Shaking my nuts

A brief sojourn on the farm in between autumn birding trips and there are plenty of jobs to catch up on.
A while back I harvested all the cobnuts. For those who don't know, these are the cultivated equivalent of hazelnuts which produce a crop much earlier in their lives than their wild ancestor. The crop is heavier and the nuts larger too.
I planted my cobnuts six years ago and I have been getting an ever-increasing harvest for several years now. For the first time this year my red cobnuts have produced nuts too. They are not so prolific but the trees are beautiful with their maroon leaves.
People often ask when to harvest cob/hazelnuts and I would say to harvest when they start dropping to the floor, unless you have hungry squirrels or jays in which case go earlier. They are delicious eaten 'in the green' but should dry well enough to store for longer.

Cobnuts are experts at hiding under leaves, so much of my harvesting is done by feel. However many times you go round the tree, you always find another one hiding away.

This year I went for the shaking method too, giving the whole tree a good old rattle. This dislodged maybe a third of the nuts, falling all over the ground and my head!

In all I collected two large baskets of nuts, then I disappeared off birding and left Sue to sort them all out as usual. She spent a couple of long evenings taking off the outer husks. At this stage they begin to look like the hazelnuts we buy in their shells at Christmas. Some have almost dried whereas others are still quite green.

A night in the dehydrator drives off any moisture to prevent them rotting. Alternatively you could spread them out on a mesh in a dry, airy place (easier said than done).

Sue also picked most of the almonds as their soft husks were starting to open and some had already dropped to the ground.

And so to this last week and my return from my birding exploits. I had a long list of harvesting and tidying jobs, but this was interrupted when I found a whole load more almonds under the tree. There were more still on the tree, so a good old shake of the branches had them clattering down around me. I then collected them up - over 500 in all.



Taking off the hulls was pretty easy and they went to the sheep who devoured them with gusto.

Next on the harvesting list were the beans for drying but, half way through collecting, news came through of a bird of hen's teeth level rarity on North Ronaldsay - an adult male Siberian Blue Robin.

Only the 4th Siberian Blue Robin ever

recorded in Britain (and the first adult male).

Two were dead and all the other three failed

to do the decent thing and hang around

till the second day (including this one).

Harvesting was abandoned as I embarked on a flurry of phone calls. Sue put a pizza in for me to replace the slow cooked lamb which she was lovingly preparing.
An hour later I was heading off into the night. 588 miles to the Scrabster ferry!

Kirkwall harbour, Orkney - as close as we got

30 hours later I was pulling back onto the farm in the middle of the night. Mission failed!
But some opportunities are so few and far between that you just have to take the chance when they come up. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

If I didn't have that attitude I would probably still be stuck in an unfulfilling life back in London.

Everyone's a Fruit and Nut Case

My one piece of advice to anyone setting up to be self-sufficient would be to plant fruit straight away, orchard trees, soft fruit bushes, nut trees and hedgerow fruit. It is an investment which takes a little while to start paying off, but it has rich rewards for the patient.

Our orchard is just starting to produce properly and can only go from strength to strength in the next few years. As summer gives way to autumn variety upon variety of apple comes ready, each with its own unique taste. There are pears and plums aplenty too, as well as more unusual fruits such as medlars. We have gradually added to the trees we first planted and will hopefully soon have an annual crop of apricots too.

All these, of course, can be bought in the shops (except maybe medlars), but some of the hedgerow plants I have planted are even more of a treat. Crab apples make a wonderful jelly, as well as being an excellent source of pectin when added into preserves.
And what about the elderberry - its flowers make an excellent cordial and an even better champagne, or let the berries ripen for one of the best wines. This year we harvested the berries (leaving plenty enough for the birds) to make pontack sauce. This old English recipe has enjoyed a recent revival, probably due to its inclusion in Hugh F-W's repertoire. It is a heady infusion of elderberries, vinegar and spices. The closest equivalent I can think of is Worcestershire Sauce. Pontack sauce stores indefinitely in the larder and develops its taste over the years, so Sue makes a big batch every few years. It adds an incredible richness and depth of flavour to meat dishes, particularly stews and casseroles.
Elders poke out from the edible hedgerows I have planted as well as being dotted all around the smallholding now. They are easy to propagate, grow well here and feed the wildlife as well as us.
Alongside them are blackthorn bushes with their yield of sloes. When you say sloes, most people instantly think of gin, but Sue prefers to add them to vodka. Once they have imparted their unique flavour to this beverage, the same berries are then used to make sloe port. Definitely a hedgerow fruit for the drinkers! We almost had a sloe disaster this year. After a blank year countrywide in 2016, our edible hedgerow has again failed to produce any sloes (or Mirabelles for that matter). I think I have been cutting it back too much in the winter and taking off the fruiting wood.
Sue's disappointment was tangible, but then I remembered that I had planted a few blackthorns in the woodland area which I have created. A closer inspection yielded several bushes laden with sloes ready to pick - a thorny job and it takes a while to fill a basket, but yesterday (edit - now a while ago as this post was superseded by other events) we collected 2kg of sloes, plenty enough for a lot of alcohol. They have gone into the freezer to simulate the frosts, as left on the trees the autumn thrushes would take them all before winter bites.

