Hazelnuts

Last autumn I managed to collect quite a lot of hazelnuts, or at least hazelnut shells. The trouble is, rather a lot of those shells turn out to be empty. Here's a little test, for demonstration.

The promise of twenty delicious hazelnuts...

... delivers only four nuts, and those are rather small.

I won't give up on them, though. I'm encouraging hazel trees to grow in my garden (and they don't take much encouragement) and I'll gather as many as I can next year, too, because I love eating these nuts. It's just that at breakfast time, cracking twenty or thirty shells just so I can get enough nuts to chop onto my cereal is a teeny bit tedious.