One of the basic ideas of the forest garden ideology is to grow food in the natural environment, hence the name forest garden. The natural growth of trees, bushes and under-vegetation in an area helps us to imitate and understand how plants help each other. Diversity is useful for fruit trees as is the protection and stimulation that, for example, hazel and the insects that thrive with hazel, can add to an orchard.

In the archipelago hazel nuts have been collected despite the natural competition from birds and red squirrels. The wood that hazel offers has been used for making barrels and kegs. As truffles also thrive together with hazel this can give a double harvest.

We have different varieties of hazel at Tallbacka. Alongside the domestic kind (we have 19) we also have Turkish hazel (10) which in warmer climes is a tree with clusters of nuts, a red American hazel and a middle European variety with large nuts. Together with these we have different types of walnut trees (7) which we try to grow to see how well they thrive and produce nuts in our ever warmer climate.

A newly started project about nuts (2020) with Vakka-Suomen taimisto and Arboretum Mustila involves an attempt to continue refining the domestic varieties of hazel in order to be able to grow hazelnuts in Finland on a commercial scale. The following link takes you to a document about the project (in Finnish)

One of the foreground figures in this project is Joel Rosenberg who has written the first Finnish book on nuts Pähkinöitä omasta puutarhasta (Nuts from your own garden), Into 2021.