Chestnut lovers

October is the month of chestnuts. Maybe October even means chestnut in latin? No, it means eighth month, which was true a long time back, but no longer. Like many truths that were true in old times long time gone but no longer accurate. Statements like "growth is great" were happily repeated in previous centuries but are obviously obsolete these days.

Back to chestnuts.

I love chestnuts. That should come as no surprise to the well-informed readers of this blog. Chestnuts are like hot-buns in my heart. Chestnut trees are beautiful and the wood is amazing. What is not to like with chestnuts?

I even think that there are no allergies to chestnuts, which make them a safe bet for school yards and public parks.

There are few chestnut trees in Sweden, on the order of a couple of hundred. My dream is to hundredfold this number in the coming decades. I fantasize of a future where delicious chestnuts will rain from the skies in every hamlet and every city of Southern Scandinavia, to mark the beginning of October.

We have identified a dozen good trees in our surroundings, where we harvest buckets of chestnuts, mainly for sowing. The new trees will be grafted with large-fruiting varieties or just sent out into the world to bring chestnut joy to the unsuspecting masses.

Chestnut road in Halmstad, changing from horse chestnuts to sweet chestnuts. Smart municipality.

One of our favourite places is the old restaurant/auberge Margretetorp.

We come home with buckets full of deliciousness.

Some of the chestnuts we peel in our Chinese electric chestnut-peeler.

Chestnuts help to make friends. Here is Erik, who collected these chestnuts in our Capital, Stockholm, to share.

The young chestnut nursery-man Zaio is selecting chestnuts to use as seedling starters.

Also my friend Leo is happy when he finds 'Marigoule' giant chestnuts.

We visited the elder in the fruit-and-nut-growing field, Verner, at his biodynamic farm in Eastern Denmark. We gave them some black walnuts to divert attention from the chestnuts.

The easiest way of cooking chestnuts is by cutting them in quarters and then boil them or fry them.

The pellicle falls off easily when the chestnuts are heated for 10-15 minutes.

We run a chestnut breeding project to develop an improved population of chestnuts, according to the Philip Rutter method. Here is a trial planting.

Planting chestnut trees is lots of fun for old and young! The tree is tiny, but the potential is enormous.

We store chestnuts in sand with a steel net, to survive the winter months. In April we can plant the sprouting seeds outside.

My friend Ola gives a workshop of how to cook with acorns - a kind of bitter and complicated chestnut. The main advantage is that there are already a million oak trees here...

Chestnut trees are happy in mixed forests. Here with beech.

Agroforestry

One way of growing food trees is classic orchards, of course. Another option is to combine trees with other agricultural activities. This has the fancy name agroforestry. Classic wind breaks as well as tree-rows between strips of cultivation count as agroforestry. Even putting nut trees among cattle or chicken counts as agroforestry.

At the Holma Folkhögskola, we are currently designing an alley cropping system, which is an even fancier name of having trees in rows, and cultivating something useful inbetween. We will have fruit and nut trees in the rows, and vegetables and small-scale grains in between.

Planning for the tree rows, access roads and water points.

Marking the rows in the field. Is this really a good idea?

We visited the educational farm Angereds Gård just outside Göteborg. They planted quite a lot of trees in an agroforestry system during the last two years.

Mauricio shows the windbreak of poplars.

Mauricio and the group discuss pruning of hazel bushes.

It is a good design, I think, since they include chestnut trees...

October is such a great month, that I think that we will start to call this month Castanotober instead.

Veggie harvest

October is the end of the season for our vegetable and fruit harvest. Some nights will dip below zero for several hours and the frost kills off the most sensitive plants.

We had a few nights of frost. Both in the beginning of October and in the end.

Frost is beautiful but killing for tomatoes, pumpkins and peppers.

This year we trialled one plant of physialis and it grew beyond expectations. The fruit was amazing.

We also got a create of quince from a friends' food forest system. We boil the fruit and then conserve using the classic boiling method.

We started to fill up the storage room that we built this summer. The apples and quinces smell great.

Tools and toys

Technology is great, when it is simple and repairable. Preferrably as little digital as possible. This website is a simple system based on the 'Pelican' html-generating tool, to reduce the server load. (Thanks to Kris de Decker for the inspiration, see www.lowtech.be

Josef shows a very simple drying tool for grains. Maybe this will work for hazelnuts as well?

We prepare to open the tree shop the first Saturday of November.

Friends

Our good friends Marcel and Berthe came over for a long week-end from the Netherlands. Marcel is an amazing tree-lover who knows more trees than anyone I know. He knows them by first name.

Berthe helped to cook hot-sauce of our chilis.

Marcel just identified a black walnut tree in the park in Halmstad.

And we cooked pear sauce from buckets full of gleaned pears from a roadside tree.

Collaboration project

It has been a good month in many ways. We have had lots of time together with each other and with friends. And we have learned that we got a grant to run a project to popularize nut growing in Sweden. Together with Lova and Miljömatematik, we run a project for a year. The first deliverable was to setup a knowledge sharing platform, see SvenskaNötter.se. Part of it is an online-forum, just like internet used to be in the 1990s, with a bulletin-board system. It is our small contribution to move online collaboration away from the tech-bro platforms. We'll see how it goes...