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It’s a shame that all the hickory trees that are here are Bitternut Hickory. Good wood for handles and burning in the smoker but the nuts, as per it’s name, are bitter. Just checked out a wikipedia article on them and evidently, the nuts have a high percentage of oil that can be extracted and is similar to pecan oil.

One of their links even leads to forager|chef — https://foragerchef.com/sam-thayers-bitternut-hickory-nut-oil/

We have a plethora of bitternut hickory trees here. One rather mature tree hangs over my “meditation” garden. Though I have a few ornamental plants there, it’s mostly native plants, because that’s all that wants to grow without an obscene amount of work. They take over by mid summer.

When I get my sloped area behind it trimmed back, it’s a very pretty view of the backyard. You can almost see to the creek, and definitely can see the deer paths back there.

Most all of my gardening here is the flower and shrub kind. Too much shade for many vegetables. It’s closer to a botanical garden feel here than anything. Those hickories make for a good amount of maintenance.

Went out to the tunnel/garden to check on the plants. The Tatsoi/Chijisimai are making a comeback from the cabbage worms as I thought they would. Got a couple of Bok Choy plants ready to take.

On the way back, stooped down and picked up 2 cups or so worth of hickory nuts within reach. All has cracked husks so I de-husked them as I collected. Don't have a nutcracker but I have pliers, same thing. Cracked one open and there's not a lot of meat in it. Others might be better. I know I could go back out and fill a gallon container with them from that one tree. They do make hickory nut pick up tools.

Cold pressing makes the best oil and I do have a small 6 ton hydraulic press but I'd need a heavy walled vessel with hole in the bottom for oil to come out and a plate/piston that would fit snugly into the vessel and then press it down.

Here's a DIY version. Taller than it needs to be since the jack only has 4-6 inches of travel. Probably don't need holes all the way to the top either but maybe it came with holes already in it. The cylinder walls are a little on the thin side.

Making peanut oil

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1ZT5PJjjW8

Would be cool to saute homegrown bok choy in home grown/home pressed oil. Ain't gonna happen today but having some source of oil here is something I'm happy to know about. Whole nuts will last years if kept in a cool place in containers.

I do have some steel pipe 4-5 inches in diameter with almost 1/4" wall.

Did some techie stuff today. Swapped the Tunnel Mini PC with my rugged tablet. The rugged tablet is now in the shed and for the tunnel and the Mini PC is now a web server.

It’s running fresh installations of nextcloud and wordpress that are both accessible via the web via an unused domain name of mine. NextCloud works a lot faster that the one with my prepper/gardening cloud that I pay hosting for but it’s really cheap hosting. I prefer free and faster.