[Music] We're gonna be working up some black walnuts.
We're going to be taking the hulls off, and getting them ready for curing. OK, so the first
thing that we need to do to get to black walnuts is we need to remove the hull. Now these have
degraded a little bit, they've been sitting in my bags for a couple weeks, which isn't really great.
You really -- for a really clean tasting black walnut, you really want to get those hulls off as
soon as possible, like when they're green is even better. So if you're talking about picking them up
it's much easier to pick up a bigger green walnut than it is these ones that are smaller. Especially
if you've got some grass -- the smaller your nut, the tighter the grass has to be cut. So black
walnuts come off the ground, they're 50 percent hull. And then just in the shell they're about
three to five -- no, they're about ten percent nut meat. So overall, when you pick up
a whole walnut like this, it's probably, like, five percent nutmeat -- not very much. But
what's in there is very valuable nutritious food. So what we need to do is we need to, first, remove
the hull, which is the dirty messy job. And then once we've got them nice and clean, we're going
to put them and dry them out where rodents are not going to get them, but there's still air
flow, and they can dry out and cure and then they'll be ready to crack. If you leave this dirt
on there and crack it, when you crack your nuts, this will get turned into a powder, and
it'll be very offensive to eat with your delicate walnut meat. So we want to get these
as clean as we can; that's the objective today. So you can start off with just using your
shoes and stomping on them and getting them off. The next step is probably drive
over them with your car on the driveway. But if you want to do a little bit larger scale, I
rigged up a pretty simple thing. A friend of mine made this, and I kind of remade it a little bit,
improved it, because it was falling apart. But the concept is:you take a lime spreader
-- and everyone has a lime spreader where this thing is rotted off, the cone is rotted
off -- but you still have the working gears. The key point is the the right angle gearbox
on the bottom that transfers the power from the PTO and makes this thing spin. It's
basically a spinning cheese grater. See, this thing spins independent, this.
So that's spinning around 540 RPMs. Walnuts are hard, and they put a lot of wear
and tear on machinery. So everything you make with black walnuts has to be tough, all right. So
I took this piece of a barrel rim right here, and I left a little extra metal on both sides. I cut
it and I re-fabricated it so it's short --smaller diameter -- so it would fit in there. It's bolted
to the fins of the spreader with expanded metal sandwiched between these two pieces of metal.
So that's that's basically all there is to it. [Music] I've got a little door here so, when it's
spinning, I'm going to pop that open. And the nuts are, hopefully. going to come flying out.
I've got a little piece of angle iron right there that kind of disturbs the nuts and it also pops
them out the door a little bit. Wouldn't hurt to, I think, it wouldn't hurt to have a couple more of
those in there. Really, the more you agitate the nuts the quicker the hulls come off. And water
is a pretty important component. Especially if your hulls are dry, you're going to want a little
bit of water in there, and then that really gets them clean. All right, so this is, sort of, the
major bit of abrazing, and then we're going to go to the next step, which is the cement mixer.
After the walnuts are spun around in the the hauler I'm going to open the door here -- and
of course I'll have this in place -- and they're going to come flying out. I'm going to close
that because there's always a few that stay in there. And then I'm simply going to load them
in the cement mixer like that. Now the cement mixer is going to do a finer job of taking the
hulls off. So they're still muddy, there's still some Hull on there. But just the action of the
walnuts toppling over and over and over again are going to really make those things -- the nuts
-- clean. Except for the little cracks, you can't get the little cracks. You might need a pressure
washer if you really need to get them that clean. Well, we got the nuts in the cement mixer. They're
going to spin around for about 10 minutes. I mean, that's -- you know -- could be any amount of
time, depending on how clean you really want them. But what's going to be happening
in here is -- it's like a rock tumbler. And they're going to be tumbling and they're
going to be really cleaning each other really really well. Water is a really important component
of that, because that just loosens the hull up and just makes it softer and all that. And, you know,
you're going to take it -- I'm doing this on a hillside, which is nice. Because the more you get
on a hill the more you can get materials to move without having to -- like we did, we had to hand
carry them from the crate into the cement mixer. This time, I can just send them in here, they're
going to splash down, the excess water is going to go through this half-inch hardware cloth. And the
nuts are going to roll into the washing station. [Music] So this is its final rinse, and it's also
a chance to separate the the floaters. So the the good nuts will be sinking to the
bottom, and then I will skim off the ones on the top -- usually duds. They're floating, there's air
pockets in there, they're no good. You don't want to fool with them, you don't need to be carrying
them around, you don't need curing them, you need to get rid of them as soon as you can. So as soon
as you identify the floaters, get rid of them. It's a good year this year, not too many duds.
