The days between Thanksgiving and Christmas are walnut season to me. Not store-bought English walnuts, but native black walnuts. Nothing beats their spicy fragrance and sweet taste. You can buy black walnuts at a grocer or a farm market. Or you can spend time and energy cracking them yourself. Either way, they’re worth it.
In my younger days I enjoyed going with my dad to our favorite woods to gather nuts. We’d bring burlap bags, easy to find back then, to our favorite groves of nut trees and fill them with fallen nuts. Late fall and early winter evenings after dinner we would descend to the cellar and start cracking. By Thanksgiving we would have filled two freezer bags with shelled walnuts, ready for the nut-breads and cookies my mother would bake.
Black walnuts are stately trees with serpentine branches, wide spreading crowns and thick twigs. In winter the tree looks sparse. In spring the leaves begin to fill the spaces between the branches and by early May the green, rope-like-like flowers appear. These give way to round, green fruits.
The thick green hull of a walnut is really the fruit, and the nut is the seed. In June these fast-growing fruits are the size of marbles but by July they’re as big as golf balls. By August they are the size of large hens’ eggs. Bright green with a pebbly texture, they have a spicy, distinctive fragrance.The season of falling leaves comes early for black walnuts. Their compound leaves start to turn yellow and fall on windy days in late July.
For many years we lived in a house beside an enormous black walnut tree. This magnificent tree produced a consistent yield but most nut trees alternate between productive and lean years. We loved working and sitting in the shade of the great tree. Nuts would start falling in September, so we had to duck or wear a hat if we spent much time there. By October, fallen nuts covered the grass. Passing under the tree meant risking a fall over rolling nuts underfoot. I needed to rake them before mowing that part of the yard. Now I regret that during those years I became complacent about walnuts and cracked very few.
Black walnuts would be rare without the help of squirrels. These little rodents can’t wait for the nuts to fall and start to cut them off with their teeth in late August. I saw a squirrel last September with its face, chest and forelegs stained blackish- brown from walnut husks. Caching walnuts for the winter, squirrels bury so many they never find them all. Then in spring, black walnut seedlings sprout in fields, yards, and flower beds. We brought a squirrel-planted young tree from our old place when we moved to West Virginia and it’s now big enough to produce its own walnuts.
Squirrels make a lot of noise opening a black walnut. Listen for the ringing rattle of teeth against shell. The squirrel gnaws the walnut around the middle for easy access to both halves of nutmeat. Where squirrels hang out, it’s easy to find chewed halves of walnut shells with visible tooth marks.
If you cut or bruise the green fruit, a yellowish juice will stain your skin yellow. Since the early days, people have used walnut hulls to produce dye. Rich in tannic acid, walnut hulls dye wool, cotton and other fabrics rich brown. Dye made by boiling the hulls is permanent and requires no mordant or fixative.
Black walnut wood is strong and hard with beautiful grain and dark color. It is valued for making furniture, musical instruments, and gunstocks. To make gunstocks during World War II, walnut trees were cut down and the wood was donated by patriotic Americans to munitions factories. By the end of the war, most sizable walnut trees were gone. Since then, foresters and tree farmers have successfully reestablished this native tree.
Black walnut meat is oily, rich and tastes very different from English walnuts. But first you need to remove the husks. One traditional method — spreading nuts on the driveway and driving a car over them will remove most of the dried outer covering. Then cracking black walnuts involves a hammer and a rock, anvil or other flat, hard surface. Conventional nutcrackers are no match for these American beauties. And the hard shells splinter easily, so wear gloves and shield your eyes from flying shards.
Everybody develops their own method of cracking black walnuts. My dad could split a walnut with one crack of a hammer. I never mastered his technique. I encourage you to try until you figure out what works for you. With luck, you’ll have a small bag of spicy, delicious black walnuts for holiday baking treats. Happy cracking!
Doug Pifer is an artist, naturalist, and writer. He has a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Penn State and has been an editor and art educator. His illustrations have appeared in various books and magazines and he has been a contributor to The Observer for several years. He lives with his wife and assorted animals on 5.7 acres in a historic farmhouse near Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
By Doug Pifer