Why would anyone gather nuts in May? It’s entirely the wrong time of year. The reference may of course be to may trees, but then they don’t have nuts. More probably ‘gathering nuts in May’ is a quaint old country term for being off one’s rocker, a bit nuts in fact, and the nursery rhyme is, like so many, rather less dainty and more sinister than at first appears.
I started trying to gather nuts in August, to win a head start over the squirrels. I had looked up cobnut harvesting online, and read somewhere the jokey little sentence ‘but you have to be quick, before the squirrels get there first!’
It was the ‘!’ that really got to me, I think. Slugs eat my lettuces, caterpillars eat my tomato plants and everything eats my raspberries. Now even the bl**dy squirrels were getting in on the act.
I had read that nuts could be harvested from August to September. I was going away at the end of August, which would give the squirrels a clear window of opportunity. So I had to get in first. I mounted my campaign, Operation Nut, in mid-August.
I should explain that my hazel grove is not extensive. It comprises a single tree by the front lawn, stretching spindly branches a good fifteen feet upward. The central trunk is not really a trunk at all, but a cluster of them, all fairly slender and unclimbable (unless you are a squirrel, of course) after the first couple of feet.
So how to get the nuts down from the tree? For I could see that there were nuts, unlike last year when there there seemed to be nothing at all, for which I blamed the squirrels. Looking carefully, I could make out a number pale green clusters amongst the foliage of the upper branches. But how to get at them?
Shaking didn’t get me far – the branches, though too slender to climb, proved far too sturdy to shake. So I tried dislodging the nuts by throwing things at them. Unfortunately, I’m a pretty bad thrower, and 15 foot vertically is a surprisingly long way to throw anything heavy enough to dislodge a nut. Stones were too small, a half-brick too heavy, and a chunk of wood to cumbersome. Most of my throws fell short, and I nearly brained myself with the half-brick.
Then I remembered the catapult. Not one of those wimpy jock-strap resembling wash-leather slingshots as wielded by David against Goliath, but a serious piece of kit with a metal wrist guard and a thick rubber sling. It takes quite a lot of muscle tooperate, but shoots a long way. And probably, when used by an expert, it is pretty accurate. Not, alas, when used by me. Trying to hit a nut at 15 yards is not easy. I succeeded once, and the r*ddy thing must have been welded to the tree; it didn’t budge.
I was getting exasperated. Suppose I was on a desert island with only this tree for sustenance. Would I starve to death just because I lacked the skill, stamina and ingenuity to detach a nut? It seemed ridiculous to be defeated by such a simple challenge.
Then I had A Good Idea. I slung some string over one of the main branches (this in itself took twenty minutes and involved clambering about, getting poked in the eye with twigs). I tied the string into a loop, with a circumference of around 20 feet, and by pulling hard on it, made the branch sway and dance about like a sapling in a hurricane.
The nuts, however, stayed put.
So I gave up, and left the squirrels to it.
But by late September the nuts were still on the tree (as was my string – I tugged at it from time to time, to no effect) and the squirrels were clearly taking their time. Then one day I noticed a solitary nut lying on the driveway. Poking about the lawn, I found half a dozen more.
And so it went on, day after day, for a month and more. Every day half a dozen nuts appeared on the ground, and my only task was to spot them (not easy, they are well camouflaged against leaf litter) and rescue those on the driveway before they got run over.
I now have a large bowl of home bred cobnuts which we are keeping for Christmas.
I also have another, smaller bowl of some very beautiful nuts indeed.
These handsome fellows were gleaned, or scrounged, not from the rural hedgerows but from the Shifley Park housing development.
The development, and hence the saplings that the council no doubt forced the developers to plant along the pedestrian walkways, is about 10 years old. Planting includes a number of hazel trees, I did a spot-check on these in passing.
They are scrubby little bushes compared to my towering specimen, but they have catkins on them already (mine doesn’t) and one of them, mysteriously, seems to produce a very different and vastly superior looking nut. The inhabitants of Shifley Park, not being of a rural turn of mind, have clearly failed to spot the potential of this plantation as anything other than a handy dog toilet. So by picking my way amongst the furry grey decaying turds, I managed to collect a whole carrier bag full of these little beauties.
As you can see in the photo, the suburban nut on the right is massively larger and rounder than its rural counterpart. However, both kernels are about the same size. I think this must be because the larger nuts are older (I collected them from the ground, and don’t know how long they had been there) so the kernels may have had time to dry out and become wizened, like so many of us.
But the home-grown cobnut kernel definitely wins hands down on flavour. To be fair, I’ll have do to a taste test at Christmas when both have matured but, for now, I reckon the Cottage variety wins hands down. Thank goodness for that – I don’t think I could have borne the shame.
