On Saturday, 14 volunteers turned out to plant the first batch of hazel-nut trees for the Quadra ICAN Nut Tree Project.
The organizer, Jennifer Banks-Doll, explained, “For a few years now on Quadra, we’ve been working towards increasing food security. There’s been lots of different ideas about how to do that. From perhaps the more obvious, perhaps not more obvious ideas about gardening workshops and learning how to preserve food — different types of gardening, things like that.”
“Then we thought, one of the gaps here is really plant protein and oils. How do we address that gap? You can’t really produce a lot of oils in this climate or on a small island because they require expensive equipment. Actually it was my husband, Marc Doll, who came up with the idea of planting nut trees.”
“There are some nut trees that grow quite well in our climate on Quadra. So we applied for a grant and we weren’t initially successful, but eventually we were. So we were given some money to plant 100 nut trees in publicly accessible areas on Quadra.”
“The grant was supposed to be for one year and we realized it was going to take a lot longer than one year to do this. We have to get permission to plant all those trees and that’s quite a process.
“We started planting them on Saturday. We had a community planting day and we started with hazelnut trees because hazelnuts grow well on Quadra, but also they are smaller.
“When you plant a walnut tree, you need quite a big space because walnut trees get quite big and they also produce juglone through their roots, their leaves and their bark. This is basically designed to inhibit the growth of most other plants. So if you’re planting a walnut tree, you basically need to give it its own space.”
“Whereas with a hazelnut tree, you can grow it as a shrub, you can grow it as a hedgerow. It’s a much smaller tree. You can prune it so that it’s out of the way of some other things that you’re planting. So it grows well in a food forest where you have other plants. It’s just an easier tree to start with and easier to get to 100.”
“We are planting them in publicly accessible areas, right beside a road or on a pathway that’s used by the public. A lot of it is private land, but it’s on publicly accessible land and the nuts are not for the owners of the land.”
Cortes Currents: what does 100 trees mean, in terms of food security?
Jennifer Banks-Doll: “That is hard to answer because a single hazelnut tree can produce many pounds of nuts. Of course that depends on the year and it depends on who else is trying to gather those nuts. Squirrels really love nuts too. So I think the idea is to plant more than a hundred, but we’re going to start with the goal of 100.”
“We’ve just planted 10 trees behind one of the fire halls. That land, I think, is actually owned by the SRD and it’s open to the public. So we will be inviting the public to harvest those nuts in a few years when they’re ready.”
“We hope to have some days where we go out and harvest together as a community and we hope to eventually have a nut festival. Maybe it will even be a fruit and nut festival. On Denman Island they have an apple and a nut festival. These are all ideas for the future.
“The focus right now is on planting the trees. So we’re planting them in publicly accessible areas.”
“Another planting we did was at Quadra Storage, but the trees are planted right along West Road. If you’re driving between the Quadra Ferry and the Cortes ferry, you’ll be driving right by those trees. If you’re walking by those trees, you can harvest those nuts. With hazelnut trees, when the nuts are ready they fall to the ground. So they’re quite easy to harvest.”
“The third location that we planted at this year was in the parking lot for Quadra Builders. When you park at the parking lot, you’ll be facing those hazelnut trees and you’ll be able to harvest as part of your trip to the hardware store. Or as part of a walk by the hardware store.”
We really wanted to plant them on one of our trails this year, but it turns out the trail is through a wood lot. There are a whole bunch of different permissions that need to be gained, so that needed to be bumped to next year.”
“The other part of the project is we sold hazelnut trees to private property owners. So for example, we bought a few for our farm, and so this not only helps with planting way more than a hundred nut trees on Quadra. It also enabled us to buy trees in bulk.”
“The nursery that we bought trees from doesn’t sell to someone who wants to buy a handful of trees, they usually sell to commercial orchards. I think the minimum order is 50 trees. When you buy in bulk, you also get a discount.
“We were able to get lots of trees for our island by going together, purchasing in bulk, and then picking them all up at once and bringing them back to Quadra. So all of those property owners didn’t need to figure out how they were going to go and get these trees.”
“We will organize community harvest days to make it a big deal because part of it is really about spreading the word and creating some enthusiasm around this idea of growing nuts on Quadra.”
“This year we planted hazelnuts, but the idea is to eventually plant walnuts, both English walnuts and Black walnuts, also to plant Sweet Chestnuts, heart nuts and different kinds of trees.”
“Who knows, maybe one day we’ll be able to even grow almonds on Quadra, but to plant lots of other trees and to learn together how to grow nut trees. We planted them in different conditions in terms of the soil, and the sun, and the different plants that are around these trees. We’ve planted different varieties, so it’s part of a grand experiment in terms of what’s going to grow well here on Quadra.”
“Part of it is just creating a perennial food source.”
“There are fruit trees all over Quadra that have probably been part of similar initiatives to get fruit trees growing everywhere, different kinds of fruit trees.”