[Music] And then I'm simply going to take
this, and I'm going to tip it in here, it's going to go in the bag. Oh yeah!
That's a pretty bag of nuts right there! So we'll get ready for a cure, and
you're gonna go in the cage. [Music] So we've got the nuts de-hulled,. They're wet and
the meats are green inside. They need to cure for them to crack out easy. They'll shrink inside the
shell, and they'll taste better also, as well. So we need to get air on them, but we
need to protect them from the rodents, because rodents -- obviously, we know squirrels
and everything -- just love these things. This is the first iteration of a nut curing cage.
It's a tote with the plastic thing gone. I just lined it with some quarter-inch mesh. I've
had fox squirrels eat through hardware cloth, so I'm not so excited about hardware cloth
for long-term storage. For short-term storage -- storage with a lot of airflow --
this is great. The next one, I started making four by four panels, and they were modular, and
I could take them apart. So when it's not nut season anymore, I can take this apart and stack
them up and they don't take up a lot of room. So the latest iteration I have of a nut-curing
place is these four by eight panels. Real simple, real light, three-quarter inch poplar, half-inch
screen. Now remember, it's not gonna be long-term storage. Because if I leave this, after the nuts
are out of the woods, the squirrels are going to be looking for more nuts. So come February,
March the [squirrels] get more aggressive. So they'll be safe for a while to cure. Then
I eventually want to get them into, maybe, something more solid -- like some plywood boxes
with air holes in them. But what's great about this is it comes apart -- four by eight sheets. If
I need to send some to Abingdon because they have a big nut year and I need to share them, they've
got the same sized ones, and then I'll send these over there. Breaks down, no problem. If I'm not
using it, it breaks down, I can set it in the side of the barn. So this modular unit is really
great, and it can get big real quick with just a few more panels. Store an enormous amount of nuts
in here! You got a lot of airflow, of course, like any kind of curing. If you can get air flow
-- we're up in a barn here with a lot of -- you don't want to have it in a damp barn, you want to
have it in a barn where there's some good airflow. And if you can get heat on it, that would be even
better. Ideally, I'm going to have a silo where I can actually pump in hot air -- maybe with
propane or something like that -- and I can get my nuts cured maybe in a week, so I can get them
in market. Because it's a real -- like I think I mentioned earlier -- it's a real short amount of
time between when the nuts fall and when holiday season is, and when everybody wants to bake.
You got to get your nuts in the market before then. So you don't want to spend too much
time with wet nuts taking too long to cure. We're putting we're putting the hulls on the
compost, and the compost the organic matter acts like a buffer. There's a lot of good stuff
in walnut hulls. I know of ponds where walnut hulls have been put in and it smells terrible.
Just smells like animal manure. There's a lot of nutrients in it, I don't want to waste that. But
I don't want to put on my plants directly. So I'll put in the compost, let those juglones break down
a little bit, and it's just adds to my mulch pile. Got some rasps here. And then, I like the
squirrel tooth is what I really like when I'm cracking a walnut. I'm gonna find that little
fissure right there, and there's the suture, and then put the squirrel tooth right
in there, boom, it just pops right out. Stick that little squirrel tooth in that suture,
and you just hardly got to do anything, pops out. Yeah, you're after those -- the nut that
throws out the quarters in one big piece, that's what you want. [Music] Now, these are not the nuts that we just washed. Those
nuts are going to need to be cured for a couple of weeks, if not a month. If you've got some heat
on them, if you get some heat on them, they'll dry faster, and maybe you get them in time for the
holidays. But it's a race to get your walnuts cracked fresh this year ready for Grandma's
walnut cake. You got, you got to be on it. Now remember, walnuts are the Gateway nut --
it's where you start. Then come the hickories and the acorns -- there's this whole world of
nuts. But walnuts is a good place to start. [Music]
