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HOW MANY MINNESOTA NUTS ARE IN HOLIDAY NUT BOWL?
A bowl of unshelled nuts came to a stop by my spot at a holiday table. You know the assortment: Brazil nuts, pecans, walnuts, filberts, almonds.
Since nuts are an allowable food on the South Beach diet I am following, I used the nutcracker on a handful before passing on the bowl. The fellow to my right asked if I had ever seen a filbert tree in Minnesota. "We had one growing in our pasture that I'd pass by whenever I had to get the cows for milking," he recalled.
"I didn't realize filberts grew in Minnesota," I replied. Back home at my computer, I decided to dig a little deeper into which holiday nuts are native to Minnesota.
Most holiday nut bowls contain walnuts, which grow throughout Minnesota. The bowl doesn't generally contain butternuts, a close relative to black walnut. We had butternut trees growing on the farm on which I was raised.
The butternut's name is most likely attributable to the kernel's high (60%) oil content. Settlers used butternuts to polish furniture and advised that "a single nut kernel is sufficient to thoroughly oil one walking stick."
The nut tree with an obvious holiday connection is the American Chestnut. We sing along to the tune each December: "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping..."
Unfortunately, few Minnesotans are able to recall stands of the majestic American chestnut in this state. Although chestnuts grew in southeastern Minnesota, the legendary chestnut blight of 1904 wiped out nearly the entire U.S. population of chestnuts in a few short years.
Besides their tasty nuts, chestnuts are worth remembering because of the mammoth size of this prized tree. In the central Appalachians, it is said that mature chestnuts averaged up to five feet in diameter and up to 100 feet tall. Many 8-10 ft. diameter specimens were recorded and there were rumors of even bigger trees.
Now, thanks to the American Chestnut Foundation and numerous private nurseries and plant breeders, hybrid chestnuts are making a comeback. Some of the new cultivars are winter hardy in this growing zone.
The nut we commonly call filbert, also called hazelnut, is produced on a family of shrubs and small trees. The two species hardy in Minnesota are American hazelnut and beaked hazelnut. An internet search produced several websites of Minnesota tree nurseries that sell both winter hardy hazelnuts and blight-resistant chestnuts.
Most shell pecans found in the nut bowl are grown in southern states but the pecan family also includes all the hickory species: Bitternut, mockernut, pignut, shagbark and shellbark hickories. Of these, pignut, shellbark and shagbark are native to Minnesota. If you want to plant a hickory to produce nuts, Dr. Leon Snyder, founding director of the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, wrote in his 1991 book "Native Plants for Northern Gardens" that shagbark hickory (Carya ovata) nuts have the best flavor of any of our native nuts.
Two nuts we enjoy each holiday season that clearly are not Minnesota natives are almonds and Brazil nuts.
Almonds are stone fruits eaten as nuts. Almonds produced commercially in the U.S. are grown in California's Central Valley and in other dry parts of the state. Almonds are harvested by shaking trees when hulls begin to split. Almonds need 180-240 days to mature the nuts.
Brazil nuts grow in tropical South America inside hard, woody coconut-sized shells that weigh about 5 pounds each and contain 15-25 nuts.
Brazil nut trees grow to 165 feet and have a life span of several hundred years. Their reproductive biology is extremely specialized. They bear grapefruit-sized fruits that remain on the tree for 15 months and contain some 20 seeds (nuts) per fruit.
In the wild nuts can only be opened by agouti rodents. These animals scatter-hoard the nuts by burying much of the crop. Agoutis may take the fruits a thousand feet away from the parent tree and often bury some of the seeds for future retrieval. If the agouti forgets where its cache is, the seeds may germinate into seedlings.
Pollination of this tree is so specialized that Brazil nuts have never been effectively grown in plantations. Trees do not begin production for 30 years. Euglossine orchid bees are required to pollinate Brazil nut flowers. Fruits are gathered and opened in the forest by local harvesters and the nuts are hauled in sacks to processing camps.
A final thought on nuts: If you want to grow Minnesota-native nut trees, it is best to plant them from seed since most nut tree species have deep taproots and are difficult to transplant.
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