After six months at The Schoolhouse, it is time for me to leave now. I'll be flying back to Finland tomorrow and I have to say it is really sad to leave this place. It has been a great experience to work here and I am really glad I chose this company to do my internship in. I have really enjoyd working with the sustainable food project and it has been really rewarding. It has been great to see things happen and this has been a project that made me feel that I'm doing something important. I feel like I've gained really important working experinece here and I do hope I have been useful to the company as well. And, of course, it has been priceless to work and trying to communicate with local Chinese people, it's challenging but fun! For the most part, I feel like we have achieved our goals what we had for this six months, and now we have an organized and formalized sustainable food program. It is a different thing, however, to get things really done, and done efficiently, in pracitce and that is something that should be really focused on in the future. We have it all in paper, and most of it in practice too, but we just have to keep pushing and pushing.

So, I’ll leave tomorrow but obviously we need someone to take over and continue improving, organizing and updating our sustainable food project. Someone has to make sure that the program continues and people keep following the procedures. The title for this job is sustainable food project manager. This title will go to one of the interns in The Schoolhouse, Audrey Gueho, a french woman who will stay here until late December. She has the knowledge and the interest – and a masters degree in sustainable development for that matter - and I am more than happy to see her continuing what I did here. I have already handed her the Schoolhouse Edible Trees And Bushes powerpoint show, which I wrote about earlier and which ended up being 64 slides about our edible trees. Feel free to go and check it soon in our websites! At least I hope it will end up there soon, we'll see about that. I also handed Audrey the Sustainable Food Project Manual which will act as a guide and framework for continuing this project. The manual is actually not quite ready yet, but then again, it will never be. It needs to be updated and modified on a regular basis to be up-to-date and this is something the sustainable food manager should spend some time doing. Anyway, I’ll still finish it as much as I can today and then send my final version of it from Finland on Monday. This document includes everything, or almost everything, about this program and will hopefully be really useful for this company and for this program in the future. It will be posted soon in the websites too, go and have a look. It also gives me something tangible to take with me, a documented file of what has been done so far.

The two primary task that should be undertaken regarding this project as soon as possible is to implement and plan the winter garden and to make sure that compostable waste ends up to the compost piles. A crucial thing is also that the weekly project meetings continue to be held and the meeting decisions continue to be implemented. I think one of the most successful things of this project has been the meetings, as they have really been a good forum to talk about all the things involved we all the people involved. They have worked in practice as well as the things talked about in the meetings have been implemented almost without exception. It is really important that they keep going on in the future, because they are essential for keeping this program organized and formalized.

So, what’s going on with the project now, what is the condition I'm going to leave it here in? Well, I think everything looks quite good, better than I thought it would when I first got here, which is great, but surely there is still lot to do and plenty to improve. The garden has changed to autumn garden and there is currently lettuce, rucola, spinach, radish, cabbage, cilantro, pumpkin, parsley and rosemary growing. Lettuce and rucola looks better than ever before, please feel free to go and look our garden gallery at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/msrpublicphotos/RoadhouseKitchenGarden#.  It has been constantly updated and there are currently 343 pictures in the web album. Audrey will continue to take pictures of the garden and upload to picasa. So no worries! One can see that the garden really looks different now than it did in April, so there is something done right at least. We’ve got a significant amount of greens from our garden to our restaurants, most abundant ones being lettuce, rucola, cucumber, basil, eggplant, green beans, radish and spring onion. You can see from the gallery how these plants have evolved in time. The need for purchasing for example lettuce, rucola, basil, radish and eggplant has decreased significantly due to our garden, and that has lowered the food cost of the company. We have successfully implemented a cycle (talked about it before) in growing lettuce and rucola, and we’ve had a continuous supply of them for some time know. This was one of the major goals of the project and I am really happy we got it through. The garden, although it looks quite empty from time to time, has been a great thing for us and I’m actually quite proud of it. However, many things still can be done better and there always room for significant improvements. The first thing that should be done is to change the signs which still indicates the summer garden plants and are in totally wrong place. I’ve been planning to do this for a long time, but I have to admit that without any good reason I just haven’t done it. Then, finally, a garden map for autumn garden should be done – another thing I didn’t do. Anyway, as I’ve said before, there should be three maps done of the garden each year. This year the third one is still missing.

