Cobnuts

I've got high hopes for our cobnuts this year.

Nuts

 

We've both regular hazelnut and cobnut/filbert variety trees in our garden, several of them annually bear fruit. This year we've not seen as many as we'd expect, and usually the cob produce a noticeably larger nut, though this year their nuts are near comparable, the cob being slightly smaller than usual and the hazel slightly larger. Both varieties though are equally tasty.

Cobnuts

 

The year before last I pollarded (after a fashion) our 10 year old Cob Hazel (Corylus). I'd imagined it would've taken a few years before the tree produced nuts again. I was mistaken. I've spied quite a few good sized nuts so far.

Nuts

Along the hedgerows, through the coppices and in my back garden, hazelnuts are forming. Last year was a real bumper year; I wonder how we'll fare this season. 

Copious Cobs

It's not just the common Hazel out and about that's got a bumper crop developing, in our garden the Cobs (a variety of Hazel which produces much larger fruits, sometimes also known as 'Filberts') are better laden than we've ever seen then them. The same applies to them though as with the wild varieties, it's only at harvest we'll know if the shells are full. Last year we had a fantastic crop of good (commercial) sized nuts, and very tasty they were too. Fingers crossed for the years haul.

Going nuts.

We've a couple of Hazelnuts and a Cobnut in the garden, and last autumn I cut the rods out of them, leaving the parent trees unscathed. Doing that I assumed we wouldn't have much of a crop  of nuts this year...in the case of the Cobnut, I was mistaken. The Cobnut tree is more laden with fruits than I've ever seen it, good sized fruits too. Cobnuts are a corylus cultivar, very like the Hazelnut (corylus avellana) though propagated for much larger fruit, two maybe three times the size of the common hazelnut. I'll watch with interest how the fruits develop, as in years past the fruit case may have been well developed, though the fruit inside was not. Still, if they do come to fruition, we'll have quite a crop.