Nanabush Food Forest Stories — nuts

Having failed to report news in a timely manner, let's go with better late than never...  it was thrilling to have our first (small) crop of hazelnuts from 4 year old trees.  Check out some of the hazel close-ups (of both nuts and the male flowers a.k.a. catkins that form in the fall)!  

Seems like only yesterday, I was processing buckets and buckets of black walnuts, testing the structural integrity of double layers of heavy rubber gloves...  This year promises to be similar as those tasty little buggers will soon start dropping en masse.  Thanks to Giacomo Panico from CBC radio for coming over to visit our base camp food forest and try out one of my favourite recipes to use them in, the scrumptious Black Walnut & Lentil burgers with Sour Cherry Salsa.  It was a lot of fun to tour him through the chaos and wonder of a 4 year old...

In fact this post is not about my bridge-grafting operation to save a Clapp pear tree that was ringed by mice over the winter… In our recent organic certification inspection, the conversation came around to what tree seedlings were growing.  Along came a proclamation from someone that they “will never grow butternut”.  I can only assume, this is for fear of the dreaded butternut canker that can inflict trees.  This is in fact why we started a whole bunch of butternut trees from seed last year.  We are happy to be a part of the Butternut Rescue team, and hope...

This past fall was a big year for nut trees in the area. Its called a masting year. Its kind of cool, trees have a reproduction strategy to out-wit the typical consumers of their bounty. By only producing moderate amount of nuts, squirrels and the like do not have a population explosion. Then, once and a while (and likely also based on environmental factors), a nut tree will go loco, producing way more than typical years. And more interesting is that all nut trees in the area are in synch. So, 2013 was a masting year, and we tried our...