Bumper Crop of Black Walnuts

Last year (2016) I got no black walnuts.  North Georgia had a severe drought in the late summer and early fall; although I had some nuts on the trees in July, by the end of August they had all aborted.

This year was different.  A lot of nuts were downed in early September by Irma.  As I mentioned in September, I went ahead and cracked some of them right away to see if they were okay and they were.  Lesson learned, however:  The nuts had not cured.  I left the container of nuts shown in the Irma post out at room temperature to see what would happen, and after a week or so the nut meats molded.

I didn't go back for the rest of the Irma walnuts because (as noted previously) it was a total pain trying to remove the husks.  It probably took 30-60 seconds of hammering to get them off each nut.

The remainder of the crop started to drop in October.  In all, I probably got about 20 gallons' worth off of my two trees, and I left many more on the ground unharvested.  I just couldn't get to them all in time.

It takes me about an hour to process five gallons.  I have gotten better at it, but it's still labor intensive.  First I knocked off the hulls with a hammer. The fully ripe ones were much easier to de-husk.  I had some husk fly larvae but not many; perhaps last year's failed crop cut down on the population some. Then I swirled them in water in a bucket, using both the water stream out of the faucet and the nuts themselves to remove remaining husk.  I did about three or four rinses, ending up with what you see here.  That's about clean enough, though I have seen cleaner shells.  People pressure wash them or do many more rinsing cycles to get them cleaner.  They don't have to be works of art.

I haven't cracked these yet--that's actually the most labor-intensive step in processing--but they are ready to go.  They'll be good in the shell for a year or two.

Irma Walnuts

I think about 1/3 of my black walnut crop was knocked down during Irma.  A friend who has several black walnut trees had a similar loss rate.  I figured they wouldn't be ripe yet, but decided to process a few just to check.  As mentioned previously, I hammer off the husks, wash them to get them as clean as reasonably possible, then crack them.  These early nuts had no husk fly larvae in them; there either won't be any this year or the eggs haven't hatched yet (it's possible the cycle is temporarily broken at my place; last summer the whole crop dropped prematurely because of the drought--no husks, no new generation).

The husks from the first few have been extremely hard to remove.  It might be because they aren't quite ripe.  Hopefully later it will be better.  Pretty much everyone says you should let the nuts dry for a while after husking, but this time I cracked them within a couple of days because I wanted to see how good they were.

I used my Master Nut Cracker (also available from 855sheller and maybe a few other places) to do the cracking.  It went pretty well this time. 

The nuts I cracked were from my good tree--the one that I think is an improved cultivar.  As you can see, it has big nuts and they yield a lot of nutmeat.  The cracker easily breaks them up without damaging the nut meats much, so I can get out big pieces.

 

The container shown has maybe three nuts in it.  I only cracked five total as a test.  I'm going to husk the other early ones at this point and look forward to the normal harvest when they start dropping in another couple of weeks.

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.

 

Black Walnuts

It's almost black walnut time in north Georgia.  I've had a few nuts dropping for a while, probably due to drought, but the main drop starts about now and lasts for a few weeks.  The ones that have dropped already probably are not mature.  The ones that dropped in July definitely were not ready.

Nuts are harvested when they hit the ground.  They're covered in a spicy-scented thick green husk, which is removed to reveal the nut itself.  English walnuts, which are the more familiar variety, also have husks but they split apart somewhat easier.

The nuts themselves are pretty tough.  A normal little hand-held nutcracker probably won't work well (though I haven't tried to use one myself).  Forget about the decorative ones that star in Christmas plays.  Once the husk is gone, what's left looks sort of like a normal walnut, except that the ridges are sharper.  The photo is of some of the nuts I harvested last year--you can see that some have mold on them; I'm not sure why, but I cracked a few of those and they were all bad.

The first nuts I processed I used a hammer on; I just carefully whacked at them using the driveway as a backstop.  It worked ok, but was very inefficient.  I damaged a lot of the nutmeat and probably spent upwards of 20 minutes per nut.  That was just a demonstration project to assess the viability of the nuts.  I soon decided that I did want to harvest my nuts and went searching for a better nutcracker.

I soon found one:

It's available at:  http://www.masternutcracker.com/.  The website is not the most user-friendly, but there's a form that can be printed out and you can e-mail in advance with any questions you may have. There is at least one reseller I know of, and may be others:  http://855sheller.com/.  The tool does a great job and can crack the nuts with ease (it works on other tough nuts, like hickory).  There do appear to be some knockoffs available for sale from a lot of outlets; they do not seem to function as well:  Master vs. copy.  I've ordered from the Master site twice and have had very good experiences.

855 Sheller also sells other crackers, including one that can be used with a drill to process nuts quickly--they have posted videos on their YouTube site showing it in action.  If I had more trees, I would probably have to do something other than crack them one at a time, but I don't get a very big harvest.  It's more of a novelty for me at present.  Maybe someday the trees will be producing more, and I have just planted a new improved cultivar tree (Thomas Myers) that is advertised to yield big nuts with thin shells (I think one of my existing trees is something like this, or another big variety; the nuts run 20 to the pound).

A much easier option is just to buy them; the little packages at the grocery store are expensive but chopped black walnuts can be had from Amazon and other places relatively cheaply thanks to the business model of Hammon's, a Missouri company that buys nuts from small-scale harvesters who pick the wild nuts up off the ground.  There do not appear to be very many commercial producers.  The trees themselves are more often grown for their timber value, which can be substantial.