#Hazelnut bastille electric full#

Then you must gather them from the ground – separating out all of the rocks and twigs – and let them dry out. In most cases, you’ve got to wait for them to fall from the trees. Not only do nut trees take a long time to mature, harvesting their fruit is labor-intensive as well. “Then you know you’ve got to turn them over.” “You can smell the aroma coming out of the oven,” he says.

#Hazelnut bastille electric full#

He prefers to snack on them once they’ve been freshly roasted (about 15 to 30 minutes for a sheet pan full of nuts in a 270-degree oven). Later this winter, he plans to start working with caramel-maker Ellie Grubich of Ellie’s Edibles to make hazelnut candies. He sells the nuts from his home and also at several other farms around Green Bluff, including Hansen’s. Now, they are 15- to 20-feet high and bore about 200 pounds of hazelnuts last year, he says. “You have to protect them from animals and protect them from bacterial blight … Then when they get bigger, they get less susceptible.”Įichin planted his babies when they were just small sticks, really, about three-feet-tall. “When they’re small, they’re subject to weather,” Eichin says. “The trees take quite a while to develop.”įor the first few years, the trees must be babied, he says. “It’s been a learning process for me,” says Eichin. While there, he met another hazelnut farmer. “I live in the nut house.”Įichin, a former engineer, became interested in growing hazelnuts while working in Oregon for the Bonneville Power Administration.

“Everybody knows me as the nut man,” Eichin says with a laugh.

And they’ve just started bearing fruit in the last couple of years. Paul Eichin planted his 65 hazelnut trees at Green Bluff about a decade ago. You won’t find a “nut festival” in their honor on the ‘bluff, but they are there.

When families pack into the car and head up to Green Bluff this time of year, they’re usually on the prowl for apples, pumpkins or gourds.īut there’s another kind of fruit growing on Green Bluff’s trees, only this one doesn’t get the star billing of the others: Nuts.Īmongst the apples and squash, you can find walnuts, hazelnuts and even (eventually) pecans dropping from the trees this time of year.