Recently I posted about the difficulty of shelling black walnuts. Then a reader who’s a more savvy Internet user than I am sent me this link to a Youtube video, How to Harvest and Crack Black Walnuts, which is a lot more helpful than the instructions I got from neighbors:
Unfortunately, it turns out they usually only bear every other year, so I guess I’ll have to wait two years to try again. But I was interested in the author’s method of washing the nuts immediately after hulling them, then hanging them in onion bags to dry—only a few weeks, he says, instead of months! And snipping at the shells with wire cutters is an interesting approach for getting out all the meat. He says you still have to go through them and pick out any shell fragments, but his end results sure look better than mine! And he doesn’t even worry about the hulls having bruises, or having some pulp sticking to the nuts after washing.
