Autumn into winter

Saturday was a rare sunny day amongst the misty, murky days of recent weeks. The bright tints of late autumn were so attractive that I am posting a small photo gallery, just for the pleasure of it.

The few remaining leaves show up brightly against the nearly-bare branches.




In the hedgerows there are still a few beech leaves also providing colour.

On some branches the yellow and orange of lichen gives another bright note.

Lichen and late leaves

Turn and look the other way and winter seems well-established....

Not a leaf to be seen!

....although a gentle haze on the nut trees show where the catkins have been in place for some time.


At the back of the shed the 'bug hotel' is standing up well to wind and weather.

Has anyone told the bugs they can move in?

Two young trees are ready to be planted and will go in partly as pollinators for the Kent Cobs (which as we know are not self-fertile), and to add to the pollination provided by wild hazels around the plat.

These young trees are a variety called Cosford filberts

Wanding in the top bloc is well underway and, as tomorrow is the first of December I shall spend a hour or two on the young bloc - weather permitting!

Visit to Hurstwood Farm

In Mid November a group of us met at Hurstwood Farm for a visit to see how Kentish Cobnut Oil is made.

Cobnut trees make the backdrop as the group assembles

Our host, nut farmer (and piano-maker), Richard Dain received us warmly with tea and biscuits and he and his assistant, Catherine, gave a talk explaining how it all came about.

Cathrine, right, explains 

When his extensive apple orchards suffered irreparable damage during the Great Storm of October 1987 Mr Dain decided a wiser move would be to replant with cobnuts rather than with apples.  The idea for an oil press came later and, being an engineer by profession, he assembled the various parts, sourcing from Italy, Germany and using his own invention.

The barn where we sat doubles as a concert hall in summer

The resulting cobnut oil was entered for the Great Taste Awards of the Guild of Fine Food and at its first appearance won not just best in its category but overall winner. It was a great start and Kentish Cobnut Oil has gone from strength to strength since then.

Making oil from cobnuts is not simply a question of feeding the nuts into a machine and bottling the oil that comes out.  The process has many stages and we visited each in turn. First we saw the machine which makes boxes into which the bottles are packed for dispatch: different sizes for different numbers of bottles.

The machine will print boxes to suit your specifications

But before any of that what about the actual process of making the oil? First the nuts must be dried and the moisture reduced to a particular degree. Then the nuts are cracked and the shells separated from the kernels.  The kernels are fed into a hopper and thence into the pressing mechanism.

Nut kernals are drawn up the conveyor (right) into the hopper

Richard Dain controls the pressing mechanism

The resulting oil goes into containers and thence to the bottling plant.

Three bottles are filled before you can say 'nuts'!

There is another element of this machine which secures the bottles with sealed caps.

Securing the familiar and distinctive labels

 Finally the bottles are labelled and are ready to be packed into their boxes.










Hurstwood farm has thirty acres of cobnuts and another seven acres of walnut trees which will be made into walnut oil once the necessary machinery has been installed.  I think we would be willing guinea-pigs when it comes to  trialling it!


You can buy Kentish cobnut Oil from Hurstwood Farm at the Shipbourne Farmers Market
(Thursdays from 9 to 11 am).

I too have supplies and will be happy to take your orders: 

just phone 01732 761466

Harvest time

I finished my last post, by speculating that the harvest might be early and so it turned out.  We began on August 24th - a day later than planned owing to the writer being  caught out 'up a creek' (actually the river Roach on the East coast of Essex), not without a paddle but with wind and tide against us. But that is another story.

Some growers had begun picking their cobnuts ten days earlier but late August suited us fine.  I decided, with the help of willing volunteers to take care of the young bloc - some 200 trees roughly ten years old, with the main bloc going to Hurstwood Farm, the makers of Kentish Cobnut Oil ( www.cobnutoil.co.uk ).

cobnuts crated up

On 9th September 32 sharp-eyed pickers and the farm manager descended on the plat and stripped the golden clusters from the trees, leaving them bare in two and a half days.

two pickers to each row of nut trees

ready for loading

In fact the nuts were so advanced this year that a good shake of the trees brought most of them to the ground where they were quickly collected up.

ground hog?

The nuts were of good quality

passing inspection

The crates were loaded onto a trailer to be trundled back to the farm.

ready to roll

The main bloc had been taken care of but there remained plenty to do to harvest and market the young bloc. The plan was for these to be  sold 'by donation' to visitors at Ightham Mote where garden staff had set up a stall by the entrance to the property. So picking continued.

a dedicated nutter

Then the nuts were bagged up and weighed.

to be sold by the bag

calibrating the scales

A final effort was needed and, as the month progressed, the weather stayed dry and the nuts were falling off the trees it was a question of scrabbling around in the grass to retrieve them before the squirrels did.

'Got to get them all!'

The Apple and Orchard Day fairs took place in the garden of Ightham Mote on the last weekend of September and we were able to provide plenty of nuts for the cobnut stand..

Supermarket trays put to use

'Will we get any customers?'

The punters arrive

If any trees remained unpicked at the end of the month the will to carry on had evaporated and the squirrels were welcome to help themselves.  So ended the harvest season, in good time as October brought wind, rain and the arrival of autumn.

All quiet on the plat

June and July are quiet times on the plat; not a lot happens other than the grass grows and the nuts begin to swell.

Soon it will be time for mowing between the rows

Meanwhile, down at Ightham Mote the new brush-cutter has arrived - paid for by the funds raised at Waitrose and generously matched by the National Trust, at Ightham Mote.

'Have we got all the parts?'

 It comes flat-packed (sort of) in a box.

'Where does this bit go?'

photo-opportunity on the East Lawn

It did not take long to put it together and, once the mowing has been done at the end of July, the brush-cutter will be in action to deal with the brambles.

Although they may be hard to distinguish among the greenery of the leaves there seems to be a good crop of nuts coming along.  Will the harvest be early this year?  Possibly, after the mild and early spring.  Volunteers to help with the picking will be more than welcome.  Watch this space and bring a picnic.

Look carefully and you can see the nuts.

St Lawrence School visit - Part 2

After lunch there were more activities to get around:-

A time-line of the local heritage

When were the nut trees planted?

Ightham Mote started way back down the line

Identifying wild flowers

This one's called 'bugle'/

                                                                                 Examining another specimen

                                                     Building a hedge for bugs and beatles

Weaving skills

Getting it right

Storytime in the Secret Dell

Time to explore!

More stories

Looking at life on the forest floor

 The children were asked which activities they liked most; answers were varied but the Secret Dell got a lot of votes.

A big cheer for a great day

Time to leave the wildlife in peace.

St Lawrence School visit - Part 1

The weather was more than kind for the visit of all 86 children of St Lawrence School, Stone Street

A perfect day on the plat

Not a cloud in the sky

                                                                                                                                        

The older children walked the mile or more through footpaths and up the steep hill of
 Mote Road.... ....arriving in great time for the visit, whilst the younger ones were brought by parents' cars.





A programme of eight different activities had been planned at different points around the plat, with volunteers guiding each one.

With the children sorted into eight groups they set off to tackle as many as they could in rotation.

If the rotation was sometimes a bit confusing and out of
sinc, no-one got too fussed and in the end each group
covered at least three of the activities before it was
time to stop for packed lunches on the open ground.












The volunteers too were glad to take a break.

Then it was time for more discoveries and creative work getting around another three or four of the stopping points.  What follows is a photo gallery of the different activities on offer:-

Learning about bumblebees and the wild flowers that
they like  

A bowlful of seeds to sow

Building a stack for wildlife

Learning about cobnuts

More activities and more photos in Part 2 (next post!)