Walnuts, Walnuts, and More Walnuts

So the Black Walnuts have been dropping like manna from Heaven around here.  And for sure, with the quantity that we have in our yard alone, we can feed 20 starving families of squirrels, their cousins, aunts, uncles, and their next door neighbors for the next 4 years.  Seriously, we have a lot of walnuts.

No way to mow them, so I thought I would pick them up.  Good plan in the mind, not so good to execute.  I picked up walnuts for about 30 minutes and FILLED SEVEN 5-gallon buckets.  This is from ONE TREE and less than HALF of that one tree!  I counted three buckets as I filled them.  I got 170 in the round buckets and 150 in the square ones.  That's close to 1,100 walnuts in the buckets - and there is At Least that many more to be picked up; maybe even 3X that many...

Understand that these walnuts still have their hulls.  Once hulled, you get to the nut, and then these seven buckets become about 2, maybe 3.  Then they have to be dried for at least two weeks, cracked, and then the nut meat extracted.  Now we're talking about a one-gallon Ziplock (TM) bag of nuts.  That's a lot of work for such a small prize.  But then again, if they weren't worth it, nobody would do it.

The hulling process is really simple as the outer shell is soft.  However, Black Walnuts are very different than their English cousin.  Black walnuts have 4 chambers versus the English's two.  And the Black shells cannot be cracked with a nut cracker - you'd break the nut cracker.  You have to use a hammer or a vice to get into these suckers.  They are that hard.

This is a picture of about 1/2 of the walnuts on the ground.

Yep, the trees REALLY produced quite a bit of fruit this year.  Even the apples were overflowing.
The Farmer's Almanac, old wives, Native Americans, and the Aborigines, would all tell you that a plentiful crop means that we will be having a Harsh Winter - as Mother Nature provides for her children.

Apples that did not get picked and eaten this year.

My current plan is to hull, dry, and shell SOME of these.  The remainder are free for the taking.  If no one out there wants any, then I'm going to pile them up in the woods for the squirrels to eat all winter long.

Seriously, if anyone wants any of these walnuts (that they have to prepare) these are yours for the taking.

What does 1,100 black walnuts look like in 5-gallon buckets?  This is it!


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