I was just remembering today about a black walnut tree my parents had in the side yard when I was younger. Huge tree, lots of nuts and of course we happened to park the car underneath this said tree. Dont know why the nuts never dented the top of the car. Mom got the great idea to harvest the nuts one year, you know because they were free and walnuts cost so much at the store so harvested they were. Now if you dont know black walnuts are covered by this lovely green to brown thick skin and if you remove the skin there's the nutshell and to get to the nut you have to crack the nutshell. Well she had oh about two bushel fulls of these nuts and had to remove the skin. Now sometimes the skins will crack after they are older but you have to hurry to harvest them because the squirrels love them. So basically I think maybe oh say maybe 10 nuts in the whole batch did not have the skins on and maybe 20 were cracked. It might be an exaggeration but I dont think I am far off. Anyway we went to school and when we came home she had started on the first bushel and was half way through. To get to this point she had worked ALL DAY. Her fingers and hands were sore from getting the skin off using a knife and they were a beautiful dark brown. She ended up giving the other bushel away. Her hands stayed that lovely shade for at least two weeks. It had to wear off - nothing took it off which really looked funny on my mom cause she is so light skinned. She was embarrassed to go to church. Dad thought it was really funny though but didnt say too much just smirked. But she got enough nuts to last for a long time.
The tree is now gone. It eventually rotted through the core of it and came down in a storm. Mom ended up hating that tree. Sap on the cars, big nuts everywhere and she couldnt get anything to grow where it was for years after it was gone.
Since Mother's Day is just around the corner, I think I will be sharing other stories of my mom and other female members of my family just so you can get the full effect of how actually strange my family is....lol. Gotta love them!
Talk to ya later!
Denise
Nice story about your mother. My parents used to take me and my brothers driving around back road looking for black walnut trees close to the road. Then we would all get out and start picking up all the nut we could find. Then we would come home and my mom would make black walnut fudge for my dad. I hate the stuff, but it made my dad happy.
ReplyDeleteKelly
I have a black walnut tree in the backyard too. I thought the same as your Mother and collected all those nuts. There are worms in between the green and black parts. That turned me off right there. And I couldn't get the nut meat out for anything. So now I leave them for the squirrels.
ReplyDeleteYou're from my neck of the woods I see. I'm originally from Brookville/Summerville area between DuBois and Clarion.
ReplyDelete