Composting, composting. The first compost pile is actually decomposed and some of it has apparently been used as a fertilizer already. At least it looked like it. The problem is that the piles still look quite empty, even though by now we should have a lot of compostable waste. The compost bins in the Schoolhouse do get filled with the right waste but somewhere on the way it seems that not nearly all that waste ends up in the Roadhouse compost pile. This issue should be taken care of as soon as possible. However, it may be that the compost piles just shrinks so much so fastly, who knows. Indeed, rightly managed, the piles should shrink to be only ¼ of their original size. Be it this or that, the composting in practical level should be paid a lot of attention, we should keep pushing it and make it more efficient. We have all the procedures, instructions and information, and the people to do it, all we have to do now is to just make sure it gets actually done. It requires attention, persistence and focusing on details. Anyway, we can be proud to say that we are probably the only company in Bohai Township that actually composts its organic waste – hopefully this practice spreads and composting soon becomes more common around here.
 

Its walnut and chestnut season now in Mutianyu and you can see it everywhere. The villages are full of them! We have also harvested our walnuts and some of our plentiful chestnuts. After taking of the shells, we got about 7-8kg of walnuts which is enough for the moment but probably not enough for the whole year, after all. Chestnuts we have more than enough for the whole year, and we have been thinking about new ways to use it in order to make our chestnut use more efficient. Actually, this is something Audrey will work on as a sustainable project manager – to find out new ways to use our home-grown foods. The most challenging part will be in November when we are going to have somewhere around 200kg of persimmons – what on earth are we going to do with all of those?

Okay, that’s it for my probably last post in this blog. I could keep writing this blog from Finland, but I don’t think there’s much point in that. Let’s see how that happens. I want to thank everyone for reading my blog and for being interested in our sustainable food project, although I’m sure some of my texts has been painfully boring to read. Hopefully the readers of this blog have actually learned something, at least I have learned a tremendous amount of new information when writing it. Not all the information is really useful, I admit, but it has been really interesting. I have enjoyed keeping this blog and it has actually helped in organizing this project in my head. If I ever come back to work here at The Schoolhouse, which is possible, I will continue writing this blog. Meanwhile, I’ll let it to Audrey to decide whether she wants to continue writing a blog about the Sustainable Food Project of The Schoolhouse or not.

Thank you everyone and take care!

Pietari

Finally, we got it. The Schoolhouse Rental Homes earned its fourth eco-star form Eco Hotels of the World. Eco Hotels of the World is an online guide created to showcase the most environment-friendly and sustainable hotels in the world and is currently the most comprehensive independent listing of eco-friendly hotels available. For a hotel to be part of Eco Hotels of the World, it must be ensured that the hotel meets the standards required to be considered as “eco-friendly” and we have been part of the listing for some time now. To be able to be part of the Eco Hotels of the World, the hotel has to show:

-          dependence on the natural environment
-          ecological sustainability
-          proven contribution to conservation
-          provision of environmental training programs
-          incorporation of cultural considerations
-          provision of an economic return to the local community

The Schoolhouse is proud to believe that we meet all the standards above, in one way or another. Previously we had three stars, but two days ago we received our fourth star, which tells something about our efforts here. Please go and see our self review and situation amongst other eco hotels:
http://www.ecohotelsoftheworld.com/the-schoolhouse-rental-homes-4.html
There you can also see more information about Eco Hotels of The World, and probably find good accommodation tips for your next holiday somewhere in the world. We are currently one of the altogether 60 eco-hotels (listed in that site, that is), one of ten in Asia and one of only three in China. This sustainable food program has been crucial for getting the fourth star, and it has been my pleasure to work with it. The composting, for example, helped us to increase our rating in “waste deposal” category and formalizing the gardening and the use of fruit and nut trees surely has increased the overall sustainability of our operations. However, this sustainable food project is only a small part of the sustainability efforts here, and our whole team has been working hard for this subject. We are all very happy for receiving the fourth star and continue to work to be even more sustainable in ecological as well as social context. Many projects are already going on and for us sustainability is constant improvement, not a concrete goal to be achieved. One project, for example, that has recently started is about Fare Trade certified products and the possibilities for The Schoolhouse to move towards using them. 

