Nelson-Blenheim
Field Days attendees enjoyed a weekend in Nelson and Blenheim this February. Great hosts, good conversations, new connections, and even the old hands learnt something new. Summer was on our side (not something to be taken for granted this ‘summer’), not too hot, but warm and dry. Fourteen members gathered to visit sections devoted to forestry and hazelnut orchards.
Dave DeGray – Sugar Maples and Assorted Forestry Species
Dave bought a 10 acre (4 Ha) block in Lower Moutere in 1980. The soil is clay (Mapua clay loam) and had been used for one rotation of pine, so the property was mostly gorse and wilding pines. Dave comes from a forestry background, and has planted a variety of hardwood species over his 46 years on the property. He’s not looking for a quick buck from his trees, rather the experimental “does this grow well in NZ?”, which might inform others of an opportunity to commercialise a species.
We visited to view his foray into sugar maples (Acer saccharum). Any old seedling will do, as the sugar is in the sap, not the seed, and in Dave’s case, his seedlings fell off the back of a truck (part of a lot destined for a plantation in Wanaka). He planted 35-40 of these, and then waited 25 years for the trees to gain the girth required for tapping.
A mature tree produces about 2.5L of sap per day, over a three week period in late winter/early spring. A tube is hammered into the trunk (about 6/tree) and a container attached to the tube collects the sap. Maple sap contains between 2-4% sugar, while maple syrup is 68% sugar, which means that a lot of sap is collected, and boiled down, to achieve the correct sugar content. In practice this became a community event hosted by Dave, with his neighbours pitching in to help with the collection and boiling process, and the final result was 5L of maple syrup which was given away to neighbours and his kids. This all came to a halt in the last few years because there have been no frosts, and maples require the frost-thaw temperature fluctuations to create the internal pressure that forces sap up the tree. Dave is unbothered by this development, because they also make good timber, and he owns a bandsaw.
(Did you know that maple wood is used in high-class bowling alleys because the wood has the ability to rebound after the dent of a bowling ball? This caused a North American crop decline during the “bowling boom” of the 1960-70s, when the Japanese built new alleys.)
An economic plantation requires 12 000+ trees, with the trees connected by tubes and plumbed into a vacuum extractor system. A couple of attempts were made to establish sugar maple plantations in NZ (Wanaka and Queenstown), but rabbits and the cost of irrigation sunk these. Dave thinks Murchison and Tapawera are promising sites for future plantations. Maples need frost, water, and clean air. Canadians came to check out his maple syrup, bringing their own samples to compare, and the NZ syrup was superior to the Canadian. Dave credits this to the lack of air pollution in NZ. This is definitely an opportunity for the person who can find the right mix of frost, water and land.
Our group wandered among the trees, and maple seedlings were dug up and taken home for planting at hazelnut properties. Dave also grows macrocarpas and cedars which he can mill with his bandsaw. He has 30 cork oaks (Quercus suber) and redwoods (Sequoia spp). This is the property of a man who loves trees, and does not feel that they need to have a commercial purpose. He recommends visiting April-November when the forest is full of bird song, after the birds feasted on Nelson’s fruit harvest over summer, and have retired to his forest to rest.
From left: A) Dave leans on a sugar maple and talks us through the maple-syrup making details; B) looking into the planatation; and C) Bev admires a Sequoia spp.
Bee & Bev Nicholl – Just Nutz
Our next visit was to the orchard of Bee and Bev Nicholl in Lower Moutere. They have attended other Field Days, but this is the first time they have hosted a visit and they had a lot to show us – but not until the cheese scones and cuppas were finished. They are members who grow, process, market and sell their own hazelnuts, so there was a lot to see and talk about.
Their property is not far from Dave’s, so the soil is similar, but their aspect is northerly, with the hazels planted on a 14° slope. They have two blocks of Whiteheart, named Old Field (480 trees) and New Field (300 trees). Old Field was planted in 2012, with the rows running down the slope because the block is 40m across and 110m from top to bottom. New Field runs across the slope, and was planted in 2016, with a 5m spacing between trees.
