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would you gather, dry, and eventually eat the walnuts? I need several walnut shells for a craft project, and we have a couple black walnut trees. I'm thinking that if I have to take the trouble to gather them and crack the hulls open, I might as well harvest the actual nut meat as well. Have any of you ever done this before?
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If I had a walnut tree, I would certainly at least try to eat the walnuts, just 'cause it would be fun. Even if I didn't need the shells for anything. Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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I agree with ElJay--much more fun to harvest and eat my own walnuts than to buy a bag of them from Walmart.
That said, there's a decent chance that your walnuts will be buggy, especially if they've been on the ground for very long. My brother harvested a bunch of pecans a few years ago, and probably a third of the ones he gave me were inedible.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Darn it! I made a long post here. This keeps happening.
Anyway, what i would make if I had a walnut tree would the chiles with walnut sauce recipe from "Like Water for Chocolate."
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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Absolutely. When I was a child, my grandma had about three or four acres of walnut trees, and it was a family project every year to harvest the nuts. Great fun. I still miss doing walnut harvest every fall.
Then, when we moved into a tract home when I was six, we had three walnut trees in the back yard. Again, every year we picked up the nuts (I got 5 cents a bucket) and dried them, hulled them, cracked and bagged the meats and sold what we didn't use. My dad had the garage all fixed up with a wood stove (to keep warm and to burn the shells, which we had no other use for) and a TV, and we would sit out there in the evenings and work through the harvest. Every once in a while, my cat would get hold of one of the walnuts and bat it around the garage floor for an hour or so. It was fun.
One warning, though. Unless you want stained hands, wear gloves when you hull the walnuts.
Posts: 2454 | Registered: Jan 2003
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We have one at my parents' house. I remember one time that my dad went out and collected walnuts, and then never did again.
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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the walnuts you buy at the store still in shells are english walnuts and are smoother. Black walnuts have very ridgy shells under the green hull, so it depends on the look you want. We've used our black walnuts before, but I forget what all we did, I remember putting them in a trash bag and driving over them, though that could have been for dye instead of eating purposes, who knows it might have been for both, I was like 7.
Posts: 5362 | Registered: Apr 2004
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Here's a picture of a black walnut shell, just to give a visual reference for what breyerchic is saying.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I don't think there's much difference between black and english walnuts in taste, but I remember thinking they weren't really worth the effort of cracking (again I was young and fairly lazy).
Posts: 5362 | Registered: Apr 2004
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The black walnut is tastier than the English walnut, but people prefer the English walnut because the black walnut is just too hard to crack.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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We used to make mice in beds with walnut shells. I think. We'd make a mouse head (out of felt) and blanket and put it in a half shell. Then glue some string to both sides of it and you have an ornament.
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
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The maize thing was a joke. The fact that in at least one Native American language the word for corn was "maize" is one of those bits of padding that makes it into virtually every grade schooler presentations on Native Americans and/or Thanksgiving, and it's almost always delivered as though the fact that there was another word for corn is significant. "The Native Americans taught the pilgrims how to grow corn. Or as they called it, maize", with the word "maize" stretched out almost reverently. I find this pretty funny, and among my friends it isn't uncommon, when someone makes reference to some historical element of Native American culture to say "or as the Indians called it, maize", regardless of whether that elemement has anything to do with corn or not. I've seen this done in a few TV shows, including The Simpsons (I think--I could be wrong), so I thought that it was a joke that would be broadly understood. It would seem that I was wrong.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Damn - who would have thought you people were so interested in walnuts?
I'm ashamed to say that the walnut shells are to make teeny tiny cradles out of for felted gnome and fairy babies to sleep in. My crafting is reaching illness levels, me thinks. I also have poor Mr. Opera searching out acorn tops for hats. I want to make some for Operaetta for Christmas.
I might try whacking one of the walnuts tomorrow with a hammer just to see how difficult it would be. littlemissattitude's description sounded fun.
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I sort of thought that might be where where you were coming from.
But just to take i along its course anyway, "maize" is not really a Native American term anyway.
"Now, to make matters more confusing, I have to admit that the term Maize is not a Native American term, but rather Tahino. When Columbus' expedition made landfall in 1492 they reached some island in the northern Antilles, near today's San Salvador. The island was populated by Tahino people, in whose language the name for their staple crop of this yellow grain was caled "mahis." The Spanish spread the Taino name for the plant wherever they distributed the crop throughout the world. That word has been transmutated phonetically into today's "maize" in English, "maïs" in French, and "maÃz" in Spanish.
