Black Walnuts

We have two large black walnut yard trees, and every year they drop dozens of walnuts onto our lawn. Last year, one broke a windshield on our car. On a bit of a lark, I thought I would try harvesting walnuts this year. They literally fall out of the tree, so how hard can it be?

As it turns out, it is a process. The walnut, which is what we are probably all familiar with from holiday nutcrackers, starts out encased in a green sticky hull. This hull turns black over time, creating a sludge that stains everything. After gathering the walnuts from the ground, the first step is to remove this hull.

Like most people, I did a Google search and found a few videos on YouTube. All the methods involved some sort of smashing to crack the hull so it could be peeled off. One video touted placing the gathered nuts in a garbage can with water and using a drill and paint mixing paddle to beat the hulls off. As it turns out, I have the exact model of paddle recommended in the video. Unfortunately, I met with limited success. I set the nuts aside to ponder, and Maggie continued to collect them. Three 5-gallon pails accumulated in our screen porch over the early fall. A week or two ago, Maggie gave me an ultimatum to shell them or get rid of them, to prevent critters from looking for a meal.

I returned to the pails, and found by this time that many of the hulls had started to break down. Most videos I watched used a log or mallet to break up the hulls. I recalled I had a hand tamper, used for compacting a gravel bed. It turned out to work very well breaking up the hulls. The key turned out to be procrastination.

I then retried the water/bucket/paddle method to clean the nuts, and found greater success. I poured the nuts and sludge through a produce crate, rinsed with the hose, and most of the crud and hull came off.

I know have two crates of nuts. The next step is supposedly to let the nuts dry and 'cure' for several weeks. I set them outside for a couple of days, bringing them in at night. Today, I found a couple of eaten nuts, probably due to squirrels or chipmunks. They are probably dry enough to keep in the basement at this point. In a few weeks, I can crack the nuts and pick the nutmeat out. Something to do in December.

I should have known this would be a bit of work after talking to an Amish woman a couple of weeks ago. I had dropped off something at an Amish welding shop, and stopped by to check on progress. As the woman and I were walking from her store to the shop, we passed a black walnut tree with many walnuts on the ground. I asked the woman if they gather the walnuts. She said it was too much work to get to the nutmeat, and that they preferred to harvest hickory nuts. Mind you, this is a group that embraces manual labor, and they find it is too much work. Her store was selling hickory nuts for around $8/pound. Too back we don't have more hickory trees.