The slope of the land has caused Bee and Bev to a) stay fit, and b) adapt their orchard maintenance and harvesting techniques to the slope. The property is spray-free, though not certified as organic. Occasionally they spray copper, and use water-soluble fertilisers in the irrigation system. The irrigation pipes are suspended above the ground (Photo B) which makes mowing and trimming much easier compared to irrigation which lies on the surface of the ground (some moaning was heard from members who have nicked their irrigation tubes when mowing).
Bev got busy demonstrating all his gear for orchard maintenance. As well as rakes in two sizes, the electric shears, and hedge trimmer, he has a mower with control handles which allows him to circle between the trees (Photo C). As always, gear was carefully examined and admired. The consensus was that the mini electric Stihl chainsaw is ideal for pruning and suckers, that owning multiple battery packs ensures work is not interrupted by the need to recharge, and the chain-mail fishing gloves are ideal for hand safety!
Then we moved to the sheds, where Bev’s inventions were revealed. He built his own rotating drum for cleaning the nuts, using Fletcher’s easy steel, bicycle rims and other found items (Photo D), and rigged up with an extractor fan to keep the dust to a minimum. Bev is a man who likes to repurpose objects, so the sorting table, drying drawers and storage areas all had previous lives, were adapted, and are now part of the hazelnut processing line. Everything is clean and organised for maximum efficiency.
Inside the house is a kitchen set up to process the nuts (Photo G). It has an oven for roasting nuts and a bench-mounted nut grinder. The recent price increase for MP2 certification, from $700 to $1400, was a sore point for everyone, as every business pays the same regardless of size. Bev’s latest purchase is a rotisserie chicken oven, which he is converting to a hazelnut roasting oven. He watched re-runs of the Country Calendar episode featuring Kasia from Loburn Grove, focusing on her roasting equipment and what he needed to change.
The Nicholls produce two products, roasted nuts and hazelnut butter. They do their own promotion and marketing, and currently their products are sold through two places in Mapua, Rabbit Island Coffee Co. and Mapua Fruit and Vege. Bev said that the roasted nuts are popular with cyclists who stop en masse for their coffee. There are no online sales yet, as setting up the payment system costs more money.
Top row from left: A) the nut harvester hooked up and ready for action; B) irrigation lines held up above the ground; and C) Bev demonstrates the manoeuvrability of his mower.
Bottom row from left: D) the bicycle-rim rotating cleaner; E) sorting table; F) storage shelves; and G) the kitchen, nutbutter grinder on bench, and a packet of roasted nuts.
Karen & Darrell Johnston – River Terrace Nurseries
After lunch, we visited the orchard of Karen and Darrell Johnston in Brightwater. The Johnstons are long-time members and have featured in previous Field Days, but we had three members for whom this was their first visit, and there is always something for the old hands to see.
Their property lies in a bend of the Wairoa River, and in last year’s floods, the river was lapping at the top of the bank. They bought the property in 1984, and in their first year the river flooded over the banks and was lapping at their door.
The Johnstons grow a variety of plants, so while they specialise in hazelnut and walnuts, they also grow macadamias, Hass avocados, various fruit trees and flowers. (Photo D) Every Saturday for the past 18 years they sell their seasonal produce at the Nelson Market (Nelson Market). The macadamias are a favourite with regular customers. Food regulations mean that they sell the nuts unroasted, thus avoiding MPI, with instructions on how to roast. Karen demonstrated how she roasts and cracks the nuts, the macadamia shell in particular is rock-hard (Photos E and F). We all tried fresh and roasted macadamias, and the roasted nuts were delicious. I have included photos of the leaves and nuts gathered from the ground.
Darrell showed us his 20 year old hazelnut stall beds (Photo A) and explained how he mounds up the sawdust, and then how he bundles up the stems and trims off the tops. He pots them up in August. The most popular seller is ‘Barcelona’, but he also recommends ‘Tonda Romana’ as it is a small tree, reliable cropper, with a low suckering tendency and not prone to blight. ‘MdB’ is a good nut, but does not like harsh conditions. Otherwise ‘Lansing’, ‘Butler’ and ‘Keen’s Late’ are good sellers too. Of the walnut varieties, Darrell recommends ‘Rex’ as it is resistant to blight.