Recently we opened an “outreach” section to our websites which is about how The Schoolhouse reaches out to the community around it and to the larger society in a number of concrete ways as a means of fostering its social missions. The site is still under construction, but please feel free to go an have a look: 
http://www.theschoolhouseatmutianyu.com/SchoolhousePublications.html
The outreach section has information about our sister village relationship, our home visits and village tours, sustainability curricula created by an intern Audrey Gueho, our published books, support for artists, community service and, of course, the sustainable food program. This is the section where the documents I’ve been talking about will be linked.  

Well, this was just a notification post about these great news that gave us a positive feedback about our operations. Hopefully we keep on improving!

Earlier I wrote a post about chestnuts, and now I’ll write about the other nuts we have growing here in our premises, walnuts. According to the estimated harvest times they weren’t supposed to be ready before we’re well into September, but it turned out they are already virtually ready to be harvested and in a week or so we are going to take them and use them in our restaurants – or at least store them for later use. We have altogether three walnut trees, two of them are in Heart’s Repose, one of our rental homes, and one is in our Roadhouse restaurant, but that one doesn’t really produce much nuts yet. So our walnuts come from two trees, but these trees are big and provide us with an estimated 60kg of nuts a year. That is enough for us for the whole year – if properly managed, there is no need for us to buy walnuts ever again.

Walnuts are big dedicouos trees that can grow as high as 40 meters, making them the biggest trees we have, although some persimmon trees can compete quite well with them in size. Walnuts form their own plant family called Juglandaceae, also know as the Walnut Family. This is quite rare, because usually, as can be seen from the posts of this blog, edible plants belong to same family with many other edibles. There are more than 21 different species of walnuts, ours is so-called Persian Walnut, also called Common Walnut, which is native to large areas from Balkans in Europe to Central China. This tree is widely cultivated for its delicious nut. Actually, I am not 100% sure if ours is Persian or Black walnut, but came into the conclusion favouring Persian nut because that is native to China as well, while Black walnut is only native to North America. Why on earth we would have that growing here?  

The nut, or sometimes called fruit, of the walnut tree is inside a hard brown shell which is in its part inside a green, soft “peel” or “cover”. The brown shells are really hard and difficult to break. Inside each shell there are two nuts, separated by a thin, paper-like layer. Walnut meats have a lobed and wrinkled appearance, some say they look like brains or abstract butterflies. The lobes are off white in colour and covered by a thin, light brown skin. So there are in a way four layers in the fruit of a walnut tree - the nut, the skin, the shell and the cover.

While chestnuts are one of the oldest things eaten by men, walnuts were reportedly first used by Ancient Greeks some thousands of year ago. However, some say that Greeks were the first ones to cultivate it but it was used long time before in Persia. Ancient Greeks and Romans introduced the tree to Balkans and to the rest of Europe, especially the French started to cultivate it in vast quantities. Although walnut is often referred to English Walnut, it didn’t land to the rainy island before 16^th century, for some reason. Walnuts all in all never were any competition to chestnut in popularity until the last few hundred years. Today, chefs of the world use walnuts in many types of cuisines including meats, vegetables, desserts, and soup preparations. Walnut oil is used widely to improve salad dressings. It is widely used in chinese cuisine, but not as popular as chestnuts - maybe because walnuts are clearly more expensive. 