I believe there are many varieties of cobnut, and would love to hear from you if you know which variety either of these is. Or perhaps we should both just get a life.
I started trying to gather nuts in August, to win a head start over the squirrels. I had looked up cobnut harvesting online, and read somewhere the jokey little sentence ‘but you have to be quick, before the squirrels get there first!’
It was the ‘!’ that really got to me, I think. Slugs eat my lettuces, caterpillars eat my tomato plants and everything eats my raspberries. Now even the bl**dy squirrels were getting in on the act.
I had read that nuts could be harvested from August to September. I was going away at the end of August, which would give the squirrels a clear window of opportunity. So I had to get in first. I mounted my campaign, Operation Nut, in mid-August.
I should explain that my hazel grove is not extensive. It comprises a single tree by the front lawn, stretching spindly branches a good fifteen feet upward. The central trunk is not really a trunk at all, but a cluster of them, all fairly slender and unclimbable (unless you are a squirrel, of course) after the first couple of feet.
So how to get the nuts down from the tree? For I could see that there were nuts, unlike last year when there there seemed to be nothing at all, for which I blamed the squirrels. Looking carefully, I could make out a number pale green clusters amongst the foliage of the upper branches. But how to get at them?
Shaking didn’t get me far – the branches, though too slender to climb, proved far too sturdy to shake. So I tried dislodging the nuts by throwing things at them. Unfortunately, I’m a pretty bad thrower, and 15 foot vertically is a surprisingly long way to throw anything heavy enough to dislodge a nut. Stones were too small, a half-brick too heavy, and a chunk of wood to cumbersome. Most of my throws fell short, and I nearly brained myself with the half-brick.
Then I remembered the catapult. Not one of those wimpy jock-strap resembling wash-leather slingshots as wielded by David against Goliath, but a serious piece of kit with a metal wrist guard and a thick rubber sling. It takes quite a lot of muscle tooperate, but shoots a long way. And probably, when used by an expert, it is pretty accurate. Not, alas, when used by me. Trying to hit a nut at 15 yards is not easy. I succeeded once, and the r*ddy thing must have been welded to the tree; it didn’t budge.
I was getting exasperated. Suppose I was on a desert island with only this tree for sustenance. Would I starve to death just because I lacked the skill, stamina and ingenuity to detach a nut? It seemed ridiculous to be defeated by such a simple challenge.
Then I had A Good Idea. I slung some string over one of the main branches (this in itself took twenty minutes and involved clambering about, getting poked in the eye with twigs). I tied the string into a loop, with a circumference of around 20 feet, and by pulling hard on it, made the branch sway and dance about like a sapling in a hurricane.
The nuts, however, stayed put.
So I gave up, and left the squirrels to it.
But by late September the nuts were still on the tree (as was my string – I tugged at it from time to time, to no effect) and the squirrels were clearly taking their time. Then one day I noticed a solitary nut lying on the driveway. Poking about the lawn, I found half a dozen more.
And so it went on, day after day, for a month and more. Every day half a dozen nuts appeared on the ground, and my only task was to spot them (not easy, they are well camouflaged against leaf litter) and rescue those on the driveway before they got run over.
I now have a large bowl of home bred cobnuts which we are keeping for Christmas.
I also have another, smaller bowl of some very beautiful nuts indeed.
These handsome fellows were gleaned, or scrounged, not from the rural hedgerows but from the Shifley Park housing development.
The development, and hence the saplings that the council no doubt forced the developers to plant along the pedestrian walkways, is about 10 years old. Planting includes a number of hazel trees, I did a spot-check on these in passing.
They are scrubby little bushes compared to my towering specimen, but they have catkins on them already (mine doesn’t) and one of them, mysteriously, seems to produce a very different and vastly superior looking nut. The inhabitants of Shifley Park, not being of a rural turn of mind, have clearly failed to spot the potential of this plantation as anything other than a handy dog toilet. So by picking my way amongst the furry grey decaying turds, I managed to collect a whole carrier bag full of these little beauties.
As you can see in the photo, the suburban nut on the right is massively larger and rounder than its rural counterpart. However, both kernels are about the same size. I think this must be because the larger nuts are older (I collected them from the ground, and don’t know how long they had been there) so the kernels may have had time to dry out and become wizened, like so many of us.
But the home-grown cobnut kernel definitely wins hands down on flavour. To be fair, I’ll have do to a taste test at Christmas when both have matured but, for now, I reckon the Cottage variety wins hands down. Thank goodness for that – I don’t think I could have borne the shame.
I believe there are many varieties of cobnut, and would love to hear from you if you know which variety either of these is. Or perhaps we should both just get a life.
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