Last week we celebrated Rosie’s 3rd birthday with a small, bunny-themed party in the morning, followed by an afternoon harvesting hazelnuts from a friend’s farm.
A row of hazelnut trees in the farm, where everything was beautifully maintained.
I’d never visited a hazelnut farm before, and it was fun to see how the nuts grow on beautiful big trees, and to learn about how they’re harvested.
A close up of a late hazelnut that’s yet to fall from the tree.
Hazelnut harvesting happens in Autumn, when the nuts naturally fall from the trees. Most commercial farms, like this one, will use a machine to collect all of the fallen nuts from the ground.
Here you can see some of the fallen hazelnuts on the ground, in front of my boots.
Whilst the machines collect the vast majority of the fallen nuts, they don’t manage to collect all of them. So after the official harvest had finished, we were invited to collect any remaining nuts for ourselves.
Rosie, proud of her success finding nuts among the autumn leaves.
It was a truly fun family activity, and in around an hour we’d managed to collect thousands of fallen hazelnuts. Our stash of nuts weighed nearly 8 pounds. It was an incredible haul!
Of course Dirty Bunny came along too. Note the pile of hazelnuts in front of him, attentively placed there by Rosie :-)
Now I’m enjoying pondering the question of what to do with all of these nuts…
My friend made a batch of homemade nutella - an utterly delicious idea, and the perfect treat to have on hand for the holidays. I’m thinking that some homemade hazelnut praline could also be pretty tasty in ice cream, chocolates, or even a tart for Thanksgiving. I’ll report back with any winning recipes :-)