Our trees - In a nutshell

Is it wrong to be thinking about chocolate when you’re out for a walk?

The reason I’m saying this is that last night we visited our trees that were planted a few years ago – if you have followed us for a while then you may remember them; we planted hazel trees, oak trees, holly trees, sweet chestnuts and many more. In fact, we planted a few thousand trees and dug a pond and it’s become rather a wildlife haven too. I heard my first skylark there and I’ve shared a few photos of the trees and pond over the years, and how it has developed. Tonight, however, on our visit I noticed a development, much to my delight!

The hazel trees are starting to produce fruit, well cobnuts to be precise. I’ve looked it up and cobnuts are commercial hazelnuts, but ones that are grown to be eaten before they harden and go brown and become hazelnuts, you may have seen them in the shops around September time, we’ve had them before, and they taste rather good. We will be leaving ours on the trees to harden so they will be classed as hazelnuts.

We have some other hazel trees that were planted a few years earlier and they look like they will be producing this year too, but I’m amazed that the very small, three-year-old trees are producing too.

Anyway, back to the chocolate, some of you will remember the tagline from a popular chocolate bar which is “Topic – a hazelnut in every bite”, so with apologies to Mars chocolate that was all I could think about earlier, sadly I hadn’t realised they were discontinued in 2022!

We are hoping to have a small crop of nuts available in our shop for sale later this year for those of you who maybe have visiting squirrels to your gardens, we have been asked for these for a few years now and hopefully this year we will have some zero food mile hazelnuts. This is great news since a majority of the hazelnuts we get from shops are actually from Oregon in the United States, Turkey or Italy!

I thought it may be fun to pull together some interesting facts that I learnt about hazelnuts while I was googling them, so, here we go! Let me know if you learn something new.

1. Another name used by children for hazelnuts is ‘filbert’ nuts.
2. Ferrero uses ¼ of the global hazelnuts – so much Nutella and so many Rochers.
3. To harvest the nuts most people wait for them to drop by themselves, but some farmers actually use a machine to shake them off a bit!
4. Hazel used to be seen as a magical tree – so maybe our orchard area is magical – and in the days of yore us English used to carry hazelnuts as lucky charms.
5. There are around 16 varieties of hazelnuts, and the trees can produce for 80 years, so our grandchildren can enjoy the fruits of what we have planted.