There are hawthorns and rowan berries too, though we don't have much use for them and leave them for the birds. Rosehips explode colourfully from the hedgerows too and every few years Sue makes a batch of rosehip syrup, a rich and sweet source of vitamin C. I actually grow plenty of rosa rugosa as its flowers brighten up the borders of the soft fruit area and it produces the plumpest, most vivid hips.




Back to the orchard fruits and damsons take centre stage. Our tree produced abundantly this year. They are a handsome looking fruit and handsome tasting too. All varieties of plum produce, in a good year, bountiful crops too much for simply eating the fruit straight. Pies, crumbles and jams go without saying, but Sue has had the dehydrator and the ice-cream maker busy too. Her plum yogurt ice-cream is delicious and dried fruits or fruit leathers make excellent healthy snacks for a hungry worker.






Finally there is the rather poshly named nuttery. The nut trees were an expensive investment when I planted them, as I opted for named varieties bred to produce fruits early in their lives. The almond tree has produced virtually since day one and the nuts taste delicious with that lovely marzipan kick of arsenic to them. The cobnuts are basically hazelnuts cultivated to produce larger kernels and these are producing more and more year on year. In contrast, the wild hazelnuts in the hedgerow and woodland will be keeping us waiting a good few more years before they even think about producing a nut.

Today I brutted my laterals and pruned my plums

I read on Facebook the other day that someone was harvesting their cobnuts. Is it time already? I checked my spreadsheet of tasks to be performed through the year (yes, I know, it's sad) and there were the words "brut laterals on cobnuts". I remember typing this, but never actually got round to finding out what it meant. I had decided to leave it till I needed to find out... which brings me to today.
Basically the laterals are the sideshoots. Brutting means snapping them and letting them hang. I'm not sure this is a technique used on any other crops, but it has its own word. By snapping the 'twigs' half way along this year's growth, it stops the tree producing more growth and instead makes it produce more flowers, more nuts next year.
It also has other benefits such as opening up the tree and increasing airflow. It will be interesting to see the results next year.

One of my freshly brutted cobnuts

As I performed the brutting operation, I was surprised to see next year's catkins already beginning to form, even before this year's fruit is fully ready.

Tiny catkins already forming along the laterals

 My other job today was to attempt to prune my plum trees and cherry trees. These fruits must be pruned before the sap is withdrawing, otherwise they are very vulnerable to disease. Silverleaf disease is bad news for plums. The job had been delayed a week while I waited for an order of wound compound to arrive. I've not used this before, but it is essential when pruning stone fruits to seal up the cut ends of wood. I don't know why, but I was expecting a powder, so when I opened up the small tub I was surprised to find a gloopy substance which I swear is just a mix of mud and rubber. Anyway, it seemed to do a good job of sealing the wounds and now that I have it I can take more care when pruning other trees too.
The pruning is mostly just taking out damaged or crossing branches, opening up the middle of the tree and balancing the tree, I took the opportunity to remove and shorten some of the drooping branches which would struggle under the weight of a good harvest. The aforesaid good harvest seems totally unpredicatable when it comes to plums. Trees which did brilliantly last year had not a plum on them, whereas others such as my Imperial Gage were literally dripping with fruits.
At least I have a few varieties, so there will always be one or two trees which produce well.

These plums are still too firm to pick.
I'm keeping a close eye on them though so I can get them before the wasps move in.

One tree which produced fairly well last year was one of my Victoria plums. However, half of its branches seemed devoid of fruit and were adorned with treacherous thorns. I presumed that a few shoots had risen up from below the graft, but the source was hidden by the tree protector.
However this year the spiny impostor was rampant. It has formed a lovely looking tree, but the Victoria Plum part of it is right in the middle, amply protected by the spiny forest.
So today I removed the tree protector, intending to lop off all thorny interlopers. But what I found was worse than I thought.

The plum tree proper is the small stem on the left!

The main trunk of the tree led up to thick, spiky branches. The Victoria Plum was coming a poor second. I decided to leave it be. Maybe we'll get a surprise crop in the future, but what? Sloes? Bullaces? Mirabelles? Or just a nice looking tree.