How to grow and harvest hazelnuts (filberts) at home, successfully!

yeah go ahead well I'd like to talk now about the harvesting of hazelnuts uh hazelnuts most hazelnuts are shrubs multi-stem shrubs although in the commercial Orchards they're sometimes grown as single trunk trees that's to facilitate machine harvesting of the nuts uh waiting till the nuts drop but uh for for the purposes of small scale Growers homeowners and such hazelnuts probably need to be have harvested by hand uh possibly stripped from the trees on the day they're ripe because if you have squirrels or blue jays Stellar's Jays or Scrub Jays in your area they're likely to take them way before they drop hazelnuts are generally ripe about a month before they'll drop from the plants and so the way that the way that I that I gauge the ripeness of a hazelnut is whether or not the shell will readily separate from the husk such as this one here so the nut is still a little green looking but if I can pry it or separate it easily from the husk then that's a sure indication that it's ripe inside and uh and and it will continue to turn brown as it dries so that's what I look for regardless of the species if if I can separate it from the husk then then it I know that it's internally ripe and it'll it's viable it'll Sprout and it'll taste good and it'll be filled inside so hazelnuts do a lot of their ripening in the last several weeks prior to harvest and uh and and so you know the Jays and the squirrels if they go into them before they're filled inside there's really not much there and because the the husk and the shell develop before there's any kernel inside for them to eat the kernel develops last and in the case of the cultivated name varieties of hazelnuts here in western Washington ripening time for them depending on the variety in the year somewhat it depends on some varieties early ripening as early as mid-august some varieties late August and some varieties into the first week or so a few days of September more or less and that's here in in cool Western Washington conditions so because hazelnuts are very flexible stems one can grab a branch and just pull an entire I can pull a 20-foot tree down to me and just harvest the clusters of nuts right off the branches now since it's mid-september this has been harvested already but you can see the catkins which are the male flowers already starting to develop in the case of hazelnuts here in western Washington they never really go completely dormant throughout the year they actually flower in the winter time um and so this particular variety will be flowering probably in late January but the flowers themselves uh in a colder area it might be March but the flowers themselves went in full bloom our Harvest our heartied to about zero degrees Fahrenheit when they're dormant like this they are they could take 20 or 30 below zero fahrenheit so they're pretty tough plants uh but um but so the the criteria that we look for in harvesting is separation from the husks and that is a sure indication of ripeness and we have many different varieties of hazelnuts that we grow some of them are we have ornamental hazelnuts the red leafed Hazels also will have a red husk and in some cases um even even the nut itself is is red such as with this variety until it's when it's in the tree it's still red and other varieties are smaller but multiple uh nuts in a cluster and when they even though they're there's green looking you know if you can if you can separate them out from the husk they're they're internally as ripe as they are going to get and they will turn brown naturally as you dry them so but to uh certainly to once you harvest the nuts they should be dried uh so that they will keep well in the shell for a year then at room temperature or or longer so

Channel: Burnt Ridge Nursery

Views: 63,543

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Id: SQXzVeHZ4kQ

Length: 4min 35sec (275 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 06 2023