Hazelnuts

We have been busy harvesting hazelnuts the last couple of days. Most of those we gather are the American Hazelnut, Corylus americana .There are two native hazelnuts in our area, the American and the Beaked Hazelnut, Corylus cornuta. The Beaked are usually ready to pick earlier in our area and never seem to be as plentiful. We try to pick a huge pile of hazelnuts because it is very deceptive as to how many nuts you actually have. The pic below is of one days picking.  The plastic they are on is about10 feet wide and 30 feet long.

It will take about five gallons of nuts in the husk to produce one quart of nuts in the shell. That quart of nuts in the shell will only yield about a cup of nut meats!  Removing the husks is a matter of letting them get very dry and then somehow crushing the husk to release the nut. We put a few gallons in a strong bag and stomp on them. The nuts are then hand separated from the husk fragments. At that point the can be stored and shelled at your convenience.

Here is a pic of them on the bush. These are average size clusters with 5 to 7 nuts in each cluster. Some times clusters will be found with 15 -20 nuts in a cluster but that is very unusual. You can roll the nut out of the husk with you thumb when they are ripe enough. One year we picked for two days without doing that important test first. None of the nuts were mature enough to be usable. Now we check each bush as we pick to make sure the nuts are mature. We do sell some of these beauties but we really like them and they are very labor intensive. There is a movement to improve and thereby commercialize our native hazels but given all the other wonders that have been bestowed on us by improving on mother nature I,m not sure I am buying into that.