Walnuts are called “hu tao” in Chinese, which literally mean “Hu peach”. Again, one rather weird name in Chinese. How does walnuts resemble peaches? I can’t find any other similarities, except they might look a bit similar green balls when they are both in their early stages. Weird it is anyway. Why it is “Hu peach” is because the ancient Chinese associated the introduction of walnut into Eastern China (it is native to western part of the country) with the Hu barbarians living in Northwest China. The English name “walnut” comes from old English and means “foreign nut” (wealhhnutu), obviously because it was introduced from foreign countries rather late. This was an interesting information for me, because I always though that the name has something to do with walls, don’t know why.

Walnuts are good for health in many ways, as are almost all of the edibles we have here. Walnuts are an excellent source of important omega 3 fatty acids, which is a special protective substance that body just can’t manufacture. In addition, walnuts contain an antioxidant compound called ellagic acid that supports the immune system and appears to have several anticancer properties. Studies also suggest that walnuts have favourable effects on high cholesterol and other cardiovascular risk factors. They are also really good for heart and hypertension and helps preventing high blood pressure. In Chinese traditional medicine, walnuts are considered to be herbs. They are believed to be good for kidneys and lungs, strengthen knees and moisten intestines, as well as to cure the asthma. All in all, walnuts are considered to be amongst the healthiest foods there is, despite the fact they are high in calories. High in calories they are, but according to recent studies, people who eat nuts at least twice a week are much less likely to gain weight than those who almost never eat nuts. It was left unclear to me why, but that’s great news anyway. So walnuts are really healthy and are safe to eat weight-wise as well!

In the Schoolhouse, as said, we are going to have some 60kg of walnuts a year, thanks to our two large walnut trees right across the street from the main building. Currently, we use walnut as part of the Jiangbao Chicken in Roadhouse, as part of our salads and as ingredients of our brownies. We also make walnut ice-cream. Walnuts are easy to preserve by for example freezing, so we don’t have to use them all during the season, we can use them all year round. Still, we are thinking about other culinary uses for them and should decide those before the harvest starts in a week or so. Harvesting walnuts is a bit hard and tricky, due to the hardness of the shell and the dyeing effect of the peel. I wrote down some procedures for the harvesting, which are going to be part of the sustainable food program manual. Hopefully this are of some use to someone:

1. Wait until the nuts fall from the trees. Picking them from the tree can damage the tree.
2. Cut the green hull off the walnut, either by using a knife or stepping on the before they crack and then peeling them with hands. Use heavy rubber cloves when doing this.
3. Collect the green hulls to a garbage back, but DO NOT put them into the compost piles, as it is uncertain what they can do to the garden.
4. Put the brown hard shells to dry for a few days. They can be laid out on a newspaper, or in a shell somewhere dry. The dryer the shells are, the easier the nut meat will be to separate.
5. Don’t put them to dry somewhere squirrels can find them – they’ll eat them all.
6. When dried, crack the nuts with a hammer, vise or something similar. This will take time, be patient. Try not to damage the nut too much while cracking it.
7. Pull the nut meat out.
8. Collect the nut shells and dispose to compost piles as dry material.

In addition to its nuts, walnut trees are used for other purposes. They are attractive for their valuable timber – indeed, walnut wood is used in some of our houses here as well – and in some areas of the world walnut wood is the most valuable commercial timber there is. Walnut shells are used for varied purposes, including cleaning and polishing soft metals, fibreglass, plastics, wood and stone, due to its hardness and right kind of texture. Flour made of the shell is widely used in plastic industry, which makes a quite interesting contrast with chestnut flour which is used to make bread. Walnut shell flour is also used as paint thickener and even as filler in a dynamite. Walnut husks are often used for creating dye that is used for dyeing fabrics – they have a strong dyeing effect, which should be kept in mind when harvesting the nuts. Okay, these purposes are totally irrelevant when it comes to our sustainable food program, but I think it is an interesting add to this post.

That’s about the walnuts. Come to The Schoolhouse and try something with this delicious nut – I strongly recommend the walnut swirl ice-cream!

