Nuts & nut trees

“Chestnuts are delicacies for princes and a lusty and masculine food for rusticks, and able to make women well-complexioned.” - John Evelyn

As a rough definition, nuts are seeds more than about 1cm in diameter. There is a botanical, precise definition for a nut, but there is also a culinary definition - most edible, hard kernels are referred to as nuts. We're more concerned here with the culinary definition - if you're a botanist, please forgive us.

Of the commercially-grown nuts in the UK, only hazel is native. It would have been a staple of the first hunter-gatherer tribes in Britain, and helped them survive the winter, but would have started to germinate in the spring. Roasting or drying them on or near the fire would have made them last several years. A few hundred years ago, a hazel-growing industry developed in Kent, particularly one variety - the Kentish cobnut. There are still several hundred acres of commercial hazels in Kent. The hazelnut is also called the filbert or cobnut, and there is a slight difference in meaning. The papery bracts that surround the nut completely enclose a filbert, but a cob has open bracts that expose the nut.

Sweet chestnuts were brought over by the Romans, and have become naturalised. Wild stands of sweet chestnut usually yield quite poor nuts, as they're not well adapted to the British climate. But around the Mediterranean they used to be a staple carbohydrate (they have a similar nutritional value to rice). They were traditionally dried in two-storey barns. The nuts were piled up on the floor of the upper storey, comprised of wooden slats with gaps between them. A fire was started below, and the heat and smoke dried and smoked them, after which they'd store for years. When wheat swept through Europe from Africa, it was grown in the flat valley bottoms and chestnuts were planted in the hills. In many areas around the Mediterranean there are still lots of chestnuts on the hillsides.

Walnuts probably have a Roman origin too; they haven't become naturalised in the same way, although they occasionally self-seed. There's a history going back several hundred years of nurserymen selling walnut trees - mainly of French origin.

Almonds are also from the Mediterranean, and are more difficult to grow in the UK. They do better in the east of the country, and particularly in London, as it's usually a degree or two warmer, and provides more shelter.

Acorns and beech nuts (both native) can be edible (see below). Horse-chestnuts (native to the Balkans and introduced into Britain in the 17th century) are definitely not edible, as they contain saponins - not good for eating but good for making soaps; and of course they're indispensable for playing conkers.

The nut industry is huge world-wide - much more so than in the UK - and particularly in the US (walnuts & almonds) and China (walnuts and chestnuts). In Britain we often see chestnuts from China in shops before Christmas, which is a bit crazy ecologically (but clearly it makes sense economically).

Other popular nuts from around the world include pecans (not tropical, but need a warm climate, like the southern US), and tropical nuts such as Macadamia (from Australia) and Brazil nuts (from all over tropical South America, not just Brazil).

Peanuts are annual legumes - so are really a type of bean. The flower head bends over and buries itself underground, where the peanuts develop in a pod.

• As with any tree crop, they store carbon, prevent soil erosion and provide habitat during their productive life, and timber and/or firewood at the end of it
• Animals can be grazed or other crops can be grown underneath nut trees, especially chestnuts and walnuts
• Nuts are very good for us: if they're high in carbohydrates like chestnuts, they can play a similar role to grains our diet; and nuts like hazelnuts and walnuts contain oils that are extremely beneficial - particularly for the heart
• People with grain allergies can substitute grains for chestnuts/acorns and chestnut/acorn flour, as they contain no gluten (some people have nut allergies of course, but this is usually to peanuts)
• Nuts are a good source of concentrated protein, so can replace meat in lots of recipes
• The benefit of growing your own is that they taste much better; nut growers would say that though, but when you consider that most commercially-grown nuts have endured herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, storage and transport, they may well be right

In the UK, this will be mainly hazelnuts and acorns in September. Wait until they start dropping from the tree, but don't wait much longer, or grey squirrels will have them all. Keep your eyes peeled from early September, and when the first ones begin to fall, shake the branches and all the ripe ones will fall too. You can also harvest hazelnuts early, and then “ripen” them on a sunny, dry windowsill – this is useful if the squirrels are too fierce of a competition.

Sometimes you can harvest sweet chestnuts from the wild too, but the quality won't necessarily be the best.

Beech nuts are too small and fiddly to treat as a crop, but you can nibble them when you're out walking. They will open naturally when they dry, so if you've got the space you can leave them somewhere dry and ventilated to make taking the nuts out the shell a snap. You'll need to roast them before eating, as they have a bit of tannins and having a bunch at once might cause stomach issues.

