Posted on 12/06/2008 8:09:53 PM PST by Coleus
I thought it would be a smart way to cut household expenses during these challenging economic times: forage for free food in parks, woodlots and along roadsides. In the past month, I've found three black walnut trees, with large, heavy nuts lying right on the ground while I was walking the dog, hunting for squirrels and watching my kids run in cross- country meets. I've found, however, that there are several downsides to collecting all these tons of free protein just lying around the state every autumn:
1) You may wind up with a bunch of maggots squirming around in your pocket.
2) Your hands and clothing will become stained a particularly nasty shade of brown, as if you'd just worked your first day at an entry- level job at a sewage treatment plant.
3) To open the nuts, you'll have to forgo those nice, cute nutcrack ers from William-Sonoma. Instead you'll need to go to the tool department at Home Depot.
4) Once you finally open the nuts, you may find nothing edible inside.
Black walnuts look nothing like those clean, hard, attractive English (or "California") walnuts you buy at the store and put out during the holidays when company comes. In its unprocessed form, the black walnut looks like some vaguely dangerous rotting fruit. That's be cause the walnut shell is sur rounded by a husk 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 inches in diameter.
A bunch of freshly fallen wal nuts looks like someone dumped a crate of green baseballs beneath a large, black-barked tree. But the husk quickly begins turning a very dark brown, in effect rotting away and leaving the seed -- a very dark, thick-shelled walnut.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
The first walnuts I found this year had fallen from a tree on a park road. I was a half-mile from the car and the day was unseasonably warm, so I took off my shirt and knotted it into a sack to hold about a dozen nuts, which were half green and half brown. I was proud of my ingenuity until I got home, untied the shirt and saw the deep brown stains all over it. I didn’t even bother putting it in the hamper.
I took one nut and tore into the thin, papery shell. The black material surrounding the nut inside was damp, mushy and cold. I thought those stringy, whitish segments were part of the husk until I saw one of them wiggle. Not wanting to discard the nuts after investing an entire T-shirt, I put them in the back of the freezer, figuring the cold would kill the maggots while I waited for all the green to disappear. (I also made a mental note to keep quiet about what was in that lumpy bag next to the chicken thighs.) I washed my hands vigorously, but my finger pads remained a russet color.
A few days later, I emptied the bag onto the concrete apron of my driveway and used my boots to roll the nuts around and remove the husks. My hands remained relatively clean this time, but the driveway was left with a big brown blot that hasn’t washed away after five rainstorms. I set the husked nuts on the patio table to dry for a few days. Then I cracked them open in a vise on my workbench. Instead of the luscious, oily nut segments I was expecting, I found tiny, black, spongy discs.
Must have damaged the meat by freezing them, I thought. The next week I found two more batches in a state wildlife management area by stepping on the big husks while hunting for squirrels, which feed on the nuts. At home, I removed the husk from one nut right away and cracked the shell open. Inside were beautiful segments of meat, tan on the outside and brilliant white inside. The taste was intense, like a store wal nut times three. I removed the husks from the rest and set the nuts outside to dry.
Three weekends later, I turned the kitchen into a nut processing facility: vise on padded table, cardboard box to capture broken hulls, plates and nut picks to separate meat from hull. The small batch from the first tree — I had found fewer than a dozen under that one — was perfect. My wife, impressed at my resourcefulness, started asking where and how I’d found them all. My daughter, attracted by the crack of nuts popping open, offered to help. But when we started on the second, much larger batch of nuts from the second tree —there had been scores of them lying all over the ground — there was nothing inside but those gummy black discs. Reggie got silent. Carrie suddenly had to go text someone.
Total yield: about two tablespoons.
I started checking books and websites for information about black walnuts. I learned that the husk fly lays eggs in the husk (confirmed that), the husks had been used in the past to dye clothing (figured that) and that you don’t have to wait for the green to fade from the husk before you remove the nut. But I couldn’t find out why, out of about four dozen wal nuts, I was able to reap only enough meat to fill the gaps between my teeth. I started searching for walnut growers (yes, they exist) and finally found one — in Iowa. Billie Hanson owns 700 to 800 black walnut trees; last year he harvested 15,000 pounds of nuts. (I can only imagine what his hands look like.)
