Honey bee take off

"I'm outta here!"

Black Walnut Harvest 2015

For the past several years now part of our autumn tradition has been to located a source of black walnuts (Juglans nigra) and harvest as many as possible. Fortunately for us, my wife has made several connections with people who have black walnut trees but little desire to keep the rock hard nuts themselves. So for us it is just a matter of driving to a location with a ton of buckets and bags on hand, and then load up. This is exactly what we did this past Monday evening.

Black walnuts in their green husks. This will fall off in a messy fashion after awhile, revealing the nut inside.

We filled both buckets and bags with the fallen nuts.

While not the hardest work, picking the abundance of fallen nuts can definitely be a bit time consuming.

In no time we had a ton of nuts.

We completely filled the trunk of my car.

And much of the back seat as well.

All told we probably managed to gather between 200 - 300 lbs of nuts on Monday (it'll be less once the husks fall off, and even further less once shelled). Now we wait for the husks to melt off, with the help of walnut husk fly maggots (Rhagoletis completa), and then dry cure the nuts. Then comes the real hard part, which is breaking the rock hard shells, which literally requires the use of a good hammer and a hard surface. But the payoff is a delicious and unique nut meat to make all sorts of goodies with. All around, a fun project.

One Big Mushroom

Driving home the other evening my wife pulled into a local swimming pool parking lot and said "I think I saw a good mushroom." This did not surprise me as the spot is one we have found interesting mushrooms at in the past. Furthermore, coming out of a week of heavy rains, it was more than reasonably that some fungi would be fruiting. Still, to have seen a good sized mushroom from the car, as dusk was settling, was pretty enticing.

The short and sweet of it was that it was indeed a "good mushroom." A big ol' Boletus bicolor, the Two-Colored Bolete. This is one of our favorite edible boletes in our region. While a little bit of care has to be taken to distinguish them from B. sensibilis (which is less brightly colored and stains a deep blue instantly upon cutting or bruising, as opposed to B. bicolor's very slow or lack of bluing) this is a pretty easy mushroom to recognize. Finding a dinner plate sized one, just on chance, is pretty exciting.

Bigger than my wife's hand. Pretty much a dinner plate of a cap.

It could almost be used as an umbrella.