Avellanochka

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It turns out that walnut, cedar, beech and many other nuts are not nuts at all. True, this statement is somewhat arbitrary, but botanists are firmly on their own: they consider a nut to be “only a fruit that has a woody shell that encloses the seed together with the germ and cotyledons”. So prove that this is not so. According to strict botanical terminology, the Voloshsky nut (what we usually call a nut) is just a bone of the fruit from which the fleshy membrane is removed. Pine nut is only a seed extracted from a cone. Finally, the botanically correct name of the beech fruit, it turns out, is not a nut, but a nut. What plant gives us a real scientifically nut? It turns out that its happy owner is a plain-looking, but well-known hazel shrub, or common hazel.

Somewhere in the Oryol region, in Voronezh or in Ukraine, when there is still snow and most of the trees and shrubs are just about to awaken from winter dormancy, the common hazel is already blooming and its heavy earrings are scattered for the joy of the still cold, even spring, wind clouds of golden pollen. Pollen is intended for the inconspicuous female flowers of hazel that are located on the branches of unobtrusive female flowers. It is they who pollinate them as soon as spring begins to take over its rights. No wonder the ancient Germans had hazel a symbol of spring, life and immortality. At the end of summer, you can already regale yourself with the first ripe nuts.

Where does it seem to compete with an unprepossessing and inconspicuous hazel with its brilliant Siberian, Carpathian and "walnut" walnut relatives? However, he dares, drags on! Apparently, as they say, a hard nut.

Already at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the pioneers of Russian agronomy and forestry, Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov, in the work “Some remarks about hazel and how it is possible to follow the fertility of nuts”, he himself created nut plantations, cutting down all the trees in the forest, except hazel.

“All the left nuts bloomed and started so much, A. Bolotov wrote about his experience, so many nuts were born, and they are so large and so good that an incomparably greater number of the best and largest nuts were collected and received from this small place from the same or even greatest space, but not cut through the forest. "

Almost without any change, this valuable experience has been successfully used now in our best forestries. Indeed, the demand for hazelnuts is very high, hazel occupies a vast territory - 1 million hectares.

It turns out that the old method applied by A. Bolotov has an ancient history. Even in the works of Theophrastus, Sophocles, Virgil and Columella, we find references to the culture of hazel in the Mediterranean. It is only a pity that in our time, forest owners are engaged in hazel in between cases.

It is appropriate to pay attention to the reserves of this nut. A good word cannot be ignored by the selfless work of forest breeders: Kharkiv resident F. A. Pavlenko and Muscovite R. F. Kudasheva, hazel gardening craftsmen Mecca - Michurinsk, and hazelnut craftsmen from Kiev and Sochi.

Visit the Cheerful Bokovenki arboretum in the Kirovograd region in early September. What nuts you will not taste here, and they are all relatives of the common hazel! For more than 30 years, the magician Pavlenko has cherished them, and how many of them have spread far beyond the nut oasis!

A whole experimental forest (16 thousand bushes) will show you in the suburbs and Kudashev, who took the baton from Academician A.S. Yablokov and selected many wonderful forms of hazel in the forests of central Russia.

Studies show that the ancient Mediterranean peoples received the source material from the mountainous regions of the Caucasus and Crimea. It is believed that the specific scientific name of hazel "Avellana" is borrowed from the Romans. It comes from the city of Avellino, which was the center of hazel culture in ancient Rome.

A great connoisseur of woody plants, Academician Georgy Nikolaevich Vysotsky always lovingly called our hazelnut Avellanochka.

No less common hazel is rich in oil, protein and other useful substances, its closest relatives are: Manchurian hazel (in the Far East), variegated hazel (in Siberia) and numerous cultivars of hazel hazel: hazelnuts. And finally, a large, slender, beautiful tree, similar to cypress or pyramidal poplar, is a tree hazel, or a bear hazel from the Caucasus. By the way, they called him bearish for being addicted to the nuts of the clubfoot owner of the Caucasian forests ripening on it.

We could continue to talk about various types of trees, whose fruits are now widely used by man. One could argue which nuts are real, and which ones are only mistakenly given this name, which ones are larger, and which are less consistent with Michurin’s forecast. In many ways, these disputes are purely academic, nuts remain nuts, they are all tasty and nutritious. And that they have different tastes, because real bread comes from rye, and wheat, and barley, and corn, and rice. Who likes what. So nuts: all serve the person faithfully, and we can safely say that all of them, together, have a future that was predicted by Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin.