The walnut trees around here are dropping a bushel a day. I don't want to see them go to waste. Does anyone have experience gathering, hulling, and storing black walnuts? BTW, I have learned that one should wear gloves when fooling with them.
Around here you pick them up and sell them. As a kid we got a silver dollar for every sack. You just rake them and bag em. I think they are giving 5.00 a sack now. Grandma only kept enough around shelled and kernelled to make ice cream with. They are a pain in the butt to shell, and I don't think they keep as well as English Walnuts. The nuts have a real tendancy to mold. The shells are actually ground up and used as an abrasive in airplane manufacturing.
The only nut I know that's harder to crack and pick out is a hickory nut. That said, you can buy nutcrackers made just for walnuts, butternuts and hickory nuts and they're very much worth buying. Walnuts are a lot easier to pick out after shelling than hickories. You could sell a few bags of nuts to pay for the cracker. It's best to get them hulled and dried as early as you can, Mom and Dad used to drive a car over them when the green hulls start showing black places to burst the hulls off early. Dry them well before you store them and put them in something that can breathe or you'll get worms in the nuts that you can't see until you shell them. If you crack and pick them as soon as the shells dry out a bit instead of storing them whole you won't have much problems with worms. Trying to crack them when they're still wet from the hulls is messy, and they don't crack as well as when dried a bit.
I never heard of a black walnut huller. I've done almonds and worked the huller belts. Never known anyone around here to hull black walnuts. Maybe they send them to Virginia. English walnuts, by the time they knock them, most of the hulls shake lose before they hit the ground.
Not a huller, a cracker. Here's a list of several - http://www.nutgrowers.org/QA/nutcrackers.htm - my neighbor had one but I don't know where he got it. Black walnut hulls are still tight on the nuts when they fall (at least here in Virginia they are), so tight you can't have much luck hulling them when they first fall. Let the hulls start to rot a little here and there and they come off easily, but the longer you leave them in the hulls the more likely worms will get into them. The hulls make a great fabric dye, just boil them with a piece of rusty metal (for the iron), strain and use.
Black walnuts are awesome... I wish I were somewhere to take better advantage of black walnut season this year. When I lived in southwest Missouri I would pick them up by the truckbed full and take them to local farmers who had contracts with the big walnut companies. They had machines they rented from the campanies that would hull the walnuts... Pretty cool process to watch. Anyway, they would pay you $13 per bag(about 45 pounds) of hulled walnuts, and for a few bucks per bag they would hull the walnuts using their machine for you to use personally. If that's not avaliable in your area then you can hull them by driving over them, stomping them... Get creative. And yes, you'll want to wear gloves... I have black fingertips right now from hulling the few walnuts that landed in my yard. *haha* After you get them hulled, you'll want to store them in a breathable sack for a few weeks to dry so that the nuts inside shrink down enough to pick out. To pick them, you can crack them with a hammer(Be CAREFUL!, bits fly everywhere not to mention you can whack your finger) and then pick them out with a nut pick. If you can't find a nut pick(a little metal tool with a dull slightly hooked point) you can fashion one out just about anything. I've used toothpicks, bamboo skewers, those metal turkey trussing pin thingies. Pick and enjoy... I've got an awesome recipe that makes the best black walnut cookies ever! Let me know if you want it.
yeah here in SW Missouri...they are a good cash crop...walnuts pay $10 to $15 a 100lbs hulled weight.....hulled not shelled...but still a good source of free money ....not to mention the great taste of fresh walnuts...well worth the trouble to shell them....makes ya wonder about the desperation needed for the original discoverer to find the treasures with in a walnut shell here is another application of black walnuts I have found...saw slabs out of the shell...makes for interesting artwork.and the imagination is the limit for the uses of them
I would think you could almost make jewelry out of those. Might be a bit large, but I've seen some pretty big necklaces lately. I would bet with a coat of poly they would last forever.
those have been coated in poly....it also helps hold the melted crayons in place on the filled ones....I've made earrings out of them...and pendant type necklaces with them mean while back to the original topic....hell yeah ivory post that recipe here....walnuts are good eatin'
I was reading the journal of a naturalist who traveled the eastern US around 1760 or so, he said the natives harvested hickory nuts by smashing them, boiling them and skimming off the oil which they used for cooking and for seasoning other foods. You've got to hand it to them, the Native Americans and early European settlers who learned from them had a knack for getting a lot done with a minimum of tools and effort. I figure that hickory nuts were a lot easier to come by in those days, though.
I am not sure how you'd get oil out of black walnut hulls. I am not sure it would taste all that good, in fact it might be noted as a narcotic for fish life. My brother came over and got a bucket of mine to throw in his koi pond one year, because he understood it would stupify them and he wanted to cull his koi and give some to a friend. Not sure how it worked, he never told me. And I totally forgot about it until now. And who ever told him this said they had to be green and in the hull. You do have to hand it to our native brothers that they seemed to understand and take advantage of all the properties of plants in their locales. No Hickorys around here though. Probably our extremely hot summers.
I think we may be stumbling on semantics, Gardener. What I'm calling the hull is the green outer soft layer, by shells I mean the hard woody part that protects the kernal, and by kernel I mean the soft part that's edible. The Cherokee didn't boil the hulls, they crushed the hull-less whole nut, boiled the crushed/mashed nut with shell, and skimmed off the oil. Hickory nuts are really hard to pick after cracking, the natives figured out a way to use them without all that bother. Of course, I imagine they had many times the hickory nuts we have now so being a bit "wasteful" wasn't an issue. I didn't know about the medical value of walnut hulls, thank you!
Hey--where's that recipe? I grew up in SW Missouri, too. We spent many days every year with brownish yellow stained fingers from gathering walnuts. We would fill up the back of my dad's old truck then dump them in the driveway and drive over them for a few days until the hulls were gone. We always sold them and my parents still do. I think the best thing to make out of black walnuts is homemade ice cream. yummy. You can use the hulls for dye. It makes a yellowy tan color and works good on wool.
