• drhugsymcfur@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    3 days ago

    Have you ever harvested walnuts? It sucks to get any sort of quantity put together.

    First you have to hull them, this will leave your fingers stained black for weeks even with gloves.

    Then you have to dry them for a season, which involves either keeping the squirrels away constantly or a bucket taking up space in your house for an entire season.

    And finally you have to shell them, which is not an easy or repeatable process. Doing it at home by hand will lead to a nice powder of shell and nut that you have to separate before you can eat a single walnut.

    Forget all that. If someone wants to do that as a job so that I can buy them for 10 dollars/lb bagged in the store then be my guest.

    • pseudo@jlai.luEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I do it every year. Maybe, we don’t have the same kind of walnuts but in my area walnut trees are common enough to go to the woods, find a place with a few trees and fill a 50L bag of nuts in an hour. Do it with two or three people, twice or thrice during the season and the whole extended family have enough walnut for regular consomption until the next automn. When dried properly the walnuts last up to 3 years in their shell. A bit less than 2 years shelled in an airtight box. You do a bunch of in fall and you break the rest progressively during the year, while watching TV.

        • pseudo@jlai.luEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          Yes. Or some other species close to it. I usually forage tree types of walnuts but I don’t know their names.
          I once found a ornamental Juglans Nigra tree that my city have marked as “American walnut tree” and picked 10 or 15 nuts. It took me days just to open 3. It was tasty though.

          Are these types of nuts sold in shops? In never saw anything but European walnuts and the taste and texture are very different.