This first picture is actually after about half an hour of collecting the sweet chestnuts. My youngest daughter couldn’t really help collect them as they’re so very very sharp! She would not let anyone else carry the tub though!

My daughter clutching the tub of sweet chestnuts we foraged

The spikes on these things are incredible. The shell is completely covered and they’re really spiney, they don’t bend at all. I started off trying to prise them open by hand, but my resourceful son (typical boy) discovered actually smashing them with the heal of your boot was the most effective, and surprisingly didn’t damage the actual nut inside at all!

Spikey Chestnut Shell

The photo below was of an open one still on the tree – these were few and far between though and mostly they were covering the floor like an incredibly spikey carpet.

Scary Open Sweet Chestnut Shell

I love the colours and gloss of the newly extracted chestnut. They’re a little like highly polished walnut, like you would find in some stately home.

Lone Sweet Chestnut

We collected loads, the tub you see my daughter holding was literally overflowing.

Inside the tub of chestnuts!

We’ve not tasted them yet. Some have been blanched and frozen to make into a stuffing for Christmas and the rest we have hung in nets with the aim to roast them in the oven.

What really amazed us is that we found walnuts in the same park! That’s not something you see everyday in the UK, but they were in the local park and we didn’t even know it. Foraging is great family fun. We definitely want to do it more – unfortunately we discovered the fun a little late in the season, but we’re going to gear up to collect a lot more in future.

As a matter of technical interest I graded these in the Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta it’s free to use until early next year. I really like it. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles (Layers!) of Photoshop, but in a way that’s good as you concentrate on the photo – more like darkroom development. The only problem is it’s not cheap, once the beta runs out it’ll be back to Photoshop only for me then.