Acorns are the nuts of the oak tree. Acorns used to be considered very important food sources, and the oak tree is a symbol of goddesses and spirits in both Turtle Island and in Europe. They can be ground into flour and used to make porridge or baked goods.

They're edible, but contain tannins which give them a bitter taste, and need to be removed. Harvest acorns in October, leave them to dry for a week in a warm, sunny place, then shell them - cut lengthways with a sharp knife and the two halves of the kernel will fall out. There is more information in the “eating” section.

If you're frequenting the same nut trees, it might be worthwhile to keep track of which nuts have which traits. Are there trees that produce larger nuts? Are there acorns with fewer tannins? Once you know this, you can try and propagate desirable nuts. For trees like oaks, where there haven't been years of selective breeding, you can benefit a lot from spreading desirable wild trees.

We can also take some inspiration from the 20th-century nut crop enthusiast, John Hershey. Hershey asked for people to mail him seeds and scions (cuttings for growing a new tree) from wild food trees alongside information about where they got them. He'd evaluate the trees for desirable traits, like resistance to disease and quantity of nuts. The people who sent in the best trees got a cash prize, while Hershey got valuable new material to try growing in his orchard. In a modern-day iteration, Andy Ciccone of the blog & podcast The Poor Proles Almanac had his community mail in acorns to be tested for size and tannin content, with a prize going to the largest, lowest-tannin acorn.

You can spread a lot of trees by both seed and scion. Scions are cuttings meant for propagation. You can cut twigs off of adult trees during winter pruning: a portion of last year's growth with at least five buds to get it started. You can get some trees to leaf out from a scion as simply as putting them in a glass of water. Scions are best grafted onto an existing rootstock, either a stump or another living tree. You'll also want to do the grafting in winter.

Next, is planting. First - how much space do you have? Chestnuts, oaks, and walnuts become big trees, and so need to be planted 12-15m apart. You can plant other things between them for the first 10-15 years, but they need a lot of space. You can also plant them closer together, for more yield in the first few years, but after 10-15 years you will need to cut down the weaker/smaller trees to make room for the rest. Hazels are smaller and can be planted 5-6m apart - the same as most fruit trees.

You can plant multiple trees in the same hectare – in fact, it's a good idea. Some trees, like chestnuts, oaks, and walnuts, need a lot of sunlight and will struggle if shaded out. Others, like elderberry (which leafs out earlier in the spring, so it gets the sun before the taller trees block it), grow well with some shade. You can grow these shorter, shade-tolerant trees amongst the taller, sun-loving trees. The yield from the shorter trees with be reduced, but if they give 75% yield, then you're still getting 175% yield (due to the yield of the taller trees). This is without considering grazing animals underneath the trees!

Plant nut trees in the winter when they're dormant.

Hazels are not self-fertile, so you'll need at least two different named varieties. There are a dozen or so named varieties selected for good fruiting. Individual hazel trees have both male and female flowers (catkins) that open at different times of the year, so they can't pollinate themselves. The flowers of different varieties open at different times, so you need to get male and female flowers on different trees open at the same time for pollination to take place - otherwise no nuts. If you have wild hazel or a hazel hedge nearby, that could work too. Buy young 'named' trees from a fruit/nut tree nursery. There are only a few nurseries in the UK specialising in young nut trees. Hazels will have been grown on their own root, not grafted like fruit trees, and you'll usually buy them around 1m tall.

Walnuts and chestnuts are unlikely to have pollinating trees nearby, so you'll need two different varieties at least. There are some good pollinating varieties of chestnut, including Marigoule and Belle Epine, so if you only have a few trees, maybe go for those. Most chestnut trees will have been grafted in the nursery, usually to a seedling root stock. With apples for example, you can choose a rootstock that will determine the eventual size of your tree, but you can't do that with chestnuts or walnuts yet. Chestnuts will be 1-1.5m tall when planted.

It's not just nurseries or professional growers that can specialise in young trees. You can do it too! The folks over at the Many Trees Project have land for growing saplings for transplantation, which can grow much closer together than adult trees. What do they do with the trees once they start getting big? They give them away! Each tree comes with a print-out of an honour code: you can plant this tree anywhere you'd like (including guerilla gardening), but you must not prevent people from taking from the tree's bounty. A similar strategy can be tried by anyone who gets good at raising trees from seed and is gung-ho about guerilla gardening.

