Most nut trees can take many years to produce their first small crops and, although their lumber is both beautiful and expensive, unless you planted them decades ago your grandchildren will profit; not you.

But hazelnuts (filberts) are technically woody shrubs and can produce in as little as 3 years, with 4-5 being the norm. Since they usually max out around 8-15 ft tall (~2.5 – 4.5m), they are a good height for a windbreak that will never grow tall enough to present a danger – and always stay low enough to produce food where you can reach it.

Plant them in open spaces and harvest them by waiting until the nuts fall from the tree or, if you are in a hurry, give the tree a shake. The ripe ones will fall from the bush … on you! If kept in the shell, they will last up to 24 months, so this is a good “putting by” food.

If you plant them near the edge of wooded areas you can harvest the squirrels, deer and turkeys, too.

In cities, these shrubs are excellent for traffic island planting as they tolerate both dry soil and floods: plant them in the early spring and they’ll have roots of their own when the heat of summer hits. If you can give them some water, they’ll reward the extra effort. As always, put a raised ring of soil around the planting hole to help funnel water from rains to the roots and then mulch several inches deep for two or three feet all around to conserve available water and cut down on weed competition.

Filberts make excellent wind screens to stop drifting snows and soil erosion and provide a lot of wildlife habitat, offering both food and concealment.

They sequester carbon in the woody roots and stems and their dense root systems stabilize topsoil to keep waterways clear. Their slender shoots make good arrows and their stouter limbs make good bows.

Because the nuts are easily recognized and easily processed into food (roasted or raw), they make a good guerrilla gardening planting, offering food for man and beast alike while needing little to no care after the initial planting. Plant them along fencerows, alongside railroad right of ways (several feet away from the ballast gravel, which is sprayed with nasty stuff to keep it clear … and mind the trains while planting!) and at the base of existing shrubby highway plantings.

For pollination purposes, the minimum number to plant is two … and the more the merrier, as they are wind pollinated. Judging by illustrations I’ve seen, actual planting distances tend to be in the range of 10-20 feet apart, depending on whether they are being grown for food or windbreak.

If you join the Arbor Day Foundation (a 501c non-profit corporation) now, they’ll send you three seedlings at the minimum membership level. These are NOT the commercial cultivars you may be familiar with … other than size (these max out at around 8 ft tall), they have been bred for good yields, hardiness across a broad range of temperatures (USDA zones 3-9) and disease resistance (including against the Eastern Filbert Blight). This is a project of the Arbor Day Foundation and three universities to develop a superior commercial strain of the filbert that can compete on the world market (Turkey presently sells roughly 75% of the worlds filberts while the US grows no more than 5%.)

If you want more than three (to plant a traffic island, freeway fence, public park, etc.) Arbor Day Foundation members* can get 50, 8-12”, seedlings for $39.00. More mature plants are about $7.00 each for members. They’ll live about 100 years, so they make a nice living memorial of one day in your life spent with mattock in hand and high hopes in your heart.

What is of especial importance, perhaps, for readers of this blog is the potential for economic growth in filberts. From a growers viewpoint, this is like getting in on the first good deals of 8-track distribution back in 1965. As urban farmers, we can plant the filberts, then plant around them until they mature. Thus we gain an immediate cash / food return while we are waiting for a far larger one.

Source: USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference,
Release 17, 2004. Nuts are unsalted and unroasted.

FAT CONTENT OF HAZELNUTS

MONOUNSATURATED 75%
SATURATED 7%

Total Phytosterols 27 mg
g = gram mg = milligram %DV = percent Daily Value mcg = microgram

* Minimum membership donation is $15 for a one-year membership.

Gardening is an opportunity for young ones to feel & be useful.

You can plant and you can forage and you can get-by. Those are positive things. You’ll probably lose weight you’ve needed to shed anyway and regain strength you thought was gone forever; you’ll definitely gain a new perspective toward food and you’ll likely taste wonderful things you would never have otherwise experienced. The taste difference between a pepper that was picked just this morning and one the grocer would have discarded tomorrow is difficult to appreciate until you’ve eaten a fresh-picked one. You won’t walk past grocery stores because you haven’t the money to shop: you’ll walk past them because your pantry (and your stomach) are already full and you don’t need to shop. Big difference.

