Nuts - Hazelnuts

Gord Nickel learns all about the delicious Hazelnut. Guest: Terry Foot -- Foot Hazelnut Farm • Hazelnuts don't take long to produce if someone wants a nut in a short period of time: 2 to 3 years (they're usually 2 years old when you buy them at the nursery, and then 2 to 3 years after that you'll have nuts) • Barcelona is the main crop that they produce at Foot Hazelnut Farm (they're a very heavy producer, and the Barcelona is a very tasty nut) • Now you need two types of hazelnuts to produce fruit (they each have their own male and female flower on each tree, but they won't cross pollinate so you need the other variety as well) • Hazelnuts start to fall at the beginning of September, and it takes approximately a month, some people will hand pick but Foot Hazelnut Farm harvests them with machinery: First they wait until they're all on the ground, they then have a machine that sweeps the hazelnuts into the middle, and have another machine that comes along and picks them up and dumps them into a 4x4 tote which is then dumped into the bin They then have to run the hazelnuts through a cleaning line because when you harvest them the machinery picks everything up (including unwanted rocks and dirt), the nuts then go through a washer, a de-rocker, a final washer, and from there they go into a kiln where they're dried (but retain just enough moisture so they're still fresh) Lastly the hazelnuts go through a tumbler that sorts them by size, and then they put them through a suction that pulls all the blanks out (because there are always blanks in hazelnuts), with 95 -- 98% being full ready-to-go hazelnuts • Fertilizing is important to get a good crop (they like nitrogen, so use organic chicken manure) • The Hazelnut tree also wants to grow as a bush, but Foot Hazelnut Farm have trained it into a single stem because it's much easier to manage the orchard, with pruning about two or three times during the year • You can also let them grow as a bush (which is what most people do) if you have a small garden or backyard and only want a 6 to 10 foot Hazelnut plant (and then for pruning you would only need to prune every second year to take out all the older stems, because the nuts like to grow on 1 and 2 year old wood, so it's very important to prune!)