I met Miles last year in the Blackstairs Mountains at Eco Trails with Mary White at her Wild Food Summer School. Miles took us on a very interesting foraging walk and he is one of the few I’ve met to make his living exclusively from foraging. He sells his foraged wild goods to restaurants in London. Here’s a blog post he wrote about Hazel Catkins which I found really interesting. His website can be found here.
http://www.forager.org.uk/catkins-and-nutkins
Above you’ll find an image I just shot from the hazel trees in the garden clearly showing the male hazel catkins and the tiny beautiful red female flowers that will become the nuts this autumn once pollinated.
I have some photos from the huge hazelnut harvest that we got 2 years ago I’ll post here below.
Was a lot of work husking them all and I recall there was 6 kilos of nuts! Unfortunately I didn’t dry them out properly and they got mouldy which was heartbreaking. I won’t be making that mistake again!
By the way I bought Miles book The Forager Handbook last year at the Wild Food event. It is an amazing resource I definitely recommend checking it out. See what Eatweeds.co.uk has to say about it here.