Walnuts: Hard Nuts to Crack, but Not to Collect

Ripe black walnut and smashed husk.

All those walnuts that have been hanging teasingly from branches have finally dropped. Well, not all of them -- some trees still have clusters of green nuts waiting to fall. But there are areas littered with brown-spotted nuts, a few inky husks already dissolving into the soil in a rotten black mess.

Walnuts cover the ground under one of the trees
at a local playground. There are several more trees nearby.

This might sound unappealing, but the brown spots and inky goo actually mean the nuts are ripe. Hard, totally green husks are the ones you don't want. I wasn't so sure about that on my first nut-collecting trip. It started out as a nut-checking trip, but when I found nuts all over the ground beneath several trees (this was at a nearby playground), I emptied some plastic grocery bags from my car (the boys and I had just been to the grocery store) and filled them with nuts. I avoided the overly brown ones and even shook a few tree branches to get some green nuts to fall. When I read up on walnut collecting at home and learned that finding a nut already exposed amid an oozing mass of black inky husk counted as good luck, I headed back to the playground to collect all those nuts I'd suspiciously avoided.

My youngest son smashes
a walnut with his foot.

My technique, undertaken at the advice of Nature's Garden by Samuel Thayer, was to smash the husks with my heel, rub my shoe back and forth briefly to loosen the nut, and then pick the nut up with a gloved hand and plunk it in my bucket. In order to be more efficient, I smashed several nuts at once, but not too many because it was difficult to tell which smashed husks still contained nuts. The appeal of smashing nuts on the spot was that I didn't have to do it later and that I could fit many more nuts in my bucket. Of course, it also took more time to collect the husked nuts than it would have taken to just pick up the husks (which in most cases would not have required gloves).

The stain left by the walnuts
is even blacker now. This was
what my hand looked like
immediately after collection.

Why gloves, you ask? Let me put it this way. Even though I was wearing gloves, my thumb, index, and middle fingers -- the digits with which I picked up the nuts -- are still stained with ink a week later. It looks like I've been digging in black soil. The ink is under my fingernails and has penetrated my skin. And yes, yes. Of course I've washed my hands -- many, many times. (Note to self: get better gloves.)

My boys with our bucket of hazelnuts.

Once I got the nuts home, I submitted them to the same float test I used on the hazelnuts the kids and I collected in August. I was going to refer you to the post about that for details, but it looks like I've kept the hazelnut pictures a secret thus far! You might recall that I checked on the hazelnuts at the beginning of August, though. When the nuts were beginning to get brown and dry, and thus ripe, the boys and I brought a five-gallon bucket to the powerline corridor that hosts the bushes and filled it up with minimal effort. It looked like we had collected a lot of nuts.

To husk the nuts, I placed them in a pillowcase and rubbed them against each other vigorously. This broke a lot of nuts loose from the husks, and I could just pick the husked nuts out of the bag. Others I still had to husk by hand. When all was said and done, I still had a sizable collection of nuts.

My first sample of the hazelnut float test.
I just wanted to see whether it worked
(I cracked the floaters, and sure enough,
they were wormy. I cracked the sinkers,
and they were good. Bingo!).
Once I had all the nuts husked, I used
a larger container of water.

Next was the float test. I dumped the husked nuts in a bucket of water. Any nuts substantially eaten by worms would float to the top, whereas any good nuts would sink (this trick won't work if the nuts have dried for too long -- then even good nuts will float). I just about cried when I saw how many nuts were floaters. I didn't count, but I would say 30% to 40% were bad nuts. My much less sizable quantity of hazelnuts is now in a ZipLock bag in my pantry.

But back to the walnuts. I filled the walnut bucket with water and swirled the nuts around. I picked a couple of floaters off the top. I swirled the nuts again and got another floater, then a couple more. Swirl, swirl. Nothing more. Swirl, swirl. Still nothing.