Chestnuts need staking for the first year, and you need to protect all young trees from rabbits, but after that, nut trees don't have any major pests or diseases unless they're grown as large-scale monoculture - but this is the same for any crop. A problem for large-scale growers might be the nut weevil, but in a non-monoculture you won't have that problem.

Young trees have soft bark which rodents might chew, especially in winter as there aren't as many alternative food sources. If the bark is chewed around the whole trunk, the tree will die. To discourage rodents, you can cut down groundcover and pull away mulch from the base of the tree, and loosely wrap the base of the trunk (to about a hand above the expected snowline) with hardware cloth.

Chestnut and walnut trees produce excellent timber (walnut was often used for Rolls Royce dashboards); but if you're looking that far ahead, there are things to think about, like pruning the side branches to make sure the tree grows straight and tall. It's best to remove branches that have narrow crotches, which are structurally weaker, and which rub against other branches, which might rub off bark and expose the tree to disease.

Nut trees benefit from interaction: pruning, whacking, coppicing, and pollarding. Each tree will have its own cycle. An example cycle would be from the Karuk of Turtle Island (as described in Elspeth Hay's Feed Us With Trees), who burn their hazel. The first few years, their post-burn new stems are great for weaving. After four years, they're no longer suitable for weaving but start producing nuts. After eight, nut production starts to go down so they burn the hazel again. Other trees also benefit from being burnt, pruned, and whacked.

Coppicing is when you cut the tree back to a stump. Pollarding is cutting it back to the trunk at head level or so, necessary when you're running animals through the woodland and don't want them to eat the trees. Pruning is the cutting of diseased and dead branches. You can prune yearly since it doesn't take away as much of the tree as coppicing and pollarding. Whacking is what is sounds like: hitting the tree with sticks. Also described in Hay (2025), on Kea in Greece they lay nets under trees and hit them until nuts and twigs fall down, naturally shedding twigs that are ready for removal. This reduces the burden on the tree and gives it more space, increasing yield.

Hazels start producing nuts after 2 years, and chestnuts and walnuts after 4. Hazels flower in late winter - catkins appear from Feb-March and sometimes April. Depending on the weather at this time, crops can vary a lot. If it's very cold in late winter, it probably won't be a good crop that year.

The main problem when harvesting hazelnuts or walnuts is competition from grey squirrels, which can be serious competition indeed, as they can strip trees before the nuts are even ripe. There are no easy answers, but we know people who treat them as another resource, and shoot and eat them (in casseroles). We have more info on game. Cats and dogs can also make them think twice, although they're very agile and quite fearless. The Forestry Commission is working on a grey squirrel contraceptive.

Chestnuts have the advantage that their nuts are in a spiny burr, which stops squirrels eating them on the tree. When the nuts are ripe (October), the burrs open and the nuts fall to the ground. It's important to harvest chestnuts frequently so that they're not lying on the ground too long. They're more perishable than other nuts, and will pick up moulds and rot, or get eaten by mice. How fast the nuts fall from the tree depends on the weather. If there's been a gale, the day after would be a good time to harvest.

You can find a tool called a nut wizard for harvesting fallen nuts. It's a good idea, as it doesn't require bending.

With trees such as oaks, you can harvest nuts by whacking the tree with a stick. First, spread a cloth on the ground so you can collect the nuts that fall. Then, hit the trunk with a stick so that the nuts fall. Small twigs and dead leaves will also fall, so you'll have to pick through these.

You can store most nuts for several months, and eat them raw - and of course chestnuts are delicious roasted. You can find recipes involving nuts online and in books (see resources).

You can store fresh chestnuts in the fridge for 4-6 weeks, or you can dry them in their shells in a dehydrator at 40°C for 3-4 days. You can also dry and smoke them, if you have the means. Once dried, they'll store for years. The brown shells are brittle when dried, and to remove them you can put the nuts in a sack and bang it against a floor or wall - the shells will crack and fall off. Soak dried chestnut kernels overnight like pulses and cook the following day (hazelnuts and walnuts don't need to be soaked). Chestnuts can be ground to make excellent flour that can be added to bread mixes. It doesn't contain gluten, so it can't be used to make risen bread, but it makes great pancakes.