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Hanson. “You have a problem with your natives.” I thought he was setting me up for a Jersey joke, but Hanson meant that many native walnut trees don’t get pollinated. When that happens, the husk and nut will grow, but no meat will form inside. And while it is possible for a walnut tree to pollinate itself, it doesn’t occur often or well. You generally need other walnut trees nearby for a tree to fill its nuts. And because black walnut trees provide very desirable wood, many have been cut down over the years, which means the New Jersey woodlands aren’t overflowing with them.
What about the squirrels that find and bury the meatless wal nuts? Won’t that harm them? “No, they won’t do that,” Han son said. “Squirrels don’t keep bad nuts.” And that was why I’d found so many nuts that turned out to be barren and so few that had meat inside. I’ll go after walnuts again next fall. But I’ll do it when they’re already in the form of fat, tasty squir rels. Mike Toth is executive editor of Field & Stream magazine. He lives in New Jersey.
What’s more fun is throwing one of the already down fruits up and waiting to see what kind of chain-reaction you get with fruit waiting to fall. (Don’t stand right under the tree.)
Don’t blame the walnuts. You are surrounded by free food. Learn to identify what is good rather than assuming what is good and then complaining.
A squirrel is just a rat with a good press agent.
The article brought home a lot of memories as a kid. We had two black walnut trees in our back yard and every year we’d gather up the fruit and hull the nuts and crack the shells. I had stained hands for weeks.
Folks around here run back and forth over the nuts with their cars, to break them open.
Doesn’t the rubber tread make it taste bad?
We moved into a house with a black walnut tree one fall when our labrador retrievers were about 2 years old. The first morning, we found them dancing around the tree...they thought they’d found a tree full of tennis balls. :-)
Better yet, harvest what you find and take them to a huller. We have seasonal setups around here. It’s a lot of work for a little money but people do it religiously!
I played golf at a course one fall that had a bunch of walnut trees lining one fairway.
When a walnut falls, it crashes through the tree limbs making the very same sound as a golf ball coming down. Can’t tell you how many times I heard that sound and did a “duck and cover.”
The walnuts are also about the size of a golf ball, and make good targets for your practice swings...
Good memories. I remember using a vice in dad’s workshop to open them. IIRC, if you lined up the seam, they opened fine. A lot of work for the meager harvest!
Delicious in banana bread.
When the neighborhood lab broke free and came to see me, I'd tell her to go find a ball. If she couldn't find one in the garage, she'd go find a grapefruit on the ground.
ROTFL!! That little anecdote is a jewel.
Every year we try to harvest the nuts from the black walnut tree in our yard. My grandparents did it and I have dim memories of how to dry and store the nuts but Wife and I have never had any luck.
This hear was HUGE! There were bushels and bushels of nuts so we gathered them up and spent DAYS husking them. The few I've opened up have been empty and now it looks like mold is forming...sigh.
Maybe next year.
prisoner6
And fudge.
Of course! I had forgotten! Thanks for jogging the gray matter.
Why isn’t this in ‘Breaking’ news?
1. Gravel driveway ~ pour them out on the drive way and run the car on them on and off over a couple of weeks. In earlier times they drove the tractor over them, and even earlier the wagon, or just had the horses stomp on them.
2. Large hunk of iron. A piece cut from an old railroad rail is good. I have one outside if you'd like to see how it's done.
3. A large 2.5 pound hammer. Any lighter than that it might bounce off.
Let those husks get off by themselves. Then dry 'em out. Lay a walnut on the rail. Pick up the hammer and let it drop gently onto the nut from about 12 to 18 inches.
Once you've got the nut broken into 15 or 20 pieces, use your nut pick to pry the meat out.
It will last all winter long!
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