When do you harvest hazelnuts?

What you need:

• Gardening gloves
• basket
• Baking sheet

People have been eating hazelnuts for thousands of years.

This is how you harvest hazelnuts

Even if your hazelnut bush starts showing the delicious hazelnuts early, you still need them all summer shrub permit. The green hazelnuts are just not ripe yet.

• Wait until the fringed leaf shell around the hazelnuts turns brown. At about the same time, the other leaves on the hazelnut bush will also turn autumnal. This is a good sign when the hazelnuts are ready to be harvested.
• Some hazelnuts will fall out of the now dry leaf shell and are easy to harvest by simply collecting them and placing them in a basket. The other hazelnuts are harvested by carefully plucking them from the branches. Wear thin gardening gloves because you have to reach into the bush. Be careful not to damage the shoots for the next year.
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• Unfortunately, you are not the only one who knows exactly when it is time to harvest the hazelnuts. Its main competitor is the squirrel, which likes to harvest the autumn nuts. But other rodents and birds also have a preference for hazelnuts. If you do not want an animal competitor to harvest the hazelnuts in front of you, you should protect the shrub with a solid net.


Harvest and dry hazelnuts

Hazelnuts have to dry out after harvesting to prevent them from going moldy. Wrong ...

When you can eat the nuts

• Unfortunately, once the hazelnuts are harvested, they are not easy to use and that is not just because of their shell. Hazelnuts need to be dried or roasted. The leaf husk, which you may have also harvested, is of course removed first.
• Put your hazelnuts in a warm and dry place to dry. Wait three or four weeks for the hazelnuts to dry out well. You should also shake them a little every now and then so that they change the situation.
• Roasted hazelnuts are quicker to use. Place them on a baking sheet and preheat the oven to a medium temperature depending on the type of oven you have. Watch the hazelnuts so you can tell when they are well browned. You can also move them a little in the meantime to roast all sides well. You should keep a close eye on the hazelnuts so you don't miss the point when they are roasted enough. After roasting in the shell, take them out of the oven and crack the hazelnuts. Place the still warm hazelnuts on a kitchen towel and rub them together. In this way you are already removing a large part of the somewhat bitter-tasting skin. Once cleaned, put the self-harvested hazelnuts back in the oven and roast them until they are nicely browned and crisp.

With your self-harvested hazelnuts, you have a tasty and healthy snack at hand.