On Chestnuts
Well, autumn is well and truly here, and for the first time in ten years I’ve been out chestnut gathering. It must be the ‘hunter and collector’ gene coming through, since the chestnuts I am talking about are horse chestnuts, not the edible sweet chestnut. The horse chestnut has a fat juicy fleshy green shell with spikes and thorns - think blowfish. The edible sweet chestnut has a thinner shell but many, many more spikes – think sea urchin. Sweet chestnuts also have a little tuft of hair sticking up the pointy end, whereas horse chestnuts are rounder and don’t have a distinctive point.
Just about the only thing you can do with horse chestnuts is craft – find something sharp enough to prick a hole in them and insert chopped down tooth picks! We made hedgehogs and a snail, and later a rather fetching (however heavy) bracelet and dinosaurs, rockets, cars… and we still have two backpacks full of them!
