The future is nutty

Nut season is upon us again .....

After doing a tour of our forest garden a few weeks ago a very nice lady came up to me and said “I’ve heard about you but never seen an image of you before …. I was expecting a wizened old man of 110, but you’re really young!”

That lifted my spirits for a few days - but to lift your spirits on a more permanent basis, I recommend you plant some nut trees.

Nut harvest is in full swing for the two major nuts sweet chestnuts and walnuts, as well as many others including hickories, heartnuts, butternuts, black walnuts, bladdernuts and more. Hazels and Araucarias finished some weeks ago, but as I laid out the hazel varieties and other nuts for testing on our nut course this weekend I am inspired by these trees that take very little work to grow but just keep on giving crops year after year.

Nuts can be nutritional staples, are very beneficial for health (and often included in dietary guidelines), are suitable for small scale and low input growing systems, and their cultivation can sequester lots of carbon. Why would you not grow them?

Sweet chestnuts, Araucaria nuts and some acorns have a similar nutritional profile to the main grains (wheat, rice). The oily nuts (walnuts, hazelnuts, pecans, pine nuts, almonds) are an excellent high-energy and high-protein food.

Growing nuts is fairly easy, but after harvesting they need drying for storage, and then cracking before using. Driers are easily constructed (one of ours is below), but nut crackers are trickier to make. There are some good (and bad) hand crackers but to make using nuts more of a pleasure, small-scale machines are best. We have little culture of using nuts in the UK and a very poor selection of nut crackers easily available.

My favourite kitchen machine is a small Turkish electric model which runs at low revs and won’t cover your kitchen floor with bits. I also have a couple of hand-cranked machines. I use a stone electric mill made by Hawos to make flours from the starchy nuts.

A lot of farmers are starting to plant nut trees in Europe on quite large scales. However large-scale monocuture nut groves are usually less sustainable in many ways (like most large-scale farming). Nevertheless, nuts are the future for sustainable growing systems and sustainable diets.