More on Black Walnuts

I'm starting to process the black walnuts that have been falling.  Most of the nuts are on the ground now, with only a few left in the trees.

The first step is to get the hull off, which requires a bit of work the way I do it.  I mentioned earlier that corn shellers can be used to de-husk walnuts, but I'm not entirely sure whether that's intended to be when they are fresh--like in the picture at right--or when they've dried down.  You'll see various things online about hulling them; generally, people recommend it be done when the nuts are first collected.  If you wait until the husks dry around the nut, it's tough to remove them.

The texture of the husk is fairly meaty.  It's apparently edible, because you can buy pickled walnuts that include everything--shell, nut meat, and husk--in vinegar (the nuts are picked in an immature state for pickling).  I was interested in trying them until I found out they didn't shell the nuts... eating the whole thing isn't very appealing.

So I remove my husks and try to do so quickly.  The picture above was taken when I had just picked up the nuts.  They start to turn black almost immediately.  Black walnuts contain juglone, a somewhat herbicidal chemical that inhibits some other plants (but not all).  The nut falls to the ground; the husk deteriorates around the shell, and limits plant growth around where the nut will sprout and begin to grow.  So one has to be careful where the husks and washing water are dumped.

I use the hammer method, described very well in this video.  He's a lot faster at it than I am.  I pound away on the nuts inside a bag to try to catch the husks--they're messy and will stain anything they touch.  I use rubber gloves. The bag at left probably took me about 10-15 minutes to do.  Inevitably, you'll find some that have husk fly larvae in them (as shown in the picture below).  The first year I picked up my nuts, I was aghast when I discovered a few little worms in the box.  Don't worry about them.  They're pretty harmless.  They eat the husk material but don't penetrate the shell to get inside the nut itself.  I just work around them.

The husk flies may provide a somewhat beneficial service to the tree, by breaking the husks up a bit and making it easier for them to fall apart and decompose once they hit the ground. On my trees, the eggs laid by the adult flies pretty much reach a dead end, because I toss them in the trash. 

 

The adult husk fly itself is a pretty attractive bug.  I have seen a few of them on the trees, though not often; one spring, I even found one in the garage sitting on some nuts that I hadn't gotten around to hulling the fall before (they were well-dried down by then). 

As noted in another post, corn shellers can also remove the husks though I have never tried that method.

After the nuts are close to hull-less (hammering can't get all the material off), I put them in a bucket and wash them in water, similar to the process followed in the video above.  The final result is as shown.  I don't get them completely clean; I get them clean enough.  When cracking, the dried hull material will flake off the shell and make a bit of a mess, but the only alternative is to use a lot of water and/or a brush to scrub the hull tissue out of the grooves in the shell.  I'm not going to do that.

Once cleaned (or semi-cleaned), the nuts will keep well in the shell for a long time--over a year.  I still have some from last year I need to crack.  Ones I have done recently have been fine.

 

In the picture above you can see that some of the nuts are larger than the others; the big ones come from what I believe is probably a named cultivar tree.  The other tree might be native.  I get usable nut meat out of both.