It is Fall again, and the lovely sounds of the black walnuts falling from the tree in the front yard, often onto the roof of my house with a thud similar to the sound of a baseball hitting the clubhouse roof after a pop fly goes horribly foul, have finally stopped just before the first frost of the season.
The Black Walnut tree always seems to know best when the cold weather is coming.....dropping all of its nuts and most of its leaves just before the maples get a red tinge. All years are not created equal it seems, when it comes to the Black Walnut crop. We only have a single tree, and I read somewhere on the internet that to maximize production, you should have at least a couple of trees close together to insure pollination. Well, I guess nobody wants to be lonely. Last year and the year before we had almost no walnuts come out of the tree. This year is a bumper crop....I'm wondering if that is any indicator of the harshness of the coming winter. Mental note to self: We will see what happens.
The Black Walnut tree is one of the most valuable resources to bushcrafters and foragers in the Eastern Woodlands of the United States. From this tree, you can find food in the nuts themselves as well as in the animals the tree attracts.....animals which are also fierce competitors for those tasty nuts...
You can use the hulls of the nuts to create dark brown dye for clothing or anything else you might want to stain brown, including boiling and blackening traps for your trap line, if you are so inclined. Also because the tree's products are so high in tannins, you can use it for medicinal purposes too as an astringent and more.
The nuts themselves, while taking work to make them edible, are tasty and nutritious. It's best to harvest them from the tree before they drop if possible. Our tree is too tall for that, hence the baseballs hitting the roof....so we pick them up off of the ground as soon as possible before they start to decay, and before the squirrels steal them all.
First thing's first...the messy part....after you pick up the nuts, you have to remove the hulls. The hulls are what turn your hands, your sneakers, your pants, and anything else you touch with them, black or dark brown for at least a very, very long time.
My grandmother and sometimes my mother used to get the hulls off this way: They would throw the nuts down on the gravel and with their best pair of old sneakers, they would stomp them to death until the hulls were off. What my wife and I did instead was employ a hammer, some rubber gloves and a tub of water with some rough rocks added.
You lightly hit the nuts with the hammer, just hard enough to loosen the green fleshy hulls, then you peel them off as best you can. Look for worms. If you find any nuts that look infested, discard them. You can save the hulls to make dye if you want ( That's another post), but otherwise, you should discard them in a place away from any garden plants or trees you don't want to kill. the acidity of the walnut hulls makes them dangerous for some plants. We don't put them in our compost pile either. We just scatter them along the back fence where they won't do much harm.
The next step...and I read this on a friendly cooperative extension website...don't remember which one....is to put the nuts with the hulls removed, into a pot of water and swish them around with the loose rocks. This will help clean them and remove even more of the offending hull material.
After the hulls are removed, it is time to put the nuts in open boxes or on newspapers or screens in a well-ventilated area to dry for about two weeks. It is important to keep them from growing mold, and to get them dry fairly quickly. We had ours in front of a fan in the basement for a couple of days. Then they went into flat open boxes to dry even more. Every day they got shaken about a little to keep them from settling or growing mold.
Now comes the fun part...get the hammer again, and a couple of rags. Wrap a couple of nuts in a rag, and then give them a good whack with the hammer, but don't pulverize them! I have found that if you lay the nuts so the seam between the two halves is facing up toward where the hammer will hit, the shells seem to break in a way that makes it easier to get the meat out. Wrap them in a rag or cloth so you don't get exploding nut shells all over the place. It helps to have some of those picks you get in a nut-cracker set to work the pieces out of the broken shells. It is a bit tedious, but the reward is worth it, and the aroma is very pleasant while you work. We like to put the walnuts in our oatmeal in the morning, and we plan to bake with them in cookies and brownies, and whatever else comes to mind.
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