How to Harvest & Store Filberts or Hazelnuts

Hi this is Yolanda Vanveen and in this segment we're going to talk about how to harvest and store filberts or hazelnuts. They're such a wonderful nut for your fruit garden. So hazelnuts or filberts are just a nut and they're really easy to grow, they kind of do their own thing. And I have found they will pretty much harvest themselves. So they are ready when they start falling to the ground. And you can actually shake the tree or put a stick up to the tree and if they start falling right out then they are ready to harvest. And a lot of times they'll just barely start cracking too and then you know it's ready. So the best thing you can do at that point is dry them out. So they dry naturally, but all you have to do is put them on paper or glass in the hot full sun and just let them dry out. Now these are shelled hazelnuts right here and they're just dried and they're not even salted in any way, although they can buy them salted, and they just taste wonderful, they're really sweet and buttery. And they're just stored in plastic and you can also store them in glass pretty much any way. And then there's lots of different ways that you can buy hazelnuts or filberts and this company right here they add a covering with sugar and marion berries so they taste just delightful. And you'll find that it's very easy to crack open the wholes too when they're that dry. You can either use a nutcracker or take a knife and just pry them open at the point where they meet and you either store them whole or you can separate the nut from the shell and then store them that way. You can either store them in paper bags or you can put them in plastic bags or glass containers, it really doesn't matter. But they will store really well for a long period of time.