“There actually are some hazelnuts here and there on Quadra, although a lot of them aren’t producing nuts because, I think, they were planted only as one variety. You don’t get nuts with hazelnut unless you plant two different varieties that flower at the same time because hazelnuts will not self pollinate. You need a different variety.”
“I think the idea is just to create a plant-based source of protein. A lot of us are raising animals as a source of protein, but this is something that’s a different source of protein that we will need.
“We need to learn how to process hazelnuts. We need to learn how to dry them properly so they don’t mold. We need to learn how to take the shells off.”
“Another food security initiative here on Quadra is a food preservation library, that’ll be part of our tool library that we’re creating. I’m hoping that part of that library will be a tool for taking the shell off all these hazelnuts because it can take quite a while to get the shells off.”
“The other thing is it can take quite a while just to take the skins off. So we’re actually growing varieties that shed their skins really easily just to make it less of a chore to get these hazelnuts ready to eat.”
Cortes Currents: How is the community receiving this?
Jennifer Banks-Doll: “It’s such a new initiative, we’re still really working on getting the word out.”
“We had a good turnout for our community planting day. I think in a few years, when we start getting nuts, we’ll have a lot more enthusiasm. We hope to involve more and more community members as the years go on. Certainly when we sold hazelnut trees, there was quite a lot of enthusiasm, so we sold quite a few.”
Cortes Currents: When you say you had a good turnout, how many people?
Jennifer Banks-Doll: “We had 14 people, which was plenty for the task at hand.”
Cortes Currents: Okay, What’s next?
Jennifer Banks-Doll: “We need to put our order in for next year. So we ordered our trees from a nursery in Courtenay. They are three year old trees, so the nurery’s stock of trees for selling next year was planted two years ago. So it’s limited, and they sell primarily to commercial orchards. If someone comes along and says they want a thousand trees, that’s going to be all their trees for next year and probably the year after that.”
“We are currently in the process of getting ready to put our order in for next year. So we’re trying to predict how many trees we can plant, and that’s a process of going through our list. We have quite a long list of possible locations. A lot of them are nonprofits with boards and we are trying to get those organizations to agree that they’ll be able to take these trees next fall when we do our next planting. So that’s the next thing.”
Cortes Currents: How many trees did you order this year?
Jennifer Banks-Doll: “We ordered 89 trees, between the trees we ordered for our plantings and the trees for property for private sale.”
Cortes Currents: Do you have any idea how many trees you will order for next year?
Jennifer Banks-Doll: “It will be at least 50 because the minimum order for this nursery is 50 trees. We have to find those locations and find those people who want hazelnut trees and they should have some chestnuts and some walnuts next year as well. So we’ll probably have a few of those trees as well in our order.”
“One thing I didn’t talk about is the new varieties of hazelnuts. A few years ago hazelnut trees were hit by a blight Eastern Filbert Blight, which started in the Eastern United States. It’s a blight that’s spread by spore. It quickly made its way out to the West coast. The Fraser Valley is where a lot of our hazelnuts are grown, and they were devastated a few years ago.”
“A lot of orchards are now planting these new blight resistant varieties. It’s still possible that they could be affected, but they’re much hardier and the breeding program is ongoing to create, more and more resistant varieties. The nurseries are only allowed to sell Eastern Filbert Blight resistant varieties.”
“The blight has not come to Quadra yet, but it’s inevitable that it will because it is spread by spore. A lot of the existing trees on Quadra are not blight resistant, but all the trees that we’re planting are. So part of what we’re doing is hopefully creating a more resilient food source.”
Cortes Currents: Will there still be two varieties for pollination?
Jennifer Banks-Doll: “Every planting that we’ve done, including all the plantings that are on private property by private property owners just for their own use, are all done with matching varieties that will pollinate each other.”
“We have a whole bunch of new varieties that we’ve brought to Quadra this year.”
“Are they doing anything like this on Cortes? Or have they In the past?
Cortes Currents: We were looking at apples at one point. They did some harvesting. There was talk of nuts, but I don’t know how far it went. I should actually circle around to some of the people who were doing it and find out what’s happening.
Jennifer Banks-Doll: “If Cortes does do something like this, they could piggyback on us as part of that bulk ordering process. We could pick them up, bring them to Quadra, and then they could come here and get their trees.”
“Another thing we’ve done is create a webpage. So this project is part of ICAN, which is the island Climate Action Network on Quadra. They have a website, which is https://www.quadraican.ca/. So we’ve put a webpage which is connected to the food security project, and that’s a way to share information on how to plant nut trees and how to harvest nuts and information about the project.”
We’re publishing regular articles in the Bird’s Eye and we also have a committee that’s organizing this project. So that’s another way to get involved. Watch out for information as this project unfolds over the years.
Top image credit: Hazelnuts – Photo by nerissa’s ring via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)
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