Acorns can be used for both flour and oil. Different tree species will be better for one or the other. You might have to experiment (and let us know the results, so we can share them!)

To make acorn flour, grind acorn kernels (see 'picking from the wild' above) into smallish particles in a coffee grinder. Half fill a jar with the acorn meal, and fill to the top with water. Put it in the fridge or somewhere cool for 3-4 days. Once a day, pour off the water and refill, and the tannins will leach away. Different species will require different lengths of time to leach. You can tell that the acorns are ready if the leaching water doesn't turn brown, and the acorns don't taste bitter. You can speed up the leaching by using lye. Add about a teaspoon for every 3 litres of soaking acorn meats. Lye is caustic, so handle it with care, and don't let it get on your skin. Once soaked, drain off the meal and use in cooking - add to stews, soups or bread / biscuit mixes, including grinding it finely into flour.

To make acorn oil, you can press them similarly to olives. The tannins bind to water, not oil, and so they are left behind when the oil is pressed out.

It's considered  important by some people to 'activate' nuts before you eat them. Nuts and seeds contain phytic acid and enzyme inhibitors which help the seed germinate into a plant at the right time (it's main goal) but that hinder our ability to digest them (see the video above for a great explanation). So by soaking the nuts, you fool them into thinking that it's time to grow, which activates them into transforming these indigestible components. You can then eat them fresh from soaking, or re-dry them in an oven or dehydrator for storage, after which they're generally much tastier and easier to digest.

Quite a few small businesses based on nut orchards have started since 2000. The potential for success is quite high, as nuts (particularly organic nuts) are quite expensive. The economics work pretty well, especially for walnuts and chestnuts. If you grow a polycrop (>1 tree species), the margins are even better due to higher yield, but there may be some trial and error.

There is also potential for running livestock under the trees in the orchard (it's the kind of setup that makes jamon iberico what it is – the pigs graze under oaks). Maybe you could run your own livestock, or maybe you could open up the area to people with livestock (your neighbours?) every now and then. They'll get to let their land rest, and you'll get the orchard “mowed” and fertilised. Just make sure that you don't graze livestock among young trees, especially animals that might think of a tree as a tasty snack. You might also need to be careful with “naive” livestock, who haven't ever grazed under trees: they won't know what to do, and might eat something toxic.

The going might be tougher if you want to grow acorns. Acorns are great food, but in most places in the world, the culture has moved away from eating them (often, not by choice). One of the few places where acorn-eating is still normal is Korea, in the form of acorn flour noodles (1/3 acorn flour, 2/3 wheat flour).

You might be wondering: if nuts are so great, why aren't we growing more of them? And/or: if we used to love acorns so much we worshipped oaks, why did we ever stop eating them? What happened? The change is cultural, and oddly enough, connected to the enclosure of the commons.

If a person can keep food on the table and a roof over their head without a job, they're not going to tolerate being mistreated at work. If a worker can get their own food and firewood from a common, they'll be a lot more confident in quitting and changing jobs if the job is too rough. To create workers willing to toil for long hours in the fields or the factories, they needed to get rid of the alternatives. Nut trees (wild or cultivated) were this alternative. In the 1700s, landowners were even advised to avoid growing nut trees in their hedges as “[the poor] would be less inclined to work, if every hedge furnished the means of support.” (That's Thomas Rudge of Gloucester). You can read more about this in Elspeth Hay's brilliant book, Feed Us With Trees.

Every generation that passes, we lose our cultural connection and knowledge of nut trees. A lot of people living nowadays were told that acorns were poisonous when they were kids. Whatever method of nut tree harvesting you choose, share your bounty and your knowledge. Make bread, cakes, pasta, and other familiar products using partially nut flour (just make sure people know the ingredients, in case of allergies). Gather acorns in public places, and talk to passers-by. Try and put up a stall at a local festival when you've got a bunch of nut products to give out.

The sky's the limit!

This topic belongs to the section Gardening, smallholding & farming. You can ask questions or add information on the corresponding Forum section.

It is also in the section Bushcraft & Nature (Forum: Bushcraft & Nature).

• Step-by-step guide to growing different varieties of nuts
• How to grow chestnuts
• How to grow hazelnuts
• How to grow walnuts
• How to grow nuts
• Health benefits of nuts

• Tree / woodland management
• Smallholding
• Wild food
• Fruit trees & orchards
• Forest gardening

Otto Hague