When the welfare of our family is at stake, we tend to take whatever deal we are offered in the way of work. But what would your bargaining position look like if you didn’t have to worry about feeding yourself or your family? For many people that would cut their cash needs by $100-$200 or more per week. With that burden off, they could have kept their homes. You could live on savings a lot longer while looking for quality employment or survive just fine on a lesser (cash) income indefinitely.

A well-tended garden this size will provide food for four and pay the house note, too.

You can plant on land you own, land you lease (on the cheap) and, on the sly, you can plant on public land. There are people all over the world who are already doing it. It’s called “guerilla gardening”. It’s illegal: but do it right and it will fill your stomach.  Oh, and don’t forget the overlooked plots of land at the edges of fields and woods that you can see from the freeway. It would be a hard-heated farmer who would begrudge the use of a narrow strip of land at the edge of his fields too small for him to plow with his tractor. It might happen, but most farmers are wired to be hard-working, not hard-hearted, and they tend to appreciate others like them.

You can even plant on the side of walls using a series of slightly inclined rain gutters that criss-cross and drain into each other. This could help you gain the exposure to light you need, the square footage you lack, or just getting the most good out of every drop of water. Perhaps all three.

Ding, ding! Ingenuity is rewarded at the dinner table.

Depending on your tax situation, every $1.00 of groceries you can grow is roughly $1.35 in wages that you don’t have to earn. If you grow, then, $100 worth of groceries a week (taking care of most of the essentials for a family of four), you can live on about $2.50 an hour less in wages. Do the math for yourself. You may never have looked at gardening in this light. This is why, when the layoff notice came, you didn’t have enough food in your house to last even a few months. Avid gardeners might easily manage a year or more with only minor trips to the store.

Unemployment benefits, welfare or even odd-jobs are sufficient to pay for those.

This exercise works just as well with Euros, Yen, Rubles or whatever name your currency is given and whatever tax rate you face. When you contemplate your grocery bill, keep in mind that every single bit of the protein you buy can be replaced by a vegetable source and a change in eating habits. Simply put, I don’t care what you are accustomed to, you don’t need to eat meat. One fourth acre can feed a family of four for an entire year with enough produce left over to generate ~$10,000 USD cash income and all for about 20 hours work a week … less than half of what most folks put into their jobs. In most cases there is no commute.

Too, at least at present, all the expenses of the garden go against the cash income … so the food you eat is neither taxed nor does it cost you anything out of pocket.

SSI pays ~$900 per month, or about $10,800 per year. With food stamps and Medicare, you can just about make it.

But add in the value of the cash crops from that 1/4 acre and this is nearly doubled. Add in the value of the food consumed ($5,000 – $10,000) and, rather than living from month to month you can be living rather well. Many who are on SSI can handle the light work of maintaining a garden as it can be spread throughout the day and the hot parts of the day skipped altogether. I like to start my day, coffee cup in hand, shortly after dawn, pulling a few small weed sprouts and looking for signs of slugs. I might do some watering and, as the sun dries the last of the dew, apply some mulch, pick whatever is ripe enough (or, in the case of tomatoes, still green but big enough) and just get a general sense of what might need to be done later today. I’m out there for 30 minutes or an hour and walk back into the house in a very calm mood, ready for some breakfast. If I miss a few mornings, I can just do more in the afternoon and evening. It doesn’t hurt to completely miss a day or two from time to time.

Counting pathways, I have 600 square feet. One acre = 43,560 square feet. One fourth acre, then, is 10,890 square feet. Unless you are trying to grow livestock, I don’t see the need for even 1/4 acre. My wife and I do just fine with the 240 square feet (not quite 1/64th of an acre) we actually have planted.

Proverbs 6:6-11 "it prepares its food even in the summer; it has gathered its food supplies even in the harvest"

Because I’m out there so often, (And because I’ve just watered) the weeds I pull are tiny, slip easily from the soil, and I can just toss them on top of the mulch to dry out. That’s hard on the weeds, but easy on me. All in all, not a bad way to add to my earnings while sipping a cup of coffee.

Or, at least, the uglier parts of it.

