The Walnut Harvest

The great walnut harvest of 2014 has begun! And I think I’ve got my technique down. Do you ever wonder why nuts cost a lot of money?  (Black Walnuts cost up to $25 a pound at the store). It’s because getting to the meat of nuts it’s a complicated process. (Except peanuts, poor peanuts)

With six full-grown (likely fifty year plus) black walnut trees on our acreage. I bet each tree is producing around 500 nuts throughout the fall. We do have a rather large family of squirrels that obviously raids the tree and ground below the tree every night, but there are still so many nuts that I doubt it will affect the harvest much.

Here’s how you get a delicious black walnut:

1. Pick Ripe Black Walnuts

They are ripe when you push on the husk with your finger and the husk indents just a little bit.

2. Get the Husk off the Walnut

I use a hammer and plywood for this. It is messy. Wear gloves!

 

 

3. Wash the Black Walnuts

If the walnuts float, they don’t have meat in them. But you want to clean all the husk strings off.

4. Once clean (I have no water pictures-the water pictures just look like a container with black water in it) the nuts must cure for about a month. Meaning-they must be sitting in a place where air can move all around them and squirrels don’t raid them.

 

Once cured, comes the difficult task of cracking the nuts. Luckiliy for me, I have a husband with a very strorng grip.   BBut if you see me walking aroudn with hands that appear to have been dyed with too much self-tanner, worry not. It is indeed, not tanner, but the stain of black walnuts. Which I proudly wear for the next sixmonths. (Apparently gloves can’t even stop teh staining process). And soon, I will have delicious walnuts harvested by myself! How very exciting.

If you are interested in any Iowa Black Walnut, please feel free to contact me via facebook message or phone…or email if you have my email adress. Alot of lveoand care ibeen going into the production of said walnuts.