Every so often, we need a little natural leavening here on GMD. The late Julie Waters used to provide just the right recipe through her wonderful bird studies. We miss Julie’s unique contributions, and with her in mind, I share the following.
Each summer and fall for thirty years, ever since I moved to Vermont from Montreal, I have indulged in the city slicker’s primordial fantasy of collecting “fruits” and nuts from my yard.
The “fruit” portion of my collection program is pretty meager, consisting mostly of seedy blackberries that invade the underbrush behind the yew border, back near the outside water tap; and the occasional morel that springs up unbidden from a fresh batch of bark mulch.
Three years ago, though, I made the startling discovery that those hard green golfballs raining down from the trees with enough force to dent our car roofs are actually very choice! What we’ve got are black walnuts, sometimes known locally as “butternuts;” but I’ve seen pictures of butternuts and these they definitely ain’t!
That it took so long for the lightbulb to go on in my head, is at least partially due to the fact that, shortly after we moved to the house, a visiting friend, with considerably more gardening knowledge than I, pointed to one of the black walnut trees and sniffed authoritatively, “that’s just a weed and it will have to go!”
Fortunately, the offending “weed” lived just over the property line and therefore belonged to our neighbors; so it was a moot point.
The years passed and along with several volunteer saplings, my suspicions grew that there was something very appealing about the strange green fruit. Why else would the squirrels swarm our yard every fall, leaving it a mass of green and black rubble?
Once I learned the true identity of our bounty, I was unstoppable. I discovered not one but two bearing trees right there on our own property.
The first year, I collected about 200 of the leathery nuts in trash bags and, following directions from the internet, happily drove my car back and forth over the bags to mash away the green hulls. After that, came the laborious job of separating the nuts (still in their shells) from the mush and fiber.
This is a messy job because they get their name from the black dye that they carry in their shells. It’s one of the most potent natural dyes. Processing the nuts has to be done wearing rubber gloves and with multiple changes of the wash water. You use a scrub brush or rub the nuts together under water to remove the last bits of clinging hull fiber. Then you spread them on newspapers to absorb any clinging water.
After that, they have to be dried for four to six weeks. I have a wooden shoe rack from an old New England shoe factory on our third floor and I have lined all five shelves with chicken-wire onto which I spread the nuts to dry.
That first year, I hadn’t yet acquired the handy dandy black walnut cracker that is roughly the size and weight of a tire jack, so I spent hours in my husband’s studio cracking them individually in the vise. Even though I wore rubber gloves, by the time I finished, my hands were stained a deep chocolate brown which lasted for days on my skin and weeks under my nails.
Year two saw me fully equipped and wise beyond my years. I ordered my cracker online, directly from the inventor who was simply amazed to learn of black walnut trees growing in Vermont. He sent me a few from his own tree just to make sure I knew what I was talking about.
That year, halfway through the harvest, I abandoned the car business altogether for treading energetically over and over across the bags of nuts in heavy work boots. I collected and processed well over 300 nuts in just under two weeks; and, once I had them snuggly tucked-up on their chicken wire nests, I routinely visited my horde just in order to gloat.
That’s when, purely out of a sense of guilt, I started buying peanuts and feeding the squirrels.
Year three was to be my Waterloo.
As in the past, I collected about 300 nuts and laboriously hulled, washed and dried them. I still had plenty left from the previous harvest even though I’d baked copiously and even given some away at Christmas.
Drawing on all my experience of the previous two years, I finished the job of collecting and processing in a few less days than before. I felt a genuine warmth in my heart as I trundled them up to the third floor racks and then paid a visit to my bin of last year’s bounty, making a mental note to pick-up another bushel basket.
It’s always very satisfying to look at those three-hundred nuts spread out all nice-as-you-please every time I have need to visit the third floor; but things got very busy around here last year, and I failed to go up there until almost Thanksgiving when I decided to collect my nuts into a basket and bring them downstairs.
When I reached the “drying room”, all of the racks were empty and I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I looked everywhere for those nuts, figuring that I had just forgotten that I had already collected them into a single bin and moved them somewhere sensible. It was still a crazy busy fall and I had no time to search for them, so I finally just shrugged my shoulders and forgot about it.
A month or so later, a visiting friend slept on the third floor for a few nights.
She came downstairs each morning complaining that we must have mice up there, and that they had kept her awake making noise overhead and inside the walls. It sounded as if they were rolling something; and it went on and on throughout the night, every night.
It took me a couple of days before it dawned on me what had happened to my nuts.
As it turned out, we didn’t have mice. We had squirrels; and, like something out of a Chip & Dale cartoon, they had managed to invade through a hole under the roof and made a very comfortable home for themselves inside the walls.
They had a fully stocked larder in my carefully stored black walnut collection. They found a way into the third floor through the insulation and lath, came out through a cracked closet door, and then simple moved every last one of those three-hundred nuts inside the walls! It must have looked like the building of the pyramids, with a brigade of squirrel “slaves” steadily moving nuts in a single direction.
Recognizing how emotional the whole thing was for me (remember, I had been feeding the squirrels in the yard all summer before they betrayed me!) my husband kindly allowed me to stay out of the squirrel eviction entirely. I don’t know whether there were ANY nuts left, although I did hear tell that there were great piles of nut shells in the closets under the eaves!
This year, as I see the nuts ripening on the trees, I dread collecting them. All I keep thinking is:
“What if there’s still one VERY hungry squirrel trapped somewhere in the house, just waiting for me to load up the rack again?”
I am told that the hole has been repaired and sealed and that I have nothing to fear; but once bitten, twice shy!
I am no longer feeding squirrels in the yard, but see them lurking, all beady eyed, around the bird-feeder, clearly planning a new assault come winter. Will the ramparts hold this time? We can only hope so.
Year 4, here I come.
About black walnuts: I learned a while back from a very interesting program on NPR, that black walnuts have powerful medicinal value and that the trees are so valuable that they are actually protected by law.
A naturopath suggests that young girls handle the green pods with their hands in order to ensure breast health, and older women should rub them under their arms as a powerful protection against breast cancer. Pretty wild, huh?
Wonderfully pagan, I thought! I’m just repeating what I heard on NPR, so I have no independent verification; but, wow!