Pietari

Now it’s time again to write a post about how our sustainable food project is going in general. We started this program officially in late March and lots have happened after that. As I said a few posts earlier, I started to write a comprehensive document about this project, and later I decided to call it “the sustainable food program manual”. There will be all the information about what this project is about, what has been done so far, what are the objectives, what should be done in the future, procedures for all kinds of things from composting to harvesting chestnuts and other such kinds of practical things. It is currently a little more than 50 pages long, but it contains lots of lists and tables. From the document one can for example easily check the inventory of what edible trees we have, what plants we have been growing in our garden and how The Schoolhouse is doing when it comes to the principles of sustainable food. It will be posted on our websites for everyone to see, and it works as a framework and a sort of guidebook for the schoolhouse team when it comes to our sustainable food program. Hopefully it will be some help, and hopefully it won’t be too confusing or boring.

I have been here at The Schoolhouse since March and I have enjoyed it a lot. My main project has been this sustainable food program, and I hope there is some significance in the things and this project has made some difference. I’ll be leaving in a few weeks, and of course I also hope that we achieve more during the rest of my time here. Most of all I wish that people continue to take this sustainable food program seriously and follow the suggestions in the project manual I’m writing. In the future it is planned that the company will hire a full-time sustainable food project manager, and that would be great. The documents I have written will surely be of some help when the time comes, and hopefully I have managed to formalize this program in a way that it is easy to be followed and it provides long-term value to this company.
 
There is also another document I have made concerning this program. I have made a PowerPoint slideshow with basic information about each edible tree we have, then information about that plant in The Schoolhouse and finally a picture (or pictures) separately of each tree in different location. So, for example there is one slide telling in general about persimmons, then there is a slide telling how we use the persimmon in The Schoolhouse and how much we have it, and finally there are several slides with pictures, for example “Grandma’s Persimmon” and “The Persimmon of The Persimmon Court”. That is a cool way to present our tree inventory to customers and it is always good to have a picture database about our food resources. This document will be also linked to our webpage, it should be there in a few weeks, feel free to go and check it out. It has been quite fun doing that document as I have been finding out rather lot of new information about trees I formerly knew nothing about. Because of this separate document, there is not much detailed information in the project manual about the edible trees we have here. They will be both linked in the same section of our webpages, I will post a link here when they are available. There will be also other interesting documents linked to the website, including English language curricula for children relating sustainability, created by Audrey Gueho, an intern here like me, and information about the books we have published.

About our kitchen garden. It has been after all rather successful despite what it looked in the middle of the summer. I decided to formalize the gardening in a way the we have three different garden plans in one year – spring garden before June, summer garden from June to August, and autumn garden after August, or after the middle of August. Each year there will be three different plans and maps made. This is only natural, because different plants requires different conditions and not all can be grown at the same time. For example radish and spring onion are great for spring garden; eggplant, cucumber, tomatoes and herbs are summer plants; and spinach and cabbage are planted in autumn. During this summer, we had plenty of eggplant, cucucmber and basil and there was no need to buy those vegetables outside our garden. Lettuce and rucola are the kinds of plants that are a significant part of the spring, summer and autumn gardens, and those are arguably the most important things we want from our garden. At the beginning we had problems to get lettuce and rucola to grow well, but now they grow in our garden in abundance. Our chef said that we need to buy significantly less lettuce and rucola as we did before, thanks to the plantings we have at The Roadhouse. Next year we hope to get the lettuce and rucola grow in abundance from the early spring on, and I have no doubt we will. Last week we took away the shade on top of the lettuce, as it didn’t seem to do much good, and the air is already cooler than it was in the midsummer. The two new things that have been recently harvested from the garden are green beans and pumpkins. Newest addition is the cabbage - that should be ready in late autumn.

Composting is doing quite well, although we still don’t have any finished compost product and we started to built up the first compost pile again. There has been, however, some problems in separating the compostable waste. At first, months ago, we got too much of waste and it wasn’t all properly separated, and then I said to the staff that if you are not sure about the waste, don’t put it to compost bin. Well, then the amount of waste dropped as people started to be scared, apparently, to put hardly anything to the compost bins. After that, I reminded people to start composting again and then we started to have good amounts of compostable waste, almost all correctly separated. What was weird was that the big compost bin in behind the art room still seemed surprisingly empty. We had a wild guess with our chef that now when waste is being separated the way it should be, it’s not emptied in the right place. Now we have re-educated the staff and everything should be done right at the moment, luckily. It takes to make this kind of thing work, as it is virtually unheard here. I am happy we are still doing it rather successfully, and by next year I am sure that everything goes naturally and we get our compost cycle going on as planned. That is, of course, if the procedures are followed.

