Dud hazelnuts

Volunteers for Mull Native Woodlands Group have collected kilos of hazelnuts with a view to growing them on into plants for the community nursery next spring.

There are any number of hazelnut trees on Mull however finding nuts that are fruitful has less than 10% success rate. To find out the nuts a placed in a large bucket of water, if the nuts are floating the shell is empty, logical really. The viable nuts will go through a stratifying process, ie placed in damp sand and or leaf mould over winter, before planting into a root trainer.