Don’t know why – I’m fascinated by nuts. What’s nicer than a bag of salted peanuts, or mixed nuts and raisins? Grandma Lear (mum’s mum) used to bake me Dundee cakes and send them to me when I was a student – they were basically fruit cakes, but marvellously had nuts on the top. Nuts seem to be mysterious, from distant lands, tasty, different….  

But, hey, we have them at Blore Heath!  Hazelnuts were plentiful in the hedgerows and I picked some this year when they were still green. (None went to maturity – squirrels?)  15 or so years ago, with the help of Scout volunteers, we planted some walnuts – this year we had the first fruits – like conkers, they are jacketed in a green shell. Conker trees aren’t plentiful around here but we planted some that Rosie and I collected on the banks of the Seine years ago and, most years, they fruit nicely. Aren’t they a beautiful colour! We have some good sweet-chestnut trees but their nuts aren’t worth getting pricked for – very small and insignificant, so I buy Spanish ones from the shops.  

I’m building up to a success story – acorns!  

Walk along our “green lane” (not just our farm drive but part of an ancient way, used anciently by the Bishops of Lichfield to travel between parts of their diocese) and we have a wonderful oak (see picture)  

our oldest oak

that, most years, sheds bucketloads of acorns. Actually, this particular oak is part of the “great forest hedge” mentioned in the chronicles of de Waurin about the Battle of Blore Heath 1459 (“at daybreak Salisbury and his men could seen their adversaries behind a great overgrown hedge, with only the tips of their pennons showing above it” F.R. Twemlow, Battle of Blore Heath, Wolverhampton: Whitebread Brothers, 1912, p. 23) , but I digress.  

In half-term week, on October 27, we will hold our first “care farm taster day” at Blore Heath, supported by Staffordshire Council Community Wellbeing Fund.  

We’ll have about 12-15 people – all ages – volunteering to put together the kind of day that people will find sociable, farm-oriented, interesting and fun. Of course there will be the tea/coffee to drink (perhaps with Dundee cake?), and soup and salad with home-grown ingredients. If weather permits, and people want to, we’ll look around the farm and our pigs, Angus cross suckler herd and our sheep (which started out as Shetland but have evolved into a Blore Heath strain– another story!).  

We’ll also be planting tree seeds (led by horticulturalist Simon Abbotts), especially (you’ve guessed it) acorns. We hope this will be the beginning of a key care farm project for us, sowing and bringing on native trees that will repopulate our hedgerows and coppices. Perhaps, who knows, we may even be planting second-generation walnuts. In the meantime, although possibly we can’t eat acorns, our pigs really really love them! We cannot easily turn the pigs onto the pasture to eat the acorns (but if we did we’d be doing the ancient custom of pannage) but the next best thing is to collect them, chuck them into the pig field and watch their delight in finding them!  

Did you say acorns?

Our care farm taster days are supported by Staffordshire County Council, whose financial support we gratefully acknowledge.