Q. How do you plant a Macadamia Tree?

A. First off, planting seeds (the nuts) is not the best way to grow a macadamia. Macadamias are easily grown from seed, but the seedlings may take 8 to 12 years to bear a crop and the quality of the nuts is unpredictable. Grafting is the most common method of producing nursery trees, and may take 2-5 years to bear a crop.

But, for those of you who insist on growing a macadamia from seed, here's how you do it. First, the simple way; second, the way the pros do it.

Simple Seed: Obtain a fresh macadamia nut, preferably one that has not been heated and dried. Place 1/2 inch below the soil. Potting soil is best; some sandy soil is also fine. Macadamia seeds, like most seedlings, love heat and moisture. Plant them in spring or summer or use plant in an area where the soil will be around 80 degrees F. And keep the soil moist. New macadamias do not need or like fertilizer. Don't fertilize for 6 months.

Professional seed: This article was published by Jim and Barbara Russell in the 1987 California Macadamia Society Yearbook.

PRODUCING YOUR OWN MACADAMIA ROOTSTOCK
Jim & Barbara Russell
Article from the 1987 CMS Yearbook

Fallbrook, CA. A few years ago my wife and I purchased the one and a half acres of land to the east of our home, and then after doing that some research, we decided to plant macadamia trees on it, 172 of them. We purchased those trees as one-year-old seedling rootstock from a local nursery for $6.00 each, and then one year later they were grafted to the "Cate" variety.

Last year the three acres of land just to the south of our property was offered for sale, and since it overlooks our home, we decided to purchase it to protect our privacy. After much research, we decided that macadamia nut trees would be a viable crop for that land also. However, this time we decided to see if we couldn't limit some of our initial cost by growing our own rootstock.

The first step was to draw a general layout of the grove to see how many trees we would need, and that turned out to be 500. We would be using a spacing of 15 x 20 feet. That is, 15 feet between each tree in the row and 20 feet between each row. At the prevailing rate of $8 per tree, it would cost us $4,000 to purchase trees from a nursery. We decided that if we could produce our own rootstock for less than one half of that amount, it would be worth our time, effort, and investment to go ahead with the project.

That decision led us to make a list of all the materials we would need in order to germinate the macadamia seeds and grow them for the first year until they would be old enough to plant in the field. Table One is the list of that material with the cost of each item.

Table 1. Nursery Materials Needed to Produce One-Year-Old Seedlings.
Nursery Heating Pad	199.00
2 - 4' x 8' x 1/2" sheets of ACX Plywood	14.95
4 - 2" x 2" x 8" Lumber	5.50
20 feet - 1/2" PVC Pipe	3.20
1 - 1/2" PVC End Cap	.18
1 - 1/2" PVC Hose Fitting	.52
1 - Small can PVC Glue	.37
8 - Nursery Mister Fittings	8.26
1 - Garden Hose	9.50
1000 - Macadamia Nut Seeds (Note 1)	39.00
1000 - Plastic Nursery Bags 5" x 41/4" x 18" x .004	152.20
120 - 2 Cubic Foot Bags of Potting Soil	240
1 - Year of Water	30.00
1 - Six Station Water Controller (Note 2)	60.00
1 - 3/4" Plastic Electric Valve (Note 2)	16.95
Projected Total Cost	779.63
Note 1. We planted twice as many seeds as we needed to cover those that would not germinate, those that wouldn't live, and also provide us with the opportunity to select only the most precocious for our grove.
Note 2. The cost of the water controller and the electric valve are included for illustration only. Both will be needed and used in the irrigation system of the grove regardless of how the rootstock are obtained.

Since the projected total cost was significantly less than our previously established target amount, we decided to go ahead with the project.

The thermostatically controlled nursery heating pads that we purchased is two feet by five and one half feet, and we believe it is needed for the successful germination of the macadamia seeds. Those seeds like bottom heat, heat coming up from the bottom of the planter, in order to germinate. However, the literature we read indicated that without that heat sometimes less than half of the seeds would sprout, so while we might be able to forgo the heating pad by planting at least three times as many seeds as are needed, and since the heating pad is the next-to-largest expense item on the list of materials, it might be acceptable to do that. However, we decided that there is the possibility that we might have a future use for that heating pad, plus the whole project was gamble enough and we wanted to tip the scales in our favor as much as possible.

