly. We released lacewing larvae but we could not find any evidence of them having any effect. Another TH-cam channel has information on biological control of pests setting up in the interrow an environment so different types of insects will live. Some of these insects might predate on pest species. th-cam.com/channels/oBt7BgijBzhS-FNlGIOAuQ.html

We planted all of ours in 8 meter rows. The varieties growing bigger we planted 4 meters between each one. We have a few hundred trees that will not grow so big. They are planted 3 meters apart. Row spacing depends on a lot of factors, primarily the size of your land and how many trees you want to have. The general rule is the smaller the spacing is, the more productive the orchard will be in the short term, and the more work there will be in the long term. If I had more land I would have planted them in 10 meter rows and 5 meters between each tree but my farm is pretty small.

Good luck with it. We've just about finished planting our trees. Only doing replacement of failures now.

Lower branches could get in the way of machinery like mowers and harvesters.

These trees were bought in 2020 from Yarrahapinni Nursery which is located at Stuarts Point NSW Australia.

Is it a seed tree or a grafted one.