BAADER IR FILTER

California Hazel (Corylus cornuta ssp. californiaca), Corylaceae (Hazel) Family, Blooms: (female) January-March

Uses -- Past and Present: Hazelnuts were eaten to seome extent by the Indians of california. In England a cultivated form of hazelnut is planted for numberous purposes. The wood is used for making charcoal from which artsists get their drawing pencils. It is tough and flexible and used for javelin shafts and fishing poles. Roots are used for veneering in cabinetry and in refining wine. Shelled nuts easily shed their skins when roased in a slow oven for 30 mintues, Cooled, then rubbed with a towel. Hacelnuts are delicious right off the bush, but may be roasted and used in innumerable recipies. Squirrels, chickmunks, and other rodents feed on the nuts; grouse eat the catkinds, rabbits and deer browse the entire plant.
California Hazel is a common shurb of shaded areas within the Coast Range. It can be foun on wooded slopes as well as near streams and creeks.

Reaching 3 to 10 feet in height, these large shrubs have smooth slender stems and an open, spreading appearance. The alternate leaves have rounded bzses and sharply pointed tips. Their softness and fine double-toothed margins are characteristic features.

In October and November, slender 1 to 3 inch long catkins appear; they relearse plloen from January to March In late spring and summer the nuts mature, cover by a tubular bristly husk. These nuts are not only edible, but are comparable in flovor to commercial filberts. They can also be ground into a meal and baked in bread.

Stems from this shrub were usfull in basketry. To prepare the stems for weaving, the indians either scraped them with ah sharp rock or eeled the bark off with their teeth. After this procedure the lightweight stems were used as thread, rimhoops, or foundations for baskets, someas fine as flour sieves.

Leaves have a reliable fall color turning pale golden and the winter bare branches are horizontally teired and pogodalike

HT: 6 to 20 feet. LVS: winter decidous. FLWS: dangling mali catkinds, late winter; female flowers insignificant. SMR WTR: deriodic deep watering. PROP: Layering; nuts(stratify) EXP: Shade

California hazelnut may be regarede as earither a small tree or large shrub; it is amenable to training either way. To keep one or a few trunks, prune out the suckers. Hazel sends out long tiers of horizontal branches, giving it an effect much like that of flowering dogwood but with a very differnt leaf pattern. Hazel's deep green leaves are soft, broudly heart shapted, with jagged fine and coarse teeth along the margins. The light coming thought the canopy in summer is a beautifull sight, for one sees layer upon layer, tier upon tier of green. Although bare in winter, by winter's end hazel's branches wear long dangling chains of male flowers waving in the breezes and (look hard) tiny female flowers, the three feathery, red stigmas extended to receive pollen. Soon new leaves follow, but you must wait until summer's end for matur nuts. Unfortunately, most hazels bear a sparing crop of nuts, and most of the sounds ones are quickly gathered by squarrels.

California hazelnuts grows along the margins of wet forest from the coast redwoods up into the yellow pine belt of the sierra. A fast grower, it thrives where it has consiant summer water and light filtering through the fringes of tall trees. Plant it in the background of your woodland garden for a beautifull green wall, or along a stream or behind a pond with simular shrubs of similar requirements' western azalea (rhododendron occidental), rosebay (Rhododendron macrophyllum), huckleberries (Vaccinium spp.) or thimbleberry (Rubus parviflorus).

Making moonshine on the Fourth of July. Equipment was purchased from the early internet (99?) from still-life.com, a Canadian outfit. Kit was comprised of a lightly reworked pressure cooker (temp gague and vent were both add-ons. As an added bonus, I think the instructions warn against overpressurization as the relief will blow and take the thermometer with it.

I made moonshine from scratch -once-, geared myself to do it a couple more times with fancy yeasts (== champagne yeast, for max potency, liquid and ordered fresh for best activity. Never used, sadly. The end result was eventually charcoal filtered into reasonableness.

Anymore I only use distilled wine. My conversion experience was being left with an ungodly amount of liquor and wine after a party. Burning it through the cooker made for a nice floral batch and has been the model for other cooks in later days.

In the United States distilling alcohol is illegal, which is unfortunate as there are both reasonable culinary experiments and achievements to be made with relatively pure base liquor typically unavailable here.

Without too much difficulty factory-safe and once-taxed wine (the largest component in home alcohol has always been to what extent the tax man is offended). Home wine and beer production were made legal some time ago but the everyone remembers the multitude of social, governmental and health ills some of the old productions generated.