A few days ago our Bedfordshire Daughter sent me a picture of something she had found in her garden and asked me if I could identify it. That was easy, it was a pair of hazelnuts ‘in the green’.

Hazelnuts are also known as cobnuts or filberts and are familiar to me as they are grown commercially in Kent, my family home and where I went to school. They also grow in woods and hedges which explains their presence at my daughter’s home.

Hazel nuts are usually harvested ripe but some are picked in the green and are particularly delicious. You have to make sure that the squirrels and mice don’t get to them first though.

One of our neighbors has a large “natural” garden which he allows to grow wild in a controlled manner and today I noticed that he has hazelnuts growing over the fence, so they’ll be fair game then. I generally call them filberts.

7 July 2014