My two older sons and their trucks happily took
on the job of husking my first collection of
walnuts. This was before I learned that it's easier
to husk while collecting.

Surely I had too many nuts in the bucket, I thought. I emptied some of the nuts into a separate container and filled that with water. Still no floaters. I repeated the procedure with all the nuts, but I didn't get any more floaters.

The moral of the story? Hazelnuts have a lot more worms than walnuts (Walnut shells are a lot thicker, so this makes sense to me).

My walnuts are now drying in a cardboard box, which is absorbing the remaining black inky goo. They'll need to dry for a few weeks, during which time the nuts will shrink a little and become easier to crack. For that job, I'll need my special hard-nut cracker, which I purchased last year when I first discovered my local walnut trees and hoped to find butternuts as well. A traditional, hand-held nutcracker just won't crack black walnuts (I tried), and using a hammer might work for some people, but I'm not willing to put in the practice and smash the fingers that would be required for me to perfect that technique (I tried that, too). My hard-nut cracker is basically a vice that holds the nut while I crank a handle, and the pressure is applied in such a way that the shell explodes from the inside out, leaving the nut intact (I tried this last year on a couple of unripe walnuts, and it worked great).

My elder son fingers some ground cherries.

Although we've been busy with walnuts, we've made a few other discoveries recently. On a trip to Old Sturbridge Village (where "interpreters" depict how New Englanders lived from 1790-1840), we came across a large patch of (unfortunately unripe) ground cherries. Since discovering these welcome invaders in my garden, I've spotted them at the edge of overgrowth in my back yard and nestled in among tall grasses at the edge of a parking lot. Unfortunately, the fruits growing among crowded collections of other plants seem to get bug eaten before the fruits can ripen and drop from the plants. But I'm amazed that these tasty berries with their striking lantern-like husks have apparently been growing, unnoticed, all around me my whole life.

My youngest sons show off
an evening-primrose root.

I also decided to give evening primrose another try, now that it's the root season. My family tried evening primrose roots, roasted, back in the spring and didn't care for them. They were spicy raw and still made the back of our throats itch when they were cooked. I subsequently read of someone whose favorite way to eat them is as primrose pancakes (similar to potato pancakes). I thus collected approximately a pound and a half of primrose roots on a walk to the post office the other day. I diced them up finely, along with a couple of wild carrots, a small yellow onion, a Russet potato, and some parsley and chives from my garden, mixed them up with a beaten egg, some cornmeal, and some potato starch, sprinkled in some salt and pepper, and fried them in vegetable oil to make veggie fritters. I'm not really sure whether that's what the other person does -- no recipe was provided. The result was certainly much more palatable than my previous attempts at eating evening primrose, though. I still thought the back of my throat itched a little, but dipping the fritters in ketchup seemed to solve the problem. All three of my boys cleaned their dinner plates, and my eldest son asked for seconds. I guess I can't ask for much more than that! And the whole meal probably cost me under $2.

Either peppermint or spearmint. I can't tell them apart (yet).

While collecting the primrose roots, I also found some peppermint (or maybe it was spearmint; I'm not well versed in the differences), which I collected and turned into tea at home. I also found garlic mustard sprouting out of season (this is usually a springtime plant -- a pesky and invasive one), so my middle son and I collected a few cups of that, too. I never did get a chance to try any of the garlic-mustard recipes in my cookbook From Pest to Pesto, which I ordered at the end of the spring. I was hoping to try the basic pesto recipe, but when I got the book out at home, I discovered that I needed not just garlic-mustard greens but a bit of root as well. I've stashed the greens in my refrigerator until I can get a bit of root.

Quickweed.

My youngest sons and I also took a tour around a nearby community garden at the suggestion of a friend. We found numerous edible plants there (and I don't mean the ones growing in people's gardens), but a couple of new ones that I'll mention in particular. There was a whole field full of quickweed, which I had only seen in pictures until then. My book says quickweed is bland and best mixed with stronger-tasting greens, so it might not be something to get too excited about, but it certainly could be collected in quantity from this location! Apparently one should collect young plants in the summer. I don't think I could recognize the plant without its flowers at this point, though, and right now all the plants have flowers, anyway (and young plants don't have flowers).

