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.
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.
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.
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!
“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.”
Pfff. Freaking city boy.
Black walnut angel food cake, THAT’s why you pick up walnuts and crack them open.
Freaking city boy.
Its easy to make a walnut hulling machine.
Cut two 24” round pices of 3/4” plywood; drill a 5/8” hole in the center of each. Go to a building supply store and get about seven feet of 36” wide galvanized hardware cloth and a four foot long steel rod 5/8” in diameter.
Drive the rod through the holes in the plywood disks so that they’re about 6” from each end. Wrap the hardware cloth around the disks to form a cylinder, and staple it to the disks, except for the last foot of it, which has to remain free. Build a support base out of 2x6 doug fir or pine and drill each upright to accept a bearing that will support each end of the rod. place the bearings on the rod and insert into the 2x6 uprights, then fasten the uprights to the base. Now you have a drum that can be turned to tumble the hulls off of the nuts. Finally put a 12” diameter V-belt pulley on one end of the 5/8” rod, and take a long v-belt (72” or longer) and wrap it around the pulley, and set an electric motor with a 2 1/2” pulley on the base and place the belt on the motor pulley and position the motor to provide just enough tension to keep the belt on the pullies and fasten the motot at that point.
Then put the nuts in the drum, wire the flap closed, and plug the motor in. It will take about 1/2 hour in most cases to tumble the hulls off.
We used to have two Black Walnut trees on our property, when I was a kid. About the time that my mother sold the house, a neighbor came over and asked if they could cut down the tree that was near their property because they said that the trees gave off an acid that killed other vegetation and that they had never been able to grow anything on that side of their house because of that walnut tree.
I looked it up and it is true. Oh, and we never tried to open any of the walnuts because my mother hated black walnuts.