An exercise in patience: hazelnut farming in Essex County

As CBC Windsor has been reporting this week, farmers in Essex County are going nuts — for hazelnuts.

There's a growing global demand for the valuable nut, especially from Italian food company Ferrero, which makes the hazelnut-based Nutella spread and Ferrero Rocher chocolates. The company has a production facility in Brantford, Ont.

One of those farmers growing homegrown hazelnuts is Nathan Crocker. He's been growing a variety of nuts with his mother, Olga, since 2004. While hazelnuts make up the majority of their crop, they also grow heartnuts, northern pecans, black walnuts and English walnuts at their farm in Maidstone.

An ideal location

Crocker says Essex County is a great place to grow nuts.

"One, we're surrounded by water. Two, we're on the same latitude as northern California. People don't believe that, but we are. So, it's actually a good environment for most nut trees," Crocker said.

"Hazelnuts do very well here."

The Crockers have planted over 1,300 hazelnut trees alone.

While not much is happening in the orchard in January, the growing process starts sooner then you may think.

"We start at the end of February, [when] the flowers are coming out, beginning of March. Just before that, we're doing some pruning of the trees, taking off all the layering that we don't want. Hazelnuts want to be bushes, but for commercial production you need them to be single-stemmed or two-stemmed trees," he said.

The actual harvesting, however, doesn't occur until the fall.

"Come September, you're starting to collect the nuts off the ground. You pick them up, you've got to bleach them and take the husk off — make sure they're sanitized, because they've been lying on the ground," he said.

After the nuts are cleaned up, they're dried and packaged for sale.

A long-term investment

At the moment, the Crockers are not producing a lot of nuts — about 100 kilograms a year, sold entirely by word-of-mouth. This is because nut trees take many years before they mature and start producing at commercial levels. Once this happens, however, Crocker says that the trees will produce and last for decades.

Right now, the nut orchard is just a big field with young nut trees evenly spaced throughout. When those trees are fully mature, things will look decidedly different. Recently, Crocker visited a mature nut orchard in Oregon, the largest producer of hazelnuts in North America. He said it almost looked like a cathedral.