Gideon

BRIEF:
Never the biggest nut on the table and never the smallest. The tree we would bet on in a bad year.

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.

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