Nuts may seem a bit of a luxury but truly you can grow some in your garden. Some nuts are a long-term project so the sooner you plant them the quicker they will establish and start to fruit.
Many trees have seeds and nuts to spread their seed. Some like horse chestnut, oak trees and beech trees produce vast quantities of ‘nuts’ in autumn that feed the wildlife through the winter months. Beech mast is particularly popular with the seed eating finches that crack open the nuts for the oil rich flesh inside. While acorns and conkers are buried en-masse by the squirrels as a winter cache.
There are many nuts that hail from tropical climes like Brazil nuts, macadamias and pecans, that just won’t tolerate our colder gardens, but there are other nuts that will grow and fruit in the UK. Some are huge trees and may not be suitable for your garden, but others can be grown in many gardens.
Walnuts
I think walnuts are my favourite nut. I love them toasted and whizzed up with basil and garlic to make pesto, or added to my morning breakfast bowl. But the nuts can be pickled and even glacéed, I once ate them in Cyprus where they had been soaked and preserved in a spice–laced syrup and were soft and delicious added to ice–cream. But I digress. Really if you want to grow walnuts you need to plant a tree now, as it’s going to take a few years for the plant to mature and fruit. Traditionally walnut trees grow huge, but these days of course, clever breeders have created more compact forms of these fruiting trees. Even so the walnut tree can be a majestic beast. Look out for Juglans regia that can be pruned to keep it in check. Or the Europa Walnut Tree that is a naturally dwarf form bred for smaller gardens.
Hazelnuts
Grow hazel in your garden for its copious stems, free pea and bean sticks, sappy stems to make festive wreaths or to weave into Christmas decorations and get hazelnuts too. Once established in a boundary hedge it can be quite surprising how many clusters of hazelnuts form. If you really want the crème de la crème, choose to grow cobnuts. These are cultivated forms of hazelnuts. Look out for the Kentish Cob which is a popular type of these productive trees. You can buy cobnut trees to plant in your garden. They are easy to grow and fast to form nuts and can be even be grown in a large planter. Just watch out for the squirrels who will compete for the prize nuts!
Sweet Chestnuts
Roasted, pureed or even glacéed, the real chestnut (not the horse chestnut) is a wonderful ingredient for winter menus. They are a challenge to harvest and prise out of their very prickly coats, but when you find a productive tree with a carpet of green hedgehog-like fruits beneath it, you’ve found gold. You need to get to them before the resident squirrels sniff them out and bury them.
You can grow sweet chestnuts (Castanea sativa) in the UK but these are huge trees. If you are part of a community project it is a good tree to plant, but if you want to harvest fresh sweet chestnuts it would be better to locate an established tree near you and ask permission to gather the fruit.
Almonds
As a child growing up in suburbia our streets were lined with almond trees (see main image), though it was some years before I knew what they were. But their fabulous pink spring blossom was spectacular and when the fruits dropped in late summer, the inner nuts became naked and crushed under heavy boots and traffic. But even at that age I could see that the peach-like fruits hid a stone inside that looked like the almond nuts we bought at Christmas. Whoever decided that almond trees were a good street tree possibly hadn’t done a dummy run. I’m not saying that the blossom wasn’t gorgeous, it was when it was on the tree, and of course it helped to feed the local pollinators with its copious nectar, but once it was mashed into the pavement into a brown, slippery mush it wasn’t so great. But don’t let that put you off. Having your own almond harvest and the fabulous spring blossom is well worth the space and (minimal) effort. They like an open sunny spot, so plant them near a sunny wall. You can buy almond trees on dwarfing rootstocks and compact forms. Look out for Sweet Almond ‘Princess’.
Peanuts
Well, they aren’t really nuts, but if you have a nut allergy then you might be allergic to peanuts, I have never been able to work that one out. But it’s a serious consideration and if there is any chance anyone in your household is allergic to nuts of any sort, don’t grow them and especially don’t grow peanuts.
Otherwise, you really can grow peanuts if you can find unheated, non-roasted specialist peanut ‘seeds’. It’s a great thing to do with the kids, especially because unusually the actual peanuts form underground.
Don’t try and grow peanuts that you buy in the supermarket, even the ‘monkey nuts’ won’t grow. You need specially prepared ‘seed’ peanuts. And, sadly peanuts aren’t hardy either, so if you want to have a grow you need a long growing season and you need to protect them from the cold. One or two plant suppliers do sell peanut plants and if you really want to impress the youngsters, that’s a great way to grow peanuts. The growing shoots bury themselves into the soil or compost around the plant and the peanuts form underground. You need to grow them somewhere safe like a greenhouse where little rodents won’t harvest the crop before you do.