Purslane laid on our picnic blanket.

We also found plentiful supplies of purslane, which I did find at our train station last year but have not come across since. Apparently, purslane is the bane of gardens everywhere except the one at my house. Supposedly, if you chop off a bit of root and leave it lying on the ground, it will re-root itself. It is thus frustratingly difficult to get rid of. It retains large amounts of water, so it is also highly drought resistant. Nonetheless, when I tried to encourage some in my own garden by planting a bit from the train station last year, it never took off. It's too bad because purslane is extremely rich in nutrients and also quite tasty (it has a lemony zing to it and is pleasantly juicy).

Photo Gallery

When hazelnuts are ripe, the husks usually turn brown.

These hazelnut husks are still partially green, but the nuts are ripe. If a bush has any ripe nuts, all the nuts should be ripe.

Unfortunately, although I was checking on them frequently, I missed the elderberries this year. This picture shows the bare stems where the berries used to be. I posted pictures of nearly ripe berries previously. The elderberries grow in the same place as the hazelnuts. I still haven't tasted them -- maybe next year.

My oldest and youngest sons picking hazelnuts.

Unlike hazelnuts, black walnuts should be picked from the ground.

Our bucket of black walnuts.

Sheep eat wild plants all the time! Here my boys are feeding a hungry lamb some unidentified weeds at Old Sturbridge Village. The lamb appeared to be ravenous, if the way he gobbled up their offerings was any indication.

Another shot of the boys feeding the sheep.

My oldest son and the sheep.

My two oldest boys admire the numerous ground-cherry plants at Old Sturbridge Village.

Close-up of the ground cherries. The fruits are enclosed in the little green lanterns (which turn straw-colored when the berries are ripe; see my previous post).

My two oldest boys (middle on the left, oldest on the right) pose as 1800s New Englanders. This picture absolutely cracks me up.

An evening primrose rosette. This is the stage (i.e., without a flower stalk) at which the plant should be when you collect the root. Plants with flower stalks have used up most of the energy in the root, and it will be fibrous and difficult to chew. Evening primrose starts as a basal rosette (like the one here) the first year. Its second year, it sends up a flower stalk.

My collection of evening-primrose roots, with greens still attached, and my digging tool (an "asparagus knife") beside them.

My middle son with an evening-primrose root.

This whole field is filled with quickweed.

Purslane, the bane of every garden but mine. Gardeners should get smart and eat it!. Or they can give it to me!

Far Away and Close to Home

My three boys on a recent trip to Missouri. Here they are at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. We found lots of edible plants there, but they were cultivated and labeled, so they don't really count. We did, however, find lots of edible wild plants elsewhere on our trip.

Autumn berry bushes line the driveway to our local high school.
I took this picture this past weekend; the leaves are just
coming out. The berries will be ripe in the fall.

It's amazing to me how often I have to travel far from home to identify something that is growing in abundance where I live. For example, last summer on a family hike in NH I spotted a large bush with interesting reddish-orange berries, which were about the size of a pea but more oblong. The berries were speckled with silver, as though an artist had splatter painted them. The artist must then have painted a sparkly glaze on the undersides of the leaves; they were silver, too. Fortunately, I had my favorite foraging books with me, and I spent probably 15 minutes first leafing through the books in search of a similar picture and then comparing the description of the possible match to the specimen at hand. Finally confident in my identification, I plucked a fruit and got my first taste of the pleasingly tart autumn berry.

Silvery underside of the leaves of an autumn berry bush.

