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A Busy Season for Nut Pickers

This year's nut harvest is very rich, which is appreciated by both forest animals and nut pickers. However, when sorting the yield, nut pickers often encounter a significant drop-off, which is largely due to the empty nuts from female flowers that were not pollinated in the spring.

The empty or kernel-free nuts are the first to fall down every year - well before ripening of the pollinated nuts. Therefore, at the beginning of the nut season it is best to harvest nuts from hazel-tree branches. It makes no sense to pick nuts from the ground, because almost all of them will be empty, even if the nuts look big and healthy.

As time goes on, hazel-trees gradually begin to lose also their pollinated or full nuts.

Nut pests

This year's generous nut harvest has already been collected and is still being collected by nutcrackers, jays, squirrels. A certain share of nuts every year is damaged by a fungal disease, some infections and bacterial diseases. This season is no exception.

A significant share of this year's nut harvest was used for the needs of the new generation of nut weevils. Weevils or “nut worms” have a decent nursery underneath the shell of a nut - it serves as a bedroom, a dining room and a walk-in closet all at the same time. In each nut where a female insect lays one egg in the summer, a larva hatches, lives and develops.

When a nut weevil larva grows up, it tears a hole in the nut shell and hurries to leave its nursery. Most often, these larvae are lucky enough to crawl out of their former lodges while they are in or under a hazel-tree somewhere in the wild, but some (those trapped in nuts collected by nut pickers) are less lucky.

Nut harvest

In August, there was an unprecedented gain for those nut pickers who were quick to realize that this year's nut harvest will be very good. Moreover, in many places hazelnut seeds ripen earlier than usual - even before September.

The largest mass of full nuts first decreased in tree branches in overgrown clearings and forest edges. Why? Because, in these places, hazelnut seeds ripen quickly since they are well exposed to the sun. The more ripened, the easier it separates. The easier it separates, the sooner it falls to the ground. After all, there comes the time when a large proportion of nuts are mature enough and ready to separate from the tree, and nut pickers can, by either intentionally or unintentionally shaking a branch, get a good amount of hazelnut seeds. So, you can start harvesting nuts not only by pulling them off a hazel branch, but also by picking them up from the ground under the trees.

Experienced nut pickers know that hazelnuts do not ripen all at the same time, even in a single shrub, there can be both ripe, almost ripe and completely unripe nuts.

When collecting nuts for long-term storage, it is advisable to take only the ripe nuts. A fairly visible external (visual) signs of hazelnut ripeness is a distinctly yellow or brown colour of its shell.

Autumn is a time when almost all full, undamaged nuts for some reason separate themselves from hazel-trees growing in shady forests. This marks the end of the nut season.