Dehusking Black Walnuts with a Cement Mixer Meadowlily Farm

hi it's Bree sometta lily farm comm and it's November early November here in London Ontario and a lot of you know Joanne and I work in technology during the week I saw broadcast equipment and Joanne does websites and on the weekends where we can homesteaders so we've been working on the bees and there's some beehives over there that we've put away for winter and over here there's some beehives that are wrapped up or car paper to the winter and they have colonies in them so this week we're doing a black walnut harvest and we've got 55 black walnuts here in the farm so we're going to show you we went on the internet there's a lot of guys on the internet doing right so they're sitting over a bucket they're cutting them open and they're staining their hands and it's pretty funny on the commercial scale they have big machines to be husk black walnut we're going to do it the old-fashioned well kind of the old-fashioned way but we've got a little twist on it I think that the biggest thing is is collecting the walnut so this is like free food from nature so we've gone out we've collected buckets and buckets and buckets of these things and you can see here in the trailers and probably about 20 buckets in there and there's more to do but what I've done is we let them soak in water for a week or two that gets them all soft some people use these the husks for textures this is a great source of iodine and also some people make a tincture out of it to get rid of parasites we're not doing that we're after the walnuts themselves so what we've done is we've soaked these in water for a week and instead of sitting over a buck and doing it by hand with a knife what I've done is we're going to use our cement mixer to Dee husk the walnut okay so first up we're going to do is we're going to load up so again we've got these black walnuts and they've been soaking in water so it weakens up the husk it kind of rot it a bit when you're loading it into the mixer and I'm going to put in some rocks now I'm using big chunks of course because nice sharp corners are nice and heavy what they'll do is they'll beat off the husk from the nut and the water will wash it they probably do about this time our it works great and it should be cleaned by him for about half an hour 40 minutes something like that and and the rocks have knocked off a lot of the husks and the water washes them so I'm gonna duck hey Braxton here kids yes so one thing that's really important is that where you do this is going to kill grass trees will grow so that we're putting a dr william on so it's okay kill the grass but and definitely wear your old clothes and gloves because the stuff stays like crazy so so there's a rock walk walnuts and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to put these into I've got a bucket here with holes in the bottom that way you can rinse them off so lots of muck this is where your old shoes their old clothes we've rolled our walnuts with rocks in the cement mixer for a while and we rinse them off and you can see here this is after one round see that a lot of walnuts our nation are getting really nice and clean now they're still somewhat husks we'll separate these we'll do these again but you can see how this works sure beats doing it by hand and I don't have a big giant commercial machine to do these so we're reason 1/2 and we'll separate these well put these these words back in and let them go another couple rounds and get them all cleaned up here I have a blocks finished so these are nuts we've done about three times rinse them off and now we're drying them in milk crates because there's lots of air really good to do these in the Sun so you don't get any fungus growing on them and you might want to cover them up to keep the squirrels away from them I found I found a lot of them the squirrels have been coming and stealing them and hiding them in that garage so it's kind of fun and they get their share there's lots out here but oh yeah we're gonna we're gonna put these in the garage nice warm dry spot and let them dry out and looks like we're going to get o close to a hundred pounds or so well no one no in a couple of weeks but this is like free food from nature and and it's it's wonderful to try things that we're not used to we're so used to go into the stores and and our foods have so many chemicals in them over here at the farm we don't use any chemicals anywhere on any plants we don't have any chemicals on the bees we've planted 40 or 50 fruit trees we don't spray them we let nature do everything the walnuts a great source of protein they're all natural or organic and it's a lot of fun to do this it's a lot of work but it's really worth it it's very satisfying and it's a lot of fun to discover new ways to get food for yourself so thanks for joining us and have a great day and check the summit on metal early farm calm

Channel: Ontario Bee Rescue

Views: 28,676

Rating: 4.797235 out of 5

Keywords: homesteading, Meadowlily Farm, Hobby Farms, Organic Farming (Interest), Black Walnuts, Walnuts, Grow your own food

Id: OCPTxrFXGsc

Length: 6min 40sec (400 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2015