Black Harvest

 

Pictured: about 60lbs of
black walnut fruit.

Yes, it's that dread time of year...the wind blows...the branches shake...suddenly there's a bump...bump bump...BANG! on the tender roof of your car! What are these divots? What are these round, green things lying everywhere? What are these...these dark stains on the concrete...?

You look up. Towering above you is a gigantic, multi-armed, inhuman being, breathing through strange fronds, and in its tentacles you see its eggs, hundreds of them! Thousands of them! Raining down upon your property! You rush to get a rake, a shovel, an axe for God's sake...but it's too late! The lurid green orbs are piling up on the porch! Slamming against the screen door! They break through the glass, bounding like murderous tennis balls, and all you can do is let out one final, despairing SHRIEK...!

Yeah they're black walnuts.

Everyone I know who owns or rents hates black walnut trees, at least with the kind of bemusement that comes with the comment, "I'd cut the fucking thing down, but it's so tall..." Their fruit can reach the size of a softball and weigh half a pound, leaving dents in vehicles and piling up on roofs as they plummet 60 feet to the ground. And it doesn't stop there! Your yard and sidewalk will be untraversable, as the roly-poly fruit decays into slippery masses that stain concrete, tennis shoes, and everything and everyone you love. And then the squirrels get to them, burying the nuts and causing new walnut trees to sprout everywhere. The leftover, broken walnut hulls remain like caltrops hidden in the grass, waiting for you to blissfully walk out barefoot one warm Spring day.

But as much as you may want to rip up every black walnut tree in the state, these masses of dropped fruit are essential to the ecosystem, feeding squirrels and insects and providing valuable nutrients to the soil. A big grandfather Black Walnut may have dropped 16 tons of walnuts in its lifetime, and have been responsible for 37,000 seedlings!** Just as in Europe, humans have made use of walnuts in the Americas for thousands of years, making use of the tremendous harvest of oily, tasty nuts, and extracting dye and antiparasitic chemicals from the hulls. Even today, black walnuts are commercially harvested and sold. Instead of going to the store and buying nuts - which are expensive - I want to make use of a free and plentiful resource growing right here in my backyard.

So a little nomenclature first: the big green balls that grow on the walnut tree are called the fruit. Most of the volume is taken up by the juicy, fibrous, fragrant yellow husk, which quickly oxidizes to black and starts rotting off. Deep inside the husk is the nut, which is composed of a rock hard hull and the edible meat (yep, it's called nut meat). This "meat" is actually the embryo, from which a seedling will sprout if you let it.

Harvesting is easy - just pick them up off the ground. It's best to grab the intact green ones first. As you can see in the photo above, I filled three 5-gallon buckets' worth in about 30 minutes; I had a real bumper crop (nut trees will have high-producing "mast years" every 2-3 years or so). Since the husks get mashed off anyway, there's no reason to protect them from the elements; any insects will have already attacked them anyway.

Pictured: Carnage!

Next is the de-husking. You'll need a hard-ish surface and footwear you don't mind staining. I recommend a waterproof pair of boots with a heavy sole. I did mine in the driveway; if you're one of those people who paints your driveway, you may want to find another spot! This part's a lot of fun: just crush a fruit with your foot, then do a rolling-sliding motion in several directions until you feel the hard nut pop out. Then on to the next one and the next one. It's a great project for kids to help with (just make sure they don't run back into the house!); it's more effective to do them one at a time, though, so it is time-consuming.

I noticed that most of the fruit was full of maggots. And I'm not talking one or two, I'm talking hundreds. And not like those little bitty ones you find on spoiled mangoes, I'm talking fat ones like you'd find in a hot garbage can. These are apparently the spawn of the appropriately-named Walnut Husk Fly (Rhagoletis completa), a rather handsome-looking housefly-sized unit in the Tephritidae family. Knowing how poisionous the husks are, I was actually quite surprised to find such a brood; then again I can't be surprised by the eating habits of insects, some of which eat styrofoam. That's the beauty of finding your niche: if you can literally eat poison, you won't have any competition!

Pictured: somebody's babies.

So once you're done de-husking the fruit, you'll have to clean the nuts. I started this process by laying them out in the sun. They still look pretty gross, like road-apples, but I assure you that hiding under that disgusting slippery surface is a morsel of delicious nut meat. Which is a sentence I just subjected you to, and which will now remain in your mind forever. You're welcome.

At any rate, once the remnant icky bits have dried, I plan to scrub the nuts in a bucket of water. Good nuts will sink, while bad nuts will float and can be discarded. Then I'll put them on an old screen to dry. The idea is to dry them thoroughly inside and out before cracking them. This process will probably take about 3 weeks. I'll keep you updated!

About a bucket's worth of fruit, yielding
half a bucket of nuts. How many will be good?

*Based on a maturity of 150 years, and a biannual production range of 66-350lbs of nuts.

**Based on a 60-70% germination rate. About 80% of these won't survive, but that's still prolific, if my yard is any indicator.