OT/ Black walnuts

Anybody harvest black walnuts? This year is the first year I've tried it. TONS of them here in Central Oh. I picked up a 30gal. trash can at work. (had to pick them up to mow out front, it's great being paid to do it!!) That was from one side of one tree, the other half is on the property next door. And only half of the nuts have fallen. Picked up a couple of buckets in front of the house and from a couple of small trees on my property as well. I could easily fill a dump truck with all the nuts that have fallen from trees by the roads around here that nobody bothers with, they just let them lay there. I've been worried about one hitting the windshield driving down the road there's so many walnut trees around here!
I put them in a small cement mixer with 3-5" stones to knock off the husks, then hosed them off in an old 2 gal. plastic tree pot (the kind you get them in at the nursery). Then rinsed in a bucket of water and the floaters got pitched. I let the water run out in the gravel where I park equipment, it's supposed to be a natural herbacide, so we'll see how that works. Got enough out of that batch to cover a 3x4 screen I have mounted on a frame. I'll let them set for a few weeks then work on cracking the hulls and getting the nut meats out. It took about four hours to process the first lot, I may do a second round. I hope to get 2-3 quarts out of each batch. I know, it's a lot of work.

You may not be too far from me.I'm below Ashland A bumper crop here too. In years past we would gather them up and take them to a place that bought them. They would hull them and then pay by weight after hulling. A real pain to pick them up.

Send me an e-mail and I will send you a page that I have to build a thing to remove the hulks off of them. As for picking them up well that is for the squirrels and I gave up on doing that years ago. I have so many on the place you can not walk 5 foot with out stepping on a dozen of them and that is doing your best to miss them. At times it sounds like the sky if falling and that is sitting right here at the computer

NE Pa, got them by the ton here too.

When we were kids we used to pick black walnuts up in the fall of the year by the busshel baskets full.Husk them with a claw hammer and a brick,spread them out on the roof of the chicken house,the south slope worked best,to dry them.Took about 10 days for them to dry,bagged them in gunny sacks and hung the bags in the hay mow of what used to be the Horse barn when we had teams back before the war. In the winter we would bring all the bags to the house basement and again hang them ,this time to the floor joists. Mom used them in Chocalote fudge,Cakes,Cookies and by them selves for a snack.Hickory nuts went thru a like kind of process.I had 3 brothers and 8 sisters and there were always a big gang of kids around and all were hungry for walnuts.

There was one tree in my grandfathers north Texas yard which made baseball size green walnuts. Interestingly,they clung to the tree until the husk was black and starting to schrivel. Shortly after falling the husk was much easier to remove than any other I have encountered. Several trees spruted within a mile of that tree and family members planted nuts from the tree. Every one of those subsent trees produce nuts about 1/4 the size and 10 times as many compared to the parent tree. Obvusly the origional tree was grafted but why would not a few much less one,have similar nuts? I suspect all trees growing in some areas came from nuts. I have procrastinated for years top work grafting the three trees on my place with wood from the origional tree which still stands.

Used the hand crank corn seller as a kid - did a very good job on the husk.

Old man I bought one of my properties from did it that way - cement mixer with water and stones in it. Afterwards he'd put them in burlap bags and stash them in the attic of his garage to dry out some. Winter time watching TV he'd crack them and store the meat.
His wife used to make banana bread with them.
I always loved to stop in there for coffee and banana bread with lots of butter on it.

Some one posted a while back, "If you want wood plant black walnuts, if you want nuts plant english walnuts". I know the nuts off my 25 year old trees aren't worth the effort. My nut do not look like the ones you buy in the stores. The shells are very rough. My neighbor has a tree and those nuts have smooth shells like you see in the stores. The squirrels don't leave you any of them. Squirrels don't seem to touch mine.

We have a couple of walnut trees on our place. Funny this should come up, my wife went out back yesterday and in no time filled a 6 gallon plastic bucket.

MFA in town here use to take the hulls off for free, but now they charge either $2 or $3.

I had walnuts, and Butternuts laid out to dry
and the Squirrels raided them. They stashed them
away, and forgot where. Now we"ve got young trees
coming up in lots of places. If you"ve got
Squirrels protect your nuts!

I tried it with water the first load, made a huge mess. That stuff splatters on everything when the stones fall, and it comes out looking like a couple of gallons of tobacco spit. I just ran it dry after that. There's enough juice in the hulls as it is, and that stuff will stain ANYTHING!!

I had an fella tell me one time that they use to take the green walnuts and put them in a tote sack and run over them with their wagon. Then when the green walnuts were all mashed up they would take that tote sack full of mashed walnuts down to Richland creek and drag in through the water to bring the catfish up to the top.


That's what I was told.

I could fill several gravity boxes with walnuts. If I could just invent a machine to crack the meats out, I would be rich

I wish we still had butternuts. I like eating the much better than walnuts. I only know of one tree in my area left that's healthy enough to produce nuts and picked up a 1 gallon pail full, but that was all there was. Butternut canker has pretty much wiped the tree out of existence here in SE MN. It's pretty sad.

I just lay them in the drive way(gravel) and drive over them every couple of days I go out and pick up the ones the hulls are off. Put in lawn cart for a couple months to dry and then crackem. put nut meat in zip lock freezer bags and freeze for future use.