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.