Grow hazelnuts in your own garden, and learn how to use them in your cooking.
In “Eat Your Yard! Edible Trees, Shrubs, Vines, Herbs and Flowers for Your Landscape,” author Nan K. Chase shares her first-hand experience with gardening, landscaping ideas and special culinary uses for fruit trees. Recipes for edible garden plants include the crabapple and quince, nut trees, such as the chestnut and almond, and herbs and vines like the bay, grape, lavender, mint, and thyme. She instructs how to harvest pawpaw, persimmon, and other wildflowers for your meal as well as figs, kumquats, olives and other favorites.
Eat Your Yard! (Gibbs Smith, 2010) has information on 35 edible plants that offer the best of both landscape and culinary uses. Edible garden plants provide spring blossoms, colorful fruit and flowers, lush greenery, fall foliage, and beautiful structure, but they also offer fruits, nuts, and seeds that you can eat, cook, and preserve.
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Eating Hazelnuts
Crack! The sound of a ripe hazelnut being broken open before Thanksgiving dinner is unmistakable. So is the ruddy color of the hard little shell. Hazelnut flavor: that’s unmistakable too, sweet and earthy, with a little crunch.
Hazelnut, filbert. They’re interchangeable as far as the nut industry is concerned and, botanically speaking, quite close.
The important thing is that the filbert, or hazelnut, grows as a beautiful shrub or small tree with year-round interest. Pendulous catkins—the blooms—hang like golden chains from the bare branches in late winter. During summer the rounded, many-pleated leaves provide islands of shade as the nuts develop. In fall the leaves glow red and gold.
Some filberts have special landscape value on their own—the contorted filbert, or Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick, for instance—and are grown as specimen trees. Others are chosen for screening; filberts rarely grow taller than twenty feet, and some stay much smaller. Because filberts need cross-pollination with other varieties, it’s imperative to mix and match anyway.
There are two ways to grow filberts: as individual trees with single, or at most a few, trunks; and as a hedge of medium height. Imagine a garden plant with such versatility.
The natural growing habit features “suckering,” or the tendency for the plant to throw up many extra shoots around the main trunk. That’s perfect for a hedge configuration; space the plants just four feet apart and let the suckers fill in the spaces. For more intense nut production as well as for ornamental treatment, situate the plants about fifteen feet apart and keep suckers off. Hazelnut trees may need to be netted once nut production begins; squirrels love them.
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