YouTube farmer Richard, The Funky Farmer, (with 170k followers on his channel!) joined us for day three of the 2026 walnut harvest. Here’s what he found...
A farmer visits a farmer
Richard farms dairy and has a handful of walnut trees of his own, planted by his dad. A friend told him about a man in Somerset with a whole orchard of them.
This autumn he came to see it for himself. The result is a two-part film on his YouTube channel @TheFunkyFarmer.
From Mulberry to the Somerset Levels
Part 1 opens with a long sit-down with Roger. He tells Richard how Mulberry began in 1971, straight out of school, with £500 from his parents for his 21st birthday and a snakeskin choker sold to Biba.
Roger left Mulberry in 2003. That same year the farm at Sharpham came up for sale for the first time in a century. It went organic straight away.
Why walnuts, not cider?
In the heart of cider country, apples would have been the obvious choice. But while restoring the old manor house, Roger found a ‘monk’s lunch’ plastered into a wall from around 1500, including a walnut.
The monks of Glastonbury Abbey had grown walnuts here. So in 2004, Roger planted 300 walnut trees.
He admits to Richard he thought they’d crop within a few years. In reality, a walnut tree takes around 20 years to bear a meaningful harvest.
Shaking the trees
Then it’s out into the orchard, with Glastonbury Tor on the horizon. A tractor-mounted shaker, built for cider apples, grips each trunk and the nuts come down like rain.
The team gather them with rolling nut pickers and roll up tarpaulins under the bigger trees. Every tree is numbered, weighed and logged, so we know which trees perform. One gave 19.5kg; a smaller neighbour, barely anything.
A year shaped by the weather
Our walnuts are grown without irrigation, so the weather decides everything. In the 2025 drought, nuts were around a quarter smaller than usual.
Last winter, Roger fed the trees with their own composted husks and mulched them with oak chippings. That helped hold moisture through another dry summer. This year the nuts are bigger, though the harvest is smaller.
A late spring frost also hit the late-blossoming varieties. Some even tried to blossom a second time.
Nothing goes to waste
Roger explains to Richard how the farm makes the most of every nut. Smaller nuts are cracked for Pump Street’s Walnut Brownie bar and Olives Et Al’s walnut range. The leaves become walnut leaf tea with Tregothnan. This year brought our first pickled walnuts and nocino too.
Can Britain feed itself?
The conversation turns to food security, a subject Roger has been raising for years. Around 65 per cent of the fruit, nuts and vegetables eaten in the UK are imported, often from countries facing harder climate pressures than ours.
What happens next?
Shaking the trees is only the start. In Part 2, Richard follows the walnuts through washing, drying and into the box.
Coming up soon: Part 2: From husk to box! Thank you to Richard for a brilliant day. Find more on his channel.
Shop: Discover our walnut collaborations and join the waiting list for next year's British Organic Walnuts www.sharphampark.com