If you haven’t given any thought to becoming a Guerilla Gardener or, if you have thought about it but simply haven’t taken action, you really owe it to yourself to see how much beauty one guy with buck teeth has brought to Zurich, Switzerland.

http://www.maurice-maggi.ch/blumengraffiti/guerilla-gardening/ggtv-guerrilla-gardener-maurice-maggi-zurich/

There are two videos at the above link. Watch them in succession and then ask yourself if you don’t know of some locations in your neighborhood that could use some cheering up.

Maggi simply gets the seed below the surface, hiding it from birds and insects. He doesn’t water it. He doesn’t fertilize it … nature handles that just fine. It would appear that he plants hollyhocks and poppy’s together … both can tolerate fairly dry conditions.

He used a term that I was unfamiliar with: biotope. I’ve looked it up for my benefit and passed it along for yours. This definition comes from Wikipedia; YMMV.

Biotope is an area of uniform environmental conditions providing a living place for a specific assemblage of plants and animals. Biotope is almost synonymous with the term habitat, but while the subject of a habitat is a species or a population, the subject of a biotope is a biological community.

^{I Stumbled this a few minutes ago … I hope it takes off. If you have a way to help it along, please do so.}

^{Here’s my review in Stumble:}

“Guerilla gardening means the planting of public spaces without permission. Maurice Maggi has been during this in Zurich for ~20 years. He’s the source of the hollyhocks that beautify that city. Now, do your part in YOUR city. For more info, Google for "guerilla gardening".”

If you know what you are looking for, you can freely and safely harvest the places planted by nature and ignored, shunned or forgotten by man. It’s a disquieting thought to note that most major cities only have enough food reserves for 3-4 days. After that, the warehouses will be as empty as the store shelves. But, even in the winter, you can shift the odds of surviving in your favor just by knowing the difference between what will fill you and what will kill you.

To that end, my wife and I have begun taking classes in edible plant identification offered by the University of Michigan (USA) as part of their adult education program. We intend to learn food foraging.

Money is not the issue. Quite the contrary: for the moment, at least, we are able to buy enough to keep us fat and make us fatter. But it is possible that there may come a day when all the money in the world couldn’t buy a good, square, meal. Food politics and the trend toward specialization and industrialization have left many of us unable to fend for ourselves without an electric can opener and a microwave oven nearby. Yet, only a generation or two ago, these didn’t exist and mankind fed itself just fine without them.

The wild foods that fed our ancestors still grow wild … but most of us couldn’t identify enough of them to survive, much less thrive. 

You don’t have to become a Euell Gibbons, but you’ll be glad that someone did. Ever notice mushrooms popping up on the lawns you pass or maybe a little higher up on tree trunks? A lot of them are of the edible sort. While you definitely want to make certain you know  how to identify the edible varieties, in season (each has its own), they can often be had for no more effort than a casual walk around the block with a paper bag in your pocket.

Many, if not all, major cities have tangled back alleys and more vacant lots than occupied. Despite massive unemployment, no one, NO ONE, plants anything there. No one has put fertilizer there, ever. And no one bothers with weed killers, either. Whatever you find or grow there qualifies as ‘organic’. Think about that … if you don’t apply poisons to the food, there won’t be any. Some years ago my wife and I stopped at a motel near Manistee, MI on our way to camp at Sleeping Bear Dunes and see Grand Traverse Bay. Spying a restaurant not far away, we elected to walk to dinner. Our conversation had turned to foraging when, almost as if to make the point, we stumbled upon a stand of asparagus just a little past the cutting stage. It was maybe 5 feet off a busy highway and, had we arrived a few days earlier, would have provided more than enough for a meal for two.

I have a super-secret stash of dandelions that I discovered in my alley. They are in a shady spot and don’t seem to ever bloom. I’ve been eating from that stash for the past 9 years. Dandelions taste great and are full of the vitamins, minerals and fiber your body needs. Yet, most people just walk past them or, worse yet, spend good money and hard sweat to get rid of them. I just paid $1.09 yesterday for about a handful, grown in Mexico. This spring I’ll get them fresher and free. I’m not knocking Mexico or its hard-working citizens, and $1.09 seemed a reasonable price for what I got; but food shipped 3,000 miles can never be as fresh or inexpensive as food hand-carried 50 yards. Unless you grow your own food, you are forced to pay for your dinner to travel across entire continents, and even wing it over oceans just to arrive, somewhat the worse for wear, on your plate.

On a happier note: at least food doesn’t have to deal with a TSA pat-down.