How to Grow Your Own Nuts: Choosing, cultivating and harvesting nuts in your garden

by Martin Crawford, Joanna Brown (Photographer)

Overview

This is the definitive book on growing your own nuts written by Martin Crawford, the leading forest gardening expert. Nut trees are perennials, requiring little maintenance or soil cultivation, so it is no surprise that nuts are the ideal forest garden crop. How to grow your own nuts is a beautifully presented and comprehensive guide to selecting, cultivating, harvesting and processing all types of nuts. Here are old favourites like hazelnuts and walnuts alongside less common varieties such as hickories and butternuts and the exotically named chinkapin. Filled with gorgeous illustrations of trees and nuts in all stages of maturity, this book will inspire gardeners, homesteaders and commercial farmers with its clear and detailed instructions. For everyone who wants to grow their own food and aim at self-sufficiency, this book is a must.

Throughout the book we learn how delicious, nutritious and versatile nuts are. Nuts are at the heart of our culinary tradition. They have everything for health: magnesium to lower blood pressure; low carbohydrate to control blood sugar; high protein to keep our energy up, and healthy fats to help absorb vitamins. They are chock full of antioxidants. Eating a daily portion of nuts could lengthen your life, as nuts decrease the risk of heart and neuro-degenerative diseases. Recent Harvard studies indicate that eating pecan nuts increase the survival rates of prostate cancer. For vegetarians and vegans in particular, nuts are a crucial source of protein, but they are enjoyed by many more worldwide as a delicious alternative protein from meat. 

Martin describes how nuts can be planted singly in a small area, ingroups in an orchard or nuttery, as silvopasture around grazing animals, in alley cropping between cereal crops or intercropping between fruit bushes.

Nuts are also multipurpose trees and the A-Z describes their many secondary uses from timber, oil, dyes, fodder and cosmetics to medicines and honey. The beautiful spring blossom, particularly of almond and sweet chestnut, are highly attractive to bees.

Every page is rich with the authenticity, passion and experience of a master grower and forest gardener. Whether you are planning to grow nuts at home or  commercially, this book is essential reading.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857845528
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	12/01/2021
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	1,106,450
Product dimensions:	8.05(w) x 10.05(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

“Martin is a true pioneer and his work deserves respect and celebration.” - Permaculture Magazine

“Martin Crawford is a frontiersman, a pioneering teacher and an inspiration. Both his work and his garden are national treasures.” - Chris Nichols, Director of the Ashridge MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility.

Martin started his working life a computer programmer but his passion for organic gardening quickly led to a change in career. He has had broad and varied horticultural/agricultural experience over the last 25 years – he has worked for the Yarner Trust in North Devon, teaching small-scale organic agriculture; grown food for a small hotel on the Isle of Iona; restored the walled gardens of a manor house in mid-Devon; and run his own organic market garden and tree nursery in South Devon.

His experience led him to the concept of forest gardening as a sustainable system that can flourish in our changing climate conditions, and it was this that led to the founding of the Agroforestry Research Trust in 1992, a non-profit-making charity that researches into temperate agroforestry and all aspects of plant cropping and uses, with a focus on tree, shrub and perennial crops. At his 2-acre forest garden in Dartington, Devon, planted 15 years ago, Martin systematically researches plant interactions and unusual crops. He also runs a commercial tree nursery specialising in unusual trees and shrubs, and has an 8-acre trial site, researching fruit and nut trees.

Martin teaches courses on Forest Gardening and Growing Nut Crops, writes books and edits a quarterly journal, Agroforestry News. His book Creating a Forest Garden – the forest gardening ‘bible’ – was published in 2010. His other books include Cherries: Production and Culture, Directory of Apple Cultivars, Directory of Pear Cultivars, Peaches and Apricots, Plums: Production, Culture and Cultivar Directory, Currants and Gooseberries, Blackberries and Raspberries, Chestnuts: Production and Culture, Hazelnuts: Production and Culture, Walnuts: Production and Culture, Bamboos, Ground Cover Plants, Nitrogen-fixing Plants for Temperate Climates, Timber Trees for Temperate Climates, Edible Plants for Temperate Climates,Useful Plants for Temperate Climates, Plants for Hedging, Plants for Basketry, Bee Plants and Dye Plants. His latest book, How to Grow Perennial Vegetables, was published in 2012.

He is a director of ‘Gaia’, a Trust formed by James Lovelock to further his work. He lives in Dartington with his wife and two children.

See www.agroforestry.co.uk  for more information. 

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part One  Cultivating and processing nuts

Chapter 1  Growing nut trees

Chapter 2  Maintenance and propagation of nut trees

Chapter 3  Harvesting and processing nuts

Part TWO  Nut trees A–Z

Almond (Prunus dulcis)

Black walnut (Juglans nigra)

Bladdernuts (Staphylea spp.)

Buartnut (Juglans x bixbyi)

Butternut (Juglans cinerea)

Chinkapin/Chinquapin (Castanea pumila)

Ginkgo/Maidenhair tree (Ginkgo biloba)

Golden Chinkapins (Castenopsis spp.) (Chrysolepis spp.)

Hazelnut and Filbert (Corylus avellana, C. maxima)

Heartnut (Juglans ailantifolia  var. cordiformis)

Hickories (Carya spp.)

Monkey puzzle (Araucaria araucana)

Oaks (Quercus spp.)

Pecan (Carya illinoensis)

Pines (Pinus spp.) Sweet Chestnut (Castanea spp.)

Trazels (Corlus spp.)

Walnut (Juglans regia)

Yellowhorn

Glossary

Appendix 1: Nutritional content of nuts

Appendix 2: Common and Latin names

Resources

Photo credits

Index                 

Editorial Reviews

"Martin is a true pioneer and his work deserves respect and celebration.” —Permaculture Magazine
 

“Martin Crawford is a frontiersman, a pioneering teacher and an inspiration. Both his work and his garden are national treasures.” —Chris Nichols, Director of the Ashridge MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility

From the Publisher