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

How to Grow Your Own Nuts

Choosing, cultivating and harvesting nuts in your garden

By: Martin Crawford, Joanna Brown (Photographer)

Paperback | 1 December 2021

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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.

About the Author

Martin Crawford, Director of the Agroforestry Research Trust, forest gardener and author of the bestselling Creating a Forest Garden, has teamed up with Caroline Aitken, a permaculture teacher and cook on Patrick Whitefield's permaculture courses. Her passion for cooking and Martin's passion for growing are combined to offer creative and imaginative ways to enjoy the crops from your forest garden.

Martin started his working life a computer programmer, but his passion for organic gardening quickly led to a change in career. In 1992 he founded the Agroforestry Research Trust, 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.
Industry Reviews
All who have room for a tree should grow nuts - serious nutrition with huge gastronomic potential. In yet another beautiful book, one of our most accomplished forest gardeners shows how. -- Colin Tudge, biologist, science writer and broadcaster, founder of The Campaign for Real Farming How to Grow Your Own Nuts is the best guide I've seen to home and small-farm nut growing for the temperate climates, featuring species selection, cultivating, harvest, and processing. It includes many lesser-known species alongside standards like walnut, chestnut, and hazel. This is an essential guide to production of these perennial staple crops. -- Eric Toensmeier, permaculturist, author and Yale University lecturer Martin Crawford is a one-man wonder! In this grand and beautiful book on nut culture he has assembled decades of practical insight to help gardeners and orchardists grow 'bread from trees.' From planting to harvesting, selection to storage, and pruning to pest control, you'll find the answers here. Complete with a thorough and lovingly illustrated guide to 19 species of nuts for the temperate world, this book sets a new standard for a vital but little-known field. If we must transform our agriculture to build soil and store carbon, then nut trees belong in all our futures. -- Peter Bane, author of The Permaculture Handbook A beautifully presented, clear, comprehensive bible from the man who knows more than anyone about growing nuts. Full of inspiration and information. It's a great book. -- Mark Diacono, gardener, food writer and broadcaster

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