I’ve just returned indoors after a stint spent cleaning the last of this year’s windfall walnuts.

October marks the peak of the harvest but a few stragglers hold on into November.

Each year the harvest is a race against not just time but also the squirrels.

There’s a balance to be made between waiting for them to fall and knocking them off the tree as their casings open to reveal the nuts.

Leave it too long and the rodents make off with your precious nuts, take them too early and the casings are impossible to shake off.

Although, the benefit of the lost nuts often means that throughout the coming year a host of new walnut tree saplings appear across the farm as the squirrels forget where they’ve hidden their loot.

This year, as with many harvests, the walnuts have had a good year.

We currently have five crates stacked in the house drying out slowly and surely. They’ll be dry enough to to eat and bake with in the new year.

When it come to using homegrown walnuts, a whole new challenge presents itself – it’s true to say that shelling them is a labour of love and it takes time, a lot of time (it always makes me wonder how walnuts are shelled so uniformly on a commercial basis).

Whilst I try to use them in new recipes every year, there are a few dishes that deserve to be made year-on-year – dishes that really show off the earthy depths of the walnut.

The nut holds its own in moist, fruity cakes, in granola and blitzed to a fine dust in pastry but my go to recipe is a walnut and caramel tart.

I often worry it’s too simple, but simple is often the very best way.

The walnuts are toasted to bring out their aroma and favourable bitterness, the caramel is oozy and sticky and the sweet short pastry is crisp and thin.

It never lasts very long and is at its best at any time of day – with a morning coffee, an afternoon tea or a glass of crisp white wine in the evening…