Only after that first laborious identification did I realize that autumn berries are growing everywhere – at my local playground, at the high school behind my house, at a nearby Audubon sanctuary, and just about everywhere else. Apparently the federal government planted these attractive bushes alongside highways at some point, and the plants have effectively spread far and wide. The boys and I spent a pleasant afternoon picking berries at the high school last fall, and I made my first ever jelly from the juice (which I collected via my then new steam juicer, a truly marvelous invention). My two younger sons and I enjoyed the berries straight from the bush (although I'm pretty sure the youngest was enjoying the sizable seeds, too), but the flavor was too tart for my eldest son and my husband. Cooked with sugar into a jelly, though, autumn berries were an uncontested delight.

On another adventure away from home, I found my first black cherries alongside a road in the White Mountains region of NH, yet they grow at my local lake and elsewhere near my home. I first identified sumac in a front yard in Rye, NH (near the coast), but how I could have failed to notice its incredible abundance before that is beyond me (for a while after that first identification, I would scan the roadsides for sumac as we whizzed past at up to 60 miles per hour. Although my own excitement has waned, my kids still shout "Sumac!" every time they spot any from a car window – they have been a little slower to figure out that finding sumac isn't actually that difficult).

Common blue violet. The leaves are heart shaped. The flowers are
entirely purple; some just look white because I took this picture in the rain,
and the light is reflecting off the leaves.

Today I was hiking (in the rain, without kids -- two conditions I rarely encounter on a hike) and thought I saw some wood violets. When I bent down for a closer look at the leaves, I saw that they were in fact the same obnoxious "weed" I've been pulling up from my lawn and garden for years. When I got home, I checked the description of wood violet so I'll be better prepared to recognize it if I actually do see it sometime, and in the process I discovered that this plant I'd thought was a downright nuisance actually makes these pretty purple flowers (or it would, if I would just stop pulling it up) and that, furthermore, the flowers and young leaves are edible! It took a walk in the woods for me to get to know the common blue violet that grows all over my yard. The flowers and leaves are packed with vitamins A and C. One of my books mentions the intriguing possibility of making jelly from the flowers. (I haven't tasted the flowers because I didn't know what they were when I found them in the woods, and I don't think I've allowed any to bloom at my house; in any event, it's still pouring here, so I haven't had an opportunity to check.)

Honeysuckle blossoms.

The farthest I've ever traveled to identify a plant that grows near my house is Missouri. My family and I just got back from a trip to visit some friends there, and in the backyard of one set of friends a familiar scent brought back faint childhood memories of sucking out the sweet nectar of honeysuckle blossoms. I was probably about 8 the last time I did this, and I couldn't exactly remember what a honeysuckle blossom looked like. The smell, however, was unforgettable. I quickly located the flowers producing that delicious aroma and asked my friend whether the bushes were honeysuckle. She thought so, as did my husband, and so I plucked a blossom and sucked out the nectar by running my teeth along the thin tube at the base of the flower. Oh, to be the size of a bee and drink this sweet nectar in mouthfuls rather than drops!

My middle son and my friend's
four-year-old playing in the
honeysuckle bushes. They are
pretending to be bears. There is
also a grape vine growing on the left.

Back at home, the boys and I thought we discovered a honeysuckle bush growing right next to our favorite picnic rock. We've been there so many times before and yet never noticed the bush. Because spring is less advanced here in Massachusetts than in Missouri, the bush is just putting out its buds. It might not be long before we can have a second taste of that sweet honeysuckle nectar. And, if we turn out to be wrong, then I'm sure we'll spot honeysuckle somewhere close by soon -- now that we've traveled all the way to Missouri to learn what it looks like.

My friend's backyard had a number of other edible plants. There were grape vines, a peach tree (not originally wild, but I think it's fair to say it's wild now), chickweed (the common type, not the hairy mouse-ear variety that grows in our backyard), and wood sorrel. There might have even been an avocado tree: my friend reports that her four-year-old likes to throw his avocado pits into the ditch at the back of their property, and one of the plants growing there did look an awful lot like the two avocado trees I once grew from my own avocado pits (unfortunately, my poor gardening skills combined with insufficient light in our house killed the trees).

