Our first significant hazelnut harvest
Last year, our hazelnuts weren't ready to pick until early September.
But when I was weeding around the bush on Friday, I noticed a few
clusters had fallen to the ground, and several of those nuts were gnawed
open on one end. That's a classic dining pattern for flying squirrels, so I figured I'd better bring in any nuts that were ready ASAP!
Our hazelnut bush is now
six years old, and this is our first significant harvest. After a little
handpicking, I realized that the easiest method was to clear away the
few weeds that had grown up through the cardboard beneath the bush, then
to shake each limb vigorously. About half of the nuts dropped and were
easy to pluck off the ground. I'll go back next week to try to beat the
squirrels to the remaining clusters.
(Look who joined me in my harvest morning --- a beautiful katydid!)
Back at the trailer, I
decided to dehull the nuts right away. Really, I would have been better
off waiting for the hulls to dry since some required prying action to
get the leafy lobes apart. But it's been so wet that I was afraid the
nuts would mold in their shells, so I went ahead and dehulled, ending up
with about a cup of hazels in the shell for this first batch. Not a
whole lot, but pretty exciting since we only got five hazelnuts total
last year!
Meanwhile, back in the
garden, our bush has already created proto-flowers to produce next
year's nuts, as you can see if you look closely at the photo above.
Except for the multi-year wait for the first harvest and the possible
squirrel problem, hybrid hazels seem to be an excellent low-work food plant. I'm glad we set out three extra bushes last fall!
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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Nayan --- This particular bush is an unnamed hybrid from the Arbor Day Foundation. Since planting that one, breeding programs expanded to produce named varieties, so our later bushes are named (but I can't report on them yet since they're too young!).
As for bush vs. tree --- hybrid hazels naturally grow as bushes. You can train them to tree form, but I decided to keep it free form.
Tressa --- I'm not sure there are any fast-to-production varieties, or at least I haven't seen any advertised. I think catalogs just vary in the amount of time they list, some nursery owners being more cautious than others. I saw one catalog that said hazels bear in two years, which made me disappointed that mine took five!
We got our most recent bushes from One Green World and they're growing well. But I don't think they're faster than any other hazels!