Chestnut picking

Above just some of the many pictures I took of all the chestnuts (and trees) we have around the farm. I really have no idea how many trees we have, but there's a lot of them, and they produce a lot of chestnuts, although some of them are so small it's actually pointless in eating them, because really there's nothing much to eat. So apart from spending my weekend taking lots of photos (digital and about 3 rolls of film on my other camera) I also spent it picking chestnuts off the ground and directly from the trees. My hands were punctured by the end of the weekend in several places despite using gloves. The "hedgehog" casing of the chestnut has really nasty spikes, especially if they're still a bit green. In one of the pictures above you see we used one of the blue Ikea bags we had lying around, they're really big and I managed to collect about 5 bag-fulls of them during the weekend, and that's not even to mention the wheelbarrow load my dad collected and the other bag-full my mum collected. The dog had to stay home while we were out collecting all these chestnuts, because we didn't want her to injure herself on the casings of the chestnuts, and she refuses to walk with her little shoes, so she sulked inside the house. On Sunday afternoon I spent about 2 hours removing the chestnuts from their casings, and we then used all the casings as fuel for the fire, they burn fantastically. We even threw in the little chestnuts and the ones that had huge holes in them from the caterpillars that eat the chestnuts (they're plenty of those around). My mum found an article in a magazine or a cookbook that showed a variety of things that can be done with the chestnuts, so we had chestnut soup, which was delicious; chestnut cake, really good, although a bit crumbly because it doesn't take any flour (she's just made some more, so I can enjoy it over the weekend); jam/jelly for on toast or bread or whatever else purpose there is for jam and jelly, this is actually quite sweet, despite not adding too much sugar to the chestnuts, and tastes lovely on some bread; and finally the candies chestnuts, these are really delicious although my mum said she refuses to make any more because it requires about 4 days worth of cooking and she prefers to get quicker results. By the way the stuff she made was just with the chestnuts my parents had picked the previous weekend and what my mum picked during the week. This weekend alone, the three of us managed to pick about 25-30 kgs more of chestnuts, so my mum is going to make a lot more jam/jelly and we're going to try freezing some so that we can have them over Christmas.