Black Walnuts

“That Squirrel has a lime!”

Mom, Dad, and I are on the porch having lunch when I spy a squirrel bounding across the lawn with a green sphere in its mouth, obscuring my view of most of it’s head. A lime doesn’t make much sense, but I couldn’t imagine what else it could be.

Mom gets up to look, “That’s not a lime, that’s a walnut”

There’s a moment of silence. A walnut seems even less likely than a lime.

“Where would it get a walnut?”

“We have a black walnut tree” Mom points off to one side, high on the bank.

I have a hard time parsing the fact that I didn’t know that we had a walnut tree in the backyard of the house I grew up in. In fact, I still am struggling with the thought. Maybe Mom planted it after I went to college. Maybe.

Later, I go out and look. The trunk is a good eight inches across so it wasn’t planted terribly recently and perhaps it wasn’t mature enough to bear fruit when I lived here. Or I was just oblivious.

Mom tells me that they’d (her family) would gather up the walnuts, let the flesh dry out, crack them open, and her father would drive over them to crack them open. I’m fascinated.

Later, when we’re in the garage returning from a pleasant walk, I see two green spheres lying on a shelf next to two black and decrepit balls and I realize that Mom’s been sporadically gathering a few of these walnuts for years and I’d never thought to question the odd things she’d collect in the garage.

This was an obvious time to experiment. I open the dried black walnuts easily with a hammer and am disappointed to find them hollow and empty. One offers promise with black meat (see picture), which makes sense in my head as Mom said it was a Black walnut, but there is no meat inside. The green walnut offers real meat – and was harder to crack open than I’d imagined. Suddenly driving a car over it doesn’t seem to be as much overkill as I’d imagined.

In fact, according to Wikipedia, Mom’s account is half-right and half-wrong – but the opposite halves than I’d supposed. The husk is best removed when green and not dried, for the best flavor. But a common method for removing the husk is to roll the nut on a hard surface like a driveway – commercial huskers use a car tire rotating against a metal mesh.

I also learn, too late, that the juice from the husk is yellow brown at first and quickly oxidizes to a deep black green color and leave stains on hands and clothing. I now have literally, but not figuratively, green thumbs. And filthy looking thumbnails.

- Updated later –
We put 3 green walnuts in the drive before heading out to dinner (Kudos to me for hitting all three!). The results:
• One crushed, walnut and all
• One husk crushed, walnut shell intact and laying amongst the mush of husk like a yolk amidst white
• One husk crushed, walnut shell expelled like a spit watermelon seed, found feet away.
We’ll let the two recovered shells dry out and taste the walnut next month.