Black Walnuts

 Early interesting Cars:

Pensylvania car filled with over 200 walnuts by squirrels. One nutty car!

 
Yeah, but Mr Peanut has his own car:

First: Thanks from my wife to you all for the Birthday wishes. WE did smile BIG with Susie's statement, "Shoes? Isn't that how it started!"

For today:

I am a nutty guy.  I enjoy peanuts, almonds and cashews. Actually any nut I guess.  We have several walnut trees in Belmont. This year I picked up about 3 gallons of walnuts in the hulls. If you don’t know black walnuts, they are on the tree in a green hull. The hull a little bigger than a fist. The nut falls and over time the green turns to a nasty mushy black under a thin shell. The actual black walnut is a little over an inch in diameter in a HARD shell.

This is what I have left to crack and pick.

You can lay them out and drive over them with a car, you will NEVER crush the walnut, but separate the actual nut from its hull. I tried something I had never tried. I added water to fill a 5 gal bucket and used my drill and a device for stirring paint to stir, beat and jostle the nuts until the hull was separated from the nuts. It took a couple times, it is nasty and you must have gloves or you will learn the color of walnut stain. But when I finished the nuts were cleaned.

I allowed them to dry in the sun here in Florida and then tried different ways to shell the goodies out. The hammer with nut on a solid surface works, but you can hit a finger! OUCH! So far the vise has been the best. Cracking Black walnuts is hard. You feel like you won the lottery if you get a piece the size of your finger tip.

My first step, the vice.

The first squeeze and crack, then I carefully hold it in place  open the vise and ttun it 90 degrees and tighten the vise again. Below is the second crack.

After the second crack you can pick or do some vice cracking on smaller pieces, I usually do about 6 more cracks on small sections. I have gotten several 1/4 sections of goodie, but not many.

                                Our haul so far

Sherry & I remember the old drug store's ‘Chocolate Nut Sundaes.’ Vanilla Ice cream, a big helping of black walnuts in maple syrup with Chocolate syrup drizzled over the mix.  So now we have had two of those, mmmm delicious.  The English walnut just does not substitute for the black walnut.

It appears that when I am thru cracking and picking the nuts we will have a ‘sandwich size’ zip lock back full.  Not much considering it was a little more than 3 gallons of the original nuts.

 

Nite Shipslog

PS: I do hold my hand around the nut as I squeeze. Some of these crack like a rifle. A walnut is hard!!!!