As I wrote a few posts earlier, the time for harvesting our fruits and nuts are coming closer. I have done quite a lot of research about these trees, and that has been rather fun. In a week or so we are going the harvest our peach and wild flower pepper, and those are going to be used in our restaurants. Others will follow soon. We are talking with our chef quite frequently how to use all the different fruits and I am sure that he will make something great out of them. For the mint, as I’ve told we have a lot of it, we came up with a new use – Randhir is going to make mint jelly candies out of it this week! Can’t wait to taste them. These will be given to customers when handing the bill.

So, everything is going quite good with this project and I am happy I was given this project when I came here. It has been highly rewarding, and still is. Thank you for your interest, and keep tuned for new post I will write this weekend. Pietari

This is a bit early for this post as chestnuts won’t be ready for harvesting before next month, but as they are probably the single most important edible we have around here, I decided to write now an entry about them. Growing chestnuts is one of the major sources of income in Mutianyu and villages around and one can see the hills packed with these trees, waiting for the precious nuts to be ready. Chestnut trees really are a major part of the nature here and they can be seen as a pride and joy of local farmers. We have approximately 60 chestnut trees in our premises, 20 of which are in the garden of Xiaolumian and the rest are in Jim’s Chestnut Orchard. We will be harvesting them late next month and use the product in our restaurants, as is the case with all the other edibles we have. Together with Persimmon, Chestnut is the fruit/nut we have the most.

So what exactly are chestnuts? They are edible nuts produced by a deciduous tree belonging to the same beech tree family with oak, the Fagaceae family. There are four main species of Chestnuts – Japanese, European, American and Chinese – and obviously the ones we have here are Chinese chestnuts. The Chinese Chestnuts divides into four subspecies and our chestnuts are the most common ones, Castanea Mollissima. The scientific name Castanea comes from either ancient Latin of Greek language, and is still used in many old European languages – Castan-wydden in Welsch, Kastanje in Dutch and Kastanja in Finnish. Chestnut dates back to prehistoric times, and it is actually believed to be one of the first things eaten by humans. It originated from central Asia, thus being also native to China, but rather quickly it spread around Northern hemisphere. It is sited twice in the old testament of the Bible which symbolizes the long history of its importance. It was introduced to Europe via ancient Greece. Today most of the world’s chestnuts are growing in China, Japan and Southern Europe. Different kinds of chestnut trees grows in different sizes, the Chinese Chestnut being an average-sized growing up to 15m high. The trees are often wide-spreading, and the wood of the tree is highly valued as is its cousin oak. Chestnut trees resembles oak in both colour and texture.

The fruit of the tree, commonly knows as nut, is contained in a spiny round cupule around 5-10cm in diameter. One should be careful with these as they are really sharp! These spiky balls are commonly known as “burrs” and they have the delicious nut inside. When the fruit is mature enough, around September here in China, the burr turns yellow-brown and opens in two or three sections. The chestnut fruit, inside the burr, is brown and smooth, and has a pointy end. It is often also flattened in one of two sides. After the spike burr, the fruit has actually two more skins – the first one is the hard brown peel, and under it is a soft thin skin called “pellicle”. Inside all these layer there is the nut, which isn’t actually a nut but the seed of the fruit, which is creamy white-fleshed and extremely tasty. The Chinese nut (or seed) is bigger than the American version, but smaller than the big Japanese one.