We used our skill saw and cut the sheets of plywood in half lengthwise, giving us four pieces that were two feet wide by eight feet in length. Then using one of the two inch by two inch pieces of lumber, which we cut into four, two foot lengths for support in the corners, we constructed a box with no top or bottom which was two feet high by two feet six inches wide by five feet six inches long. That size was dictated by the size of the heating pad. This box formed the major part of our germination bed. We placed that germination box on the ground in our backyard in a location where it would remain for the next six months. Then we placed the heating pad on the ground, centered inside that germination box and attached the thermostatic control to the outside of that box. Next we put approximately one and one half feet of potting soil inside the germinating box (seven, two-cubic-foot-bags of potting soil) and pushed the temperature probe for the thermostat deep into the potting soil. We used one of those empty bags from the potting soil to cover thermostat control to keep the water away from it. In order to get water to the seed bed, we drilled three equally spaced holes into a six-foot length of the half-inch PVC pipe and screwed one nursery mister into each hole. The threads on the brass misters made their own threads in the PVC pipe, and they also made a water-tight connection.

We placed the pipe down the center on top of our nursery box and placed a stick upright in the potting soil to take the sag out of the middle of the pipe. Next we glued an end cap on one end of the pipe and the hose connection onto the other end. One end of our garden hose was attached the that fitting, while the other end of the hose was attached to an electric valve that is controlled by our lawn water controller.

Now we were ready to plant the seed nits. We waited until the middle of October to acquire fresh macadamia seeds, when we did the planting. We planted them one inch apart in every direction including one row all the way around the inside edge of the box. We pushed the nuts until they were just covered by the soil. We found that our box would hold considerably more than the 1,000 seeds that we needed, approximately 1,300.

Finally, we set the thermostat for 85F degrees and plugged it into the electrical outlet on the side of our house and spread a plastic sheet over the top of the whole thing. We used pieces of firewood placed on the ground to keep the plastic sheet in place. We set the water controller for the valve to water the nursery three times a day for ten minutes each time. Then we just sat back and waited.

By the first of December we had lots of little shoots emerging from our seeds, and by the first of February we believed that all of the nuts that were going to had germinated, so we reset the thermostat for 65F to keep from damaging any of the tiny roots that were forming on our new 'children'. By April 1 most of those trees were over six inches tall, and the outside temperature had warmed considerably, se we disconnected the heater and removed the plastic cover to allow our young trees to 'harden off' or adjust to the real world in preparation for transplanting them into nursery bags.

While our little trees were making that adjustment, we were making adjustments also. We were making the preparations necessary for the transplanting operation and also accommodations for those trees once they were transplanted.

Those preparations consisted of filling the 1,000 nursery bags with the content of 113 two-cubic-foot bags of potting soil plus constructing a larger watering system.

For the watering system we made upright supports that would suspend a PVC pipe over the top of the bagged trees, just like we had previously done for the germination bed. For the uprights, we took the remaining two-inch by two-inch lumber and cut them in half, yielding six two-inch by four-feet lengths. We cut a v notch in on end of each of them to hold the water pipe, and we nailed 'feet' to the other end of each piece. The feet were made from pieces of the remaining plywood and served to hold those uprights up. Next we attached misters to the remaining PVC pipe, just like we had done for the pipe in the seed-bed nursery. We attached it to the end of the end of the pipe that had been in the seed-bed nursery, making one pipe 20 feet in length with eight misters screwed into it. The pipe with the hose attached was suspended from the tops of the previously constructed supports and held in place by the v notches cut in the top ends of those uprights.

Then transplanted the young trees from the germination bed into the plastic begs that we had filled with potting soil. For the transplanting operation we used the end of a broom stick to make a deep hole in the potting soil, and using our hands we removed a young tree and placed its roots in that hole. Then the bag with the tree was placed under the new watering system.

Now while we wait for them to grow big enough to be planted in our field, we will be watering them every other day for 30 minutes. We will be removing all of the extraneous growth from each of those trees, thus keeping them to one whip-like trunk. Pruning is necessary to facilitate the grafting that will occur the year following their field planting. Planting is scheduled to occur during spring vacation in April next year. I plan to draft my mother-in-law to help in that planting operation. Stay tuned to this publication to learn how that turns out.