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Now that we have son Worshrag married off, I can turn my time and energies to more important things, like getting in the black walnut crop.
We have had a very good year for black walnuts. Big nuts and lots of them, thanks to a warm summer and abundant rain.
My hands are stained brown right now from picking up and cleaning them. I picked up 60 gallons of nuts from the lawn underneath our largest black walnut, a big spreading tree next to the tractor shed. I picked up another 40 or 50 gallons from a younger tree near the barn and from 10 tall forest-straight walnut trees in a double row up the hollow near my own house. Those trees, I am told, were planted as nuts by my dad. There is yet another walnut tree near the farmhouse that is only now starting to drop its leaves and nuts, when the other trees are bare or almost. Each tree seems to have its own schedule.
I count the crop by gallons because I pick and clean them in five-gallon drywall-type plastic buckets. I don't think I could function on the farm without five-gallon drywall buckets, which itself is an important topic for another day.
I was picking up walnuts from under the tree by the barn when a young woman visiting our pumpkin patch told me she tried eating black walnuts but wasn't sure she liked them.
"They have a very strong chemical smell and taste, almost like gasoline," she said. "And the nuts are really hard to get out of the shell."
By that I knew she had hulled and cracked new nuts.
"They need to season for a few months," I said kindly. "Hull, clean and dry them, put them where squirrels can't steal them, and crack some about February."
BLACK WALNUTS ARE A SUPERFOOD, with the highest protein content of any tree nut, so the internet says, with such high levels of antioxidents, polyunsaturated fatty acids and other health-promoting compounds that eating them reduces your risk of developing cancer, heart disease and diabetes. They decrease bad LDL cholesterol and reduce the risk of excessive clotting and inflammation. People who regularly eat black walnuts have more probiotics and better overall gut health, and are less inclined to obesity.
The green hull itself has powerful medicinal properties. You can buy ground-up black walnut hull in capsules as an herbal remedy to clear the gut of parasites and cure both constipation and diarrhea. The Native Americans used it for those and other medicinal purposes. Black walnut hull is high in beneficial acids, tannins, iodine, omega-3 fatty acids, phytosterols, polyphenols, carotenoids and melatonin. It has anti-fungal and antibiotic properties. It can be made into an antibiotic tincture and used like iodine.
I've never intentionally ingested the hulls, but I've probably absorbed all that beneficial stuff through my skin while handling them. Just look at me, the picture of health and vigor.
Walnut trees, roots, leaves and hulls have toxic herbicidal and insecticidal properties. You don't want a tree near your vegetable garden.
HULLING BLACK WALNUTS is easy if you have a driveway with ruts in it. Pour the walnuts thick into a rut, run over them a few times and then forget them for a couple of weeks. The cracked hulls will rot. Pick the nuts out of the debris.
To clean them, half-fill a drywall bucket with nuts and water, and use your hands to swirl them roughly against each other in the water. Pour off the water and repeat. The outside of the nut is very hard and abrasive, and this will clean off remaining hull fibers.
Washing the nuts has another purpose. Immature nuts are lighter and will float. Mature ones sink. Discard those that bob to the top of the water.
Three drywall buckets of nuts with hulls will yield about one bucket of cleaned nuts. Spread them out somewhere they can dry thoroughly, store them in woven sacks so air can get to them, and enjoy for years.
Recently my sister Col. Peggy told me that as a young girl she found cracked walnut shells beside an iron vise on the workbench in the barn, evidence that our Miller grandfather, Fred, would crack himself a snack of black walnuts now and then.
"I remembered and liked that because it made me realize he took breaks from work," she said.
For years I've kept a bag of walnuts in my garage for the same purpose, along with a stool, a hammer, and a section of railroad rail as an anvil to crack them on, proof that there's more of my grandfather in me than just his name.
I suppose cracking walnuts is good for lowering stress, too. Me, I just like eating them
(Fred Miller's book of 100 stories, "Falling Under Honey's Spell," is $10, available locally at Connie's Kitchen, Davis Bros. Pharmacies, Frank's Pastry, Giant Eagle Calcutta, Museum of Ceramics, and Pottery City Antique Mall.)