Visit this unique farm less than an hour’s drive from Huskisson for their short harvest season of chestnuts, walnuts and pine mushrooms, open to the public from 22 March for about six weeks. Bring a picnic, bring the family and take home a delicious bounty. We stopped in to Sassafras Nuts this week to see their preparations for this year’s harvest, and meet the team.
On the road to Braidwood, about 45 minutes drive from Huskisson is Sassafras Nuts, a picturesque property perched on the high ridge with acres of chestnut trees, a walnut grove, a few stands of towering pine trees (with lovely mushrooms that pop up their caps in the autumn), as well as a flower farm and some gentle-natured horses that are part of an equine therapy program.
We are here today to find out about the open days for the farm – every day from Saturday 22 March, except Mondays, for about six weeks – when we can experience all of this for ourselves. Bek and Brendan, the onsite farm managers, are busy preparing the site for visitors, including setting up the “Farm Gate”, a rustic shed at the top of the driveway that will be bursting with antiques, crafts and of course, bags of nuts and bunches of flowers to purchase and scales to weigh your self-harvested goodies on the way out.
For an extra special experience on the farm, there’s a Harvest Fair on Saturday 5 April, that promises to be fun-filled day. There will be food – including one of the farm’s own pigs on a spit – live music and entertainment, games and crafts for the kids, and a smattering of market stalls.
There’s picnic tables and a couple of open sheds providing lots of options if you don’t fancy spreading out on a rug, and there’s a custom-made roaster that rotates over an open fire in a drum. The team will show you how to score the nuts in a variety of ways that makes it easier to peel off their outer skin, using a special knife.
The chestnut orchard here has six different varieties, and we can see a fair few big, spiky burrs under the nearest trees, that have started to ripen up and drop. Bek, who runs the farm with her partner Brendan, demonstrates the “safe” way to remove the nuts from the burr by stepping on it to split it open, revealing plump nuts inside.
“Each variety ripens at a different time,” Bek explains, and they are sucked up by a vacuum-tractor every day or two at most, to be opened and sorted according to their variety and size, then refrigerated ahead of supply to restaurants and retail outlets like Flavours of Shoalhaven in Berry.
“You have to keep them at zero degrees in an airtight container, for about a week, or else cook them and freeze them,” explains Bek, who loves to include chestnuts in dishes like risotto and meatballs – the farm has a collection of recipe cards available with delicious ideas for all kinds of chestnut dishes.
Take a bucket from the farm gate and head out into the orchard to pick your own – Bek highly recommends wearing sturdy closed-in footwear and a good sun hat, they can offer you gloves to borrow if you haven’t bought your own, and a grabber on a stick for reaching down. She says bring a jacket too, especially at this time of year when the weather can change quickly and temperatures drop or a shower of rain appears.
The burrs, fallen leaves and other organic material is composted on the farm and reapplied back onto the trees, veggie gardens and flowers at the appropriate fertilising seasons, and Brendan – whose background is in greenkeeping for golf courses – makes all the compost on-site.
In the flower farm, Meg grows dahlias, cosmos, waratahs, cornflowers, queen Anne’s lace, peonies, hydrangeas, echinacea, zinnias and sunflowers. They are now packaging up seeds as well, which are for sale in the farm gate shop, along with some veggies and eggs from the resident chooks.
After harvest, the deciduous trees will shed their leaves and enter a dormant period for winter, and the team will take a well-earned break before the next phase of the orchard’s cycles, pruning and soil management in preparation for the next burst of growth.
Last year, the farm produced over five tonnes of chestnuts, and this year they are expecting an even bigger harvest, while the walnut trees – which were severely damaged in the fires of 2019/20 – are still recovering but are now producing well.
Brendan & Bek say the past four years have been an incredible learning curve for them, taking on these majestic trees up here around 800 metres above sea level, where frosts play a big part in the healthy growth of the nuts. There are only a small handful of chestnut farms in NSW and a few more in the cooler climates of Victoria.
Read more about this beautiful property and find out how to get there, on their website.
