This year Eric and I decided to try out a new project for our food storage. My sister has a black walnut tree in her back yard that produces quite a few nuts. Since they are dropping at this time of the year we though we would try to harvest some.
She brought down just a few that she collected..3 paper bags full and 2 boxes. After some research on what we needed to do we got to work. If you have seen black walnuts they have a green husk that turns black after it falls. This husk is what is probably the most work and definitely the messiest. Even though we wore gloves our hands still got stained. It took us a few days to get all the nuts de-husked.
After we got a batch with the husks off we put them in water and the ones that float to the top are the bad nuts so they got tossed. The boys had fun with this part, rising the nuts and making sure we got all the bad ones. We then dumped the water and put the nuts on the lids to dry out a bit. We still had to come up with a better way to dry them out so this was a short term solution.
We had beautiful weather so we had them sitting out in the sun to help dry them out. We didn't have to worry about the squirrels too much, but Sup on the other hand we had to watch a little closer.
We seen that a onion bag or potato bag works well for drying them out. We didn't have any and didn't really know where I could get an empty ones. So Sara actually came up with a really good solution that was probably cheap as well. At Joann's they have this material that we used and made small little bags and hung them up to dry. I can't remember the exact count but it was 700 and something nuts that we have. Now we just have to wait a few weeks before we can crack them. We now know why these black walnuts are so pricey ;)
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