Top row from left: A) hazelnut stall beds; B) macadamia collected from the ground; C) macadamia on the tree, the leaves are unpleasantly spiky; and D) one of the dahlia varieties ‘Dracula’.
Bottom row from left: E) Karen demonstrates the husking machine; and F) cracked macadamia.
Deb Whiteside & Alan Crawford – https://www.unclejoes.co.nz/
Sunday morning we visited the orchard and processing sheds of Uncle Joe’s in Blenheim. Once again, this property has featured in previous Field Days, and this was the first visit for three members. First Deb treated us to her own recipe hazelnut and chocolate-iced creation (Photo A), and then we got serious about hazelnuts. Originally established by Jenny & Malcolm Horwell, Deb & Alan bought the business in 2021. The orchard consists of ‘Ennis’ and ‘Barcelona’, both larger nut varieties, with ‘Ennis’ in particular a prolific nutter (Photo B).
For their own harvest, they reckon on a week to harvest the nuts and one week to sort them, with harvest usually at the end of March. Alan puts the nuts in chiller crates, which allows a lot of debris to fall out during handling, but the final sort is done on chicken-wire tables, where the remaining debris and waste can be removed by hand. Then they go into the drier, are bagged and stored.
As a commercial processor, they also buy nuts from larger orchards. Their best investment was a nut drier – previously they took the nuts off-property to be dried, but found the results could be variable, and the trips back and forth inconvenient. This drier can take 460kg of nuts at a time, saving considerable time.
There was a variety of equipment in the processing shed, beginning with the grader (from Picton Engineering), a hopper and conveyor to the cracking machine. There follows much tumbling to remove broken shells from the kernel. Alan introduced us to the term “nervous nut”, as in “Whiteheart is a nervous nut” meaning that the cracking machine must be dialled back to a “tender” setting, else it destroys the whole kernel, and chocolatiers prefer their Whiteheart kernels whole. Other varieties, apparently, are more relaxed.
(On a side note, check out this video Mātauranga in Horticulture – Thymebank for a cameo of Deb and Alan delivering bags of left-over shells to Thymebank, a hydroponics operation. The shells are burnt as fuel.)
Next stop was the clean room, where the kernels are picked over multiple times by hand, searching for the last pieces of shell that have slipped through, and removing mouldy and bad nuts. Deb placed a bowl of kernel on the wire tray and rolled the nuts around, and it was incredible how many still had to be picked out. What initially looked like a good batch of kernel, contained bad nuts (Photos E and F). This was very interesting to those who prepare and sell their own nuts and also a lesson in why nuts are so expensive to buy, with all the human labour required to produce a clean batch.
Through another door was the last stage of the process, where the products are lined up neatly on the shelves, and the kitchen where the roasting occurs. One of the current issues Deb and Alan are facing is the press machine used to extract oil from nuts. This work is carried out by another firm, and the press is not removing enough oil, so the leftover meal has too much oil left in the cake, and cannot be further processed to produce hazelnut flour. If (or until) this can be rectified, they cannot offer hazelnut flour for sale.
They have also stepped away from walnuts, because they found that there was resistance to the higher price required to produce walnut products, and problems with the (often low) quality of ‘Meyric’ varieties. Their own walnuts go as food to pigs.
Top row from left: A) the remains of Deb’s iced hazelnut creation; B) in the ‘Ennis’ orchard; C) the rotating sorter; and D) bags of size-sorted nuts.
Bottom row from left: E) a sample of cracked nuts for hand sorting; F) bad nuts detected; and G) the nut butter grinder, sourced from Pic’s.
The End
Finally, a big thank you to all our hosts for inviting us onto their properties and into their vision of paradise (growing plants for health and profit). There was a constant buzz of conversation as our attendees met new growers and shared their ideas, disasters and successes.
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