Garlic mustard in flower at my friend's house.

And, also growing in the ditch at the edge of my friend's property were some flowering plants that I thought looked familiar. I apparently took pictures of them but then completely forgot to investigate further. I came across the pictures just now as I was reviewing those I took on our trip, and I was surprised to see the same kind of plant I recently identified in the parking lot at our bank, then on our way to the picnic rock (where we found the honeysuckle), and subsequently on every roadside. It's a plant high up on the Most Wanted List: garlic mustard. Garlic mustard is

Garlic-mustard flowers in MA.

an invasive weed that, according to my sources, will out-compete just about every other plant if given the chance. One must take extreme care not to transport roots or seeds to places where it hasn't yet found a home. If you happen to like the taste of garlic mustard, then you can combine culinary pursuits with weed removal. One of my sources classified garlic mustard as a pungent green and described the taste as powerful and bitter, not for the faint of heart. I don't tend to like mustard or bitterness, so I was surprised to find that I liked the taste of the leaves (but small quantities are still recommended). Incidentally, my middle son claimed to like it as well, although I'm quite certain that this is further evidence that kids always enjoy food they've picked or prepared themselves more than food served at the table. I'd bet large sums of money that he wouldn't eat garlic mustard leaves if I served them in a salad at dinner.

We had brought along a picnic lunch, so I added a few garlic-mustard leaves to my roast-beef sandwich. The leaves vary in shape from rounded to pointed and have wavy, irregular margins. The rounded leaves at the bottom of the flowering stalks are reportedly less bitter, so I went for those (I have now experimentally compared the bottom leaves from a flowering stalk with the bottom leaves from a non-flowering stalk, and I can confirm that the former are tastier). The rapidly growing stem tips of non-flowering plants are also edible. In his book Edible Wild Plants: From Dirt to Plate, John Kallas gives a recipe for steamed garlic-mustard stem tips, but he says that cooking removes all of the garlic flavor and almost none of the bitterness, so I'm not in a hurry to try it. However, on the recommendation of Samual Thayer in Nature's Garden, I tried munching on a raw stalk. The flavor was much milder than the leaves and quite pleasant. I have high hopes for using this plant similarly to how I would use green onions, but the flavor will add a hint of garlic.

Garlic-mustard omelet garnished with two sprigs
of garlic-mustard tops.

John Kallas's recipe for a garlic-mustard omelet, on the other hand, uses the leaves and purports to retain the garlic flavor, so it seemed worth a test; I had enjoyed the leaves on my sandwich, afterall. For lunch today I mostly followed Kallas's recipe, which included red peppers, caramelized red onions, mushrooms, chopped fresh rosemary, and garlic-mustard leaves. I also added a little crumbled bacon and a sprinkling of asiago cheese. The result was delicious and was even a hit with my two youngest sons (the eldest elected to have yogurt, although he did try a bite of the omelet and said it was good).

 That's one more plant I first discovered far away and now can't stop finding close to home. I wonder what delicious treats I'll find the next time I travel!

The roots of garlic mustard have two characteristic bends. The first occurs just before the stem, so that in most cases the stem is at a right angle to the root. The second bend is a little farther down and not so sharp.

Cluster of baby grapes on a vine
in my friend's backyard.

Another garlic-mustard flower, this one in MO.

My six-year-old pulls while my four-year-old pushes my friend's son in a wagon. In the background is a peach tree (on the right). It already had miniature peaches on it.

I'm fairly certain this is an avocado tree
growing in the drainage ditch at my friend's house.

My six-year-old pretending he's going to fall off the swing. These friends (different from the ones with the honeysuckle and avocado) grow fresh garlic in their garden. I'm planning to give it a try (I've also heard it deters certain critters).

OK, let's see how well you paid attention to my Easter post. Can you find the wood sorrel in this picture of my friend's back yard? There are violet leaves as well, but no flowers yet.