harvesting black walnut

This year harvesting bigtime. Started with 100 gallons of unhusked and
looks to be 30 gallons of
husked black walnut. I have plastic containers with lids to keep the
squirrels and rodents out of
until unhusked.

I read somewhere that the green husked have a better flavor than
waiting for a black husk.

Alot of the fly and maggots in the husks.

Time consuming to place on the woodstove top to dry and roast the nut.

Maybe as the years roll by I can find some alternatives to make the
work easier.

Read that commercial operations have a sort of wheel belt that unhusks
the black walnut.

One year I tried soaking them in water until the husk was easy to
remove, but I wonder
if the water penetrated the nut itself which would be dirty water.

Tried a few and they are delicious with a strong flavor. And that the
small ones often
are better tasting than the larger nuts.

They do seem to take alot of time and will have to find better methods
of dehusking.

The only thing left to harvest now is frostbite tomatoes that are
green but will redden
in the winter and potatoes and rhubarb.

Also have to plant the strawberries out of their pots and into the
ground for the winter
and cover with straw.

Archimedes Plutonium
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<[Only registered users see links. ]> wrote in message
news:[Only registered users see links. ]...


You're sure going to have a "fun" time of it cracking open those many
gallons of wickedly hard black walnuts to engage in ultra-tedious picking
out of the meat.

We used to have a couple of prodigiously productive black walnut trees in
our back lot--every year, I'd gather up a bunch of the fallen nuts, placing
small lots of them in a cardboard box to shake around with vigorous vitality
in order to wear off most of the surface "black soot." And then the fun
began. In my spare time, I'd patiently crack open the nuts with my geology
hammer, then use one of those sharp dental tools (the variety a hygenist
uses to clean one's teeth) to poke around and pluck out the meat. After a
few weeks of occasional dedicated work, I'd have a nice cache of black
walnuts to store away.

In one of our better landscaping decisions, I must say, we finally removed
both the black walnut trees several years ago; but, if I ever wanted to
collect more black walnuts to mess around with, there are certainly numerous
huge, producing wild specimens concentrated down by our local river. Anyway,
good luck with your project--'cause you're gonna need it.

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On or about Sun, 19 Oct 2008 01:37:07 -0700 (PDT) did
[Only registered users see links. ] dribble thusly:


One method of dehusking which I've heard of, but not tried personally, is to
put the walnuts in a sack (canvas or burlap) on your driveway and drive over
it repeatedly with your vehicle. There's no risk of cracking the nuts, as
anyone who's tried to open a black walnut knows well.

Inyo wrote:

Cracking open and picking out is easy. You have half of the equation
of
ease as I also use dental tools. But the other half of the equation of
ease
is to use a vise-grip, I use a medium sized Vise-Grip which takes 1
second
to crack a nut, no mess, no splatter when held inside a container.

I am still experimenting as to where to take a hold of the nut and
crack
it so it maximizes the size of the meat to pull out. The ideal crack
is where
it is in two pieces and the four pieces of meat are lifted out.



No, you meat eaters are goning to need more luck than I do.

I am not a complete vegetarian for I occasionally eat meat. But I am
looking into the data and research of nuts replacing all meat.

I see that someone computed that black-walnuts per weight are 1.5
times
more of all the protein found in beef. So let us say that a human
requires
at least 1 roast beef sandwich per day to survive with protein. So the
weight
of that roast beef let us say is the weight equivalent of 10 black
walnuts kernels.
And the cracking open of 10 black walnuts takes 10 seconds and
delivers
to me 1.5 more of all the protein I need per day. Not a bad trade off.

But it gets even better, in that, counting the time it takes for me to
process
black walnuts (1) collect (2) dehusk (3) dry or roast for storage; is
far less
of a time of processing than if I took a cattle, slaughtered it and
dressed out
the meat and then cured and storaged. And not counting the time it
took
me during the seasons to care for the cattle whereas the tree is
sitting there
doing what a tree does-- give off more nuts.

So I think scientists should be doing more of these sort of
calculations of
moving society over to better sustaining food. I am not saying we
eliminate
meat from diet, but saying that the bulk of human protein food should
come
from vegetative protein, since it decomposes in far longer time than
does
the decomposition of animal protein. And animal protein cares uric
acid
and other mild poisons.

Archimedes Plutonium
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whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

Mike Ruskai wrote:

Nay, that is a poor technique, for hand removal is far faster and less
messy. Besides
all the gasoline gone to waste.

If the husks are very green then just keep them in a squirrel free
container for about
2 weeks and when easy to pull off by hand wearing rubber gloves.

If I had hundreds of black walnut trees to harvest every year, I would
invent some
machine that would automatically dehusk.

At the moment I think I may have bypassed one of the time consuming
operations of drying
and roasting. I dehusked a bucket last week and seeing if it will just
naturally dry out in the
back room, and so far good news in that the upper layers are becoming
dry. So maybe I
do not have to put the wet nuts on the wood stove top and dry the
nuts.

Archimedes Plutonium
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whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

[Only registered users see links. ] wrote:
(snipped)

No, I am wrong about that, I remember now in some past years ago, I
had
a bucket of them that were wet without the woodstove treatment, and
getting closer to the bottom of the bucket was massive whitish looking
some kind of fungus or mold or some growth. Whitish looking growth.
Anyone know what that whitish growth is? So I have to give them
the woodstove roasting treatment otherwise the nuts are covered
in some white growth.

Archimedes Plutonium
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whole entire Universe is just one big atom
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In article <[Only registered users see links. ]>,
[Only registered users see links. ]PAM (Mike Ruskai) says...

We have a black walnut nut cracker. It's a pair of angled, serrated
vise jaws mounted on a board, operated by about a one foot handle. A
full stroke of the handle closes the jaws about 1/4", just enough to
crack the shell of the nut.

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