Gideon

BRIEF:
The heaviest crop in the trial, in the worst year on record, nearly double the next best tree. Cold hardy, drought tolerant, and one of Greg Miller's six standard mother trees for a seedling orchard.

DETAILED:
Gideon came out of a 1972 planting in Carroll County, Ohio, where Greg Miller selected it — along with Amy and Peach — from seedlings his father had raised. It has since become one of the six standard mother trees Miller recommends to anyone establishing a seedling orchard.

The nuts are medium sized, twelve to eighteen grams, and unusually uniform and attractive. The tree is cold hardy, drought tolerant, and a consistent bearer.

What sold us on it is a single figure from a Tennessee trial. In 2011, the worst year that orchard recorded for both nut size and yield, one Gideon tree produced 7.45 kilograms of nuts — the heaviest crop of any tree in the study. The next best was a Colossal at just over half that.

Gideon is never the biggest nut on the table and never the smallest, and across multiple trial years it stays that way — stable sizeshift, holding its size as the tree matures rather than shrinking under its own crop. In a hard season it is still standing there with a crop. On a working farm that is worth a great deal, and it is why Gideon appears on every serious grower's short list we have seen.

← Previous Variety    Next Variety →