As is the case with all the nuts (although its not really a nut, but let's just call it one), chestnuts have rather many calories, about 200kcal per 100g. However, this is still a lot less than the calorie amounts of walnuts, almonds or other nuts, which can have up to 600kcal per 100g. Despite the calories, chestnuts contain very little fat and no cholesterol and they are rather healthy eaten in reasonable quantities. Actually, chestnuts are the only “nuts” that contain vitamin C, and it thus goes more than well with our sustainable food program that we have a lots of this fruit – it is arguably the most healthy “nut” there is. The vitamin C content is as high as it is in lemons, which is quite surprising. The potassium content is four time bigger than it is in apples, and it’s also rich in zinc and iron. Chestnuts have twice as much starch as potatoes and chestnut flour is actually used widely in culinary purposes – indeed, chestnut tree is often called “the bread tree”. Chestnut flour can be used to make breads and cakes, and is actually the original ingredient of “polenta” which is nowadays made mostly of corn. Before made to flour, chestnuts should be dried.

Chestnut can be eaten raw, but unlike most nuts, as raw chestnuts are not as their best – the taste can be rather astringent. The most popular way is to roast chestnuts, usually unpeeled. Roasted chestnuts are really popular as snack in China as well as in Central Europe, it is a good and healthy substitute to candy or chips. Chestnuts are also boiled, in this case peeled. Once cooked, the nut has a similar texture to baked potato but the taste is sweeter, more delicate and, naturally, nuttier. Boiling is a popular way especially in northern China, where boiled chestnuts are used as a part of different dishes. In The Schoolhouse, one of our trademark dishes is Pork with Chestnuts, in which the chestnuts are boiled. We also use these nuts for making ice-cream and as a part of daily special soups when in season. As a part of our sustainable food program, we try to find more uses for this delicacy, because we get a lot of it, an estimated 125kg a year. One idea is to start to do the polenta with chestnut instead of corn, as we have chestnut but we don’t have our own corn. There are plenty of ideas, hopefully we can get some of them work. It is really fun trying to figure out new ways to use our own food resources, and it is really rewarding too. It has been a great experience.

Chestnuts are probably one of the most difficult things to harvest we have around here. As said, the fruits are really sharp and it is important to use rubber cloves when handling them. A good idea is to take the fruits with tongs. The removing of the nut from the sell can be really time-consuming, and it is thus not a hobby for people with tight schedules. We have lots of chestnuts here to be harvested, and although our farmer surely knows better than me how to do it, I wrote down procedures for harvesting chestnuts – these procedures will be a part of the sustainable food program manual along with other procedures. The manual will be the major document of my work here during the past few months.  

1. Chestnuts should ripen in the tree until they fall. This should be at the end of September.


2. They should not be shaken or knocked from the tree, only as a last resort.


3. Harvest from the ground, not from the tree - the sooner the better (animals like them too).


4. Gather up all of the nuts with open burrs


5. Use rubber cloves and/or thongs, be careful of the spiky shells.


6. Don’t let chestnuts stay too long in the ground


7. Do two separate harvesting trips to each site: first collect all from the ground, the second time collect all the new ones from the ground and finally all the rest from the trees.


8. Remove the nuts from the burrs, and discard any with worm holes or other signs of damage.


9. Weight the yield achieved and write it down – it is important to keep track.


10. They are ready to use right away, unlike often thought

Chestnut trees produces more nuts when they grow older. The trees can live many hundreds of years, and usually start producing proper yields when they are around ten years old. We are planning to weight all the chestnuts we get every year and keep correct track of it, so that we can actually see if the yields will grow in time. This goes actually with every edible tree we have, the goal is to keep track of everything we get – this is exactly formalizing the fruit harvesting. For the storage (a questions probably popping to peoples mind, given that we have tens of nut trees but only few uses), chestnuts can be easily stored by drying or freezing. We freeze most of our chestnuts, and thus we use our own chestnut in our restaurants all year round.

So that was about today’s post about chestnuts. Here the chestnut trees in all abundance are all packed up with green spiky fruits and when hiking we must really watch out for them as they may hurt you. Now we are waiting for them to mature and drop down, and then we have all kinds of chestnuts foods served here at The Schoolhouse. Feel free to come and try!