Monday, February 6, 2012

Shelling Black Walnuts

Back on the third of October, 2011 I did a post on harvesting black walnuts. That post still gets at the least 150 views a week. You can see it HERE. It tells how to pick up, remove the shells from and wash these nuts.  
Now that ours are washed and allowed to dry for the last month we have been working on getting them cracked and picked out.  

O Wise One has a special walnut cracker that he has mounted on a board. He takes wood clamps and clamps it to the picnic table outside and sits and cracks the nuts. The good ones go in one bucket and the bad ones and shells in the other. 




Once they are cracked he puts them on an old  cookie sheet and sits at the dining room table at night and watches TV and shells them out. I sit in my rocking chair and crochet. Aren't we boring ? 


Here's a tip..after he's finished he takes the shells and spreads them out for the birds. The cardinals especially and the woodpeckers love them. They sit and find the little pieces still stuck in the shells  and the crumbs and eat them.


 Make sure and pick through the nut meats really good because those small shell pieces can be rough on the teeth if not.


Once picked over really good they go into small jelly jars and go in the freezer. They will be used in various baking projects throughout the year. Remember that black walnuts are stronger tasting that the English walnuts you buy in the store so cut back a bit and just don't use as many.

Blessings from The Holler 

The Canned Quilter



12 comments:

  1. I'm having memory flashbacks to sitting in my Granny's house, watching TV and cracking open the pecans we'd get from her yard. I'm almost certain she had the same tools you picture above!

    We don't have any nut trees in our yard, but we quite often get walnuts from our CSA. There's something extra delicious about freshly-shelled nuts over what you'd buy in the store.

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  2. Great informative post! I love Black Walnuts-and believe they are soooo worth the extra time and effort it takes : )

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  3. Good information. Its hard work shelling them. We have a huge tree and sometimes I think it might be easier to just run them over with the car and hope for the best

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  4. I am moving to MO in the fall and the land we bought is full of black walnuts, I was told they were hard to shell and appreciate this post!

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  5. I love black walnuts! We used to have a neighbor that always cooked with walnuts and the smell bring her memory back to me.

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  6. I'm so impressed! I just thought walnut trees were here to make a mess, now I know what they are really for. They looked delicious.

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  7. We used to take the outside and boil our traps in them before trapping season started!

    http://theredeemedgardener.blogspot.com/

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    1. Around here the hulls are still purchased for making walnut stain for wood. The old timers would use the walnut hulls in a burlap sack to "poach" fish. I guess if you drop the sack of boiled hulls in water it kills the fish. Illegal now but useful to feed your family when the fish weren't biting : )

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  8. My father in law always has a lot of walnuts and he can't pay people to take them. So glad for this post.... now I can take them and put them to good use.

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  9. Hi Guys - you might be interested in the WalnutBroom.com - if you would like to contact me steve@walnutbroom.com I will send you down a free sample for review

    Thanks

    Stephen

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  10. I have never really known what to do with our black walnuts. I call them tennis balls because they are green and so annoying to step on and twist an ankle. Also the squirrels love to sit on any surface and peel and eat the nuts. You can hear them gnawing away. But the worst thing is that the broken shells, that the squirrels drop under the trees they were eating in, stick in rubber shoe soles. You walk on pavement and it sounds like you have tap shoes on. Maybe someday I'll get to harvesting a few nuts, but I have pears to process and wood to split for heat so time is precious in the fall. For now I'll keep kicking them in the woods because I hate the smell the green husks leave on my hands.

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