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market-farming - Re: black walnuts

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  • From: Nicole <nbrown AT bbtel.com>
  • To: Market Farming <market-farming AT franklin.metalab.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: black walnuts
  • Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2002 10:36:22 -0500


I've found that the nuts come cleaner if you hull (husk) them by foot. I have a pair of rubber-soled "muck boots" I use for this purpose, and I do it on a piece of carpet in the barn. It's a nice thing to do when I want to be outside, but not in the rain, wind, etc. You just roll your foot over the nut, and the nut comes right out of the hull. I pour out about half a 5-gallon bucket on the carpet at a time, this way it's easy to deal with the mess a little at a time. I can do a whole bucket in about half an hour, I think, then I'm ready for a break :) I'm thinking I'll get the golf clubs out and practice a little bit - separate the nuts from the pile of hulls by "putting" them into a separate pile instead of bending over to pick them up like I had been (I put my back out last week, ouch!). Then I can squat to pick them up, which I should have been doing all along, but squatting to pick up 3 nuts at a time just wasn't worth it (not that I couldn't use the workout).

I borrowed a neighbor's corn sheller, thinking I'd sit on the porch and hull nuts, but that thing is *slow* and so much more effort. I could hull them by hand but it makes my hands sore.

I have a pair of black rubberized work gloves I use for walnut purposes. I think they were $2 or $3. Anything permeable (leather, cotton) will leave you with stained hands.

Which makes me wonder if black walnut dye/stain could be used in place of henna for semi-permanent body art ("tattoos"). I think that'd be pretty cool. :)

As for washing the nuts - I put mine in milk crates and set them under the eave of the barn. In past years I used a plastic flowerpot, and shook and rinsed until the water ran clear, but I don't think all that is necessary. You mainly just want to knock off the residual hull so it doesn't get in with the nutmeats when you pick them out. You can also pour them between a bucket and milk crate several times, so you get the agitation. I'm betting a washing machine would work great! But you'd want to get a "junk" one just for walnuts.

As for breaking the shells, I've been using a pair of pliers (to hold) and a hammer (to smash) on a flat concrete block (I think it's 4X8X16, solid), but this year we're designing our own nutcracker on a hinge principle. When you smash the nuts, shells go flying, and you end up with lots of walnut "dust" and very few big pieces. With practice, though, you can smack the nut just in the right place with just the right force, and it simply cracks the shell into 4 pieces without breaking apart. Our prototype nut cracker, made with a big $4 door hinge, worked very well but didn't last long. We're thinking of 2 pieces of channel iron, one fitted inside the other, hinged on a big bolt.

There are several different black walnut crackers on the market, priced in the neighborhood of $70, one on the hinge principle and a couple on a screw-vise principle, but they only crack one at a time, and the vise ones seem very slow. If we get a good design going, we might market ours. But, for the money, the pliers and hammer works just fine, once you get some experience with it.

When you pick the nutmeats out, be very careful about getting pieces of shell in there. If you put your nutmeats in a glass bowl, you can shine a strong light through it to make it easier to see stray pieces of shell. You do NOT want to bite into a piece of shell! Or worse yet, have a customer bite into a shell. Black walnut shell is one of the hardest natural substances on Earth, they use it for industrial abrasives.

Nicole in KY





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