Then, to top it all off, When Linnaeus (the Swedish botanist who developed today's binomial plant classification system) devised a name for maize, he used a combination of the Taino name, and its translation into Greek in order to come up with the genus and species of the plant: Zea mays."
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Space Opera, The half shells alos make for a killer ladybug ornament, with the addition of paint, googly eyes, and pipe cleaner legs.
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Space Opera: I'm ashamed to say that the walnut shells are to make teeny tiny cradles out of for felted gnome and fairy babies to sleep in. My crafting is reaching illness levels, me thinks. I also have poor Mr. Opera searching out acorn tops for hats. I want to make some for Operaetta for Christmas.
That sounds so cute! I wish I had time for crafty things.
The maize thing reminded me of a history class I took in London. Everyone in the class was American, so when we were discussing the Corn Riots, there was great confusion when the professor explained that in England, "corn" means "wheat", and what Americans call corn is called "maize". Then he threw in flaxseed and oats and other grains that non-farm-raised kids had only a hazy concept of. For some reason, the class had difficulty with this...maybe because it was 9am, and we were all half asleep. Posts: 952 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Noemon, that was hilarious. I pictured you with the most deadpan expression as I read that post.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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Space Opera, I am very angry with you at this time. Why?
Because I am now OBSESSED with the chiles in walnut sauce recipe, which is one of those recipes that will take forever to make, and probably turn out like poo.
However, it being fresh walnut season, fresh chile season, and with Whole Foods Market down the road for buying pomegranates, how can I resist?
Posts: 10890 | Registered: May 2003
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As a kid, my family used to gather and eat the walnuts from our trees. It was always one of my favorite things to do and walnuts are probably still my favorite nut (cracking them was half the fun!). I don't remember a lot about the process, but I do remember it would take a long time for them to dry.
We also always had tons of walnut ornaments on our Christmas tree. If you use whole ones, you can create a cute little snowman (I know that one's still sitting around my mom's house).
I'm not sure hairy is the precise terminology to use for those things, particularly since the picture brought back a rather vivid memory of me falling out of a chestnut tree and landing on a bunch of fallen chestnuts.
My mom was picking those spines out of my hands for days :shudder:
Sadly though, I now have a craving for chestnuts and I haven't had those in years.
Posts: 959 | Registered: Jan 2002
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Hickory nuts were what my family harvested when I was little, and I have fond, if dim, memories of doing so. I have slightly clearer memories of eating hickory nuts, when I remember as being utterly delicious. I probably haven't had any since I was three or so, unfortunately.
By the way, Elizableth, thanks for the information on the history of the word "maize". I had no idea it was a Tahino word. As I was typing up my explanation for my maize comment I thought about googling it to see what language it was from, but didn't have time.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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Yeah -- looks like everyone has already covered everything I was going to say, SO -- but mainly they are all right about the differences between Black Walnuts and English walnuts -- the Black being MUCH harder to crack and pick.
That being said, I love black walnuts, and take the time every year to harvest them on our place.
Here's what I do -- Pick up all the walnuts as they fall, and put them in the barn (or someplace dry) and let them set several weeks until the husks are totally black and thoroughly dried out.
Then, because (as it was stated) the hulls get your hands exceedingly black when de-hulling -- I use an antique corn sheller to help me get the hulls off.
Allow them to dry some more.
I crack them with a bench vise that I have mounted.
Then the rest is real tedious -- picking and picking little pieces of meat out of them.
I don't know if they would make good "cradles" for your project because they don't crack "clean" like English walnuts -- they usually disentigrate into many many pieces, and the middles are not hollow.
But they are yummy! My favorite nut. (besides Noemon, of course)
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Long ago, there used to be a commercial for Mazola Margarine. Some Native American looking lady, in a kind of deerskin outfit is walking through a corn field, holding an ear of corn.
She stops and looks into the camera:
"You call it corn. We call it maize. My people know all about the goodness of corn, maize, before America was America.
"You call it Mazola. Made from the goodness of Maize."
Those Native Americans practically invented margarine before the White Man ever came to these shores.
Posts: 10397 | Registered: Jun 2005
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I understand that the maize/corn joke is very big in Russia. If the Soviet Union is ever reborn, I'll bet that TASS'll have an article that discusses its surprising popularity over there.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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