The hickory nuts are starting to fall from the trees now.
It looks like this will be a good mast year.
It has been drier than normal, but it’s not been severe enough to keep the trees from producing a lot of nuts.
The squirrels and deer will eat well this winter.
For me it’s beech nuts. My place has lots of beech.
I spent several hours spread out over a couple of weeks trying to figure out how to get into that hard inner shell. Nothing I found on the web helped. It made me wonder if the people writing about eating beech nuts ever opened one. Or maybe I’m just a lunkhead.
I tried crushing and soaking and boiling and roasting at various temperatures and durations. I tried chewing them in the shell. Think of chewing on a piece of 2×4. Maybe soaking them for a month would do it.
Finally it came down to technique in how to split-peel it open on one of the three sides, for those that were eligible for opening. Eventually I learned to spot the ones that would open most readily. Then, only one out of about three opened has a seed in it. Then, you need about thirty of them to make a mouthful. I never got past eating half a dozen seeds in one sitting. This is in addition to the fun of collecting them. From the ground, from a ladder, etc. Collecting loads of them to get that half-dozen treat. No wonder you never see them in the store. They’d cost a hundred bucks an ounce.
So if somebody gives you a mouthful of beech seeds that they freshly harvested and shelled for you, know in your heart that they love you. Or they are just nutty above the neck.
They have a nice flavor that seems to me something like a combination of walnut and almond.
In the things you share in your posts — the places, the nature, the dog, their interactions, your take on them, the style — I feel the heart you have for it all, a heart I admire and respect.
Your inspiration is helping move me to do what I want to do with my blog. For example, I’ll make a post of this comment (with photos)! Thank you.
-Dennis
There may be some old farm device for cracking corn that might work. I use a corn sheller for dehusking Black Walnuts and a post vice for cracking them. I’m sure there must be something listed in those old Sears catalogs that’d do the trick.
I bet you’re right, but it would have to process them fast to get much from them. They are about the size of a pine nut. I’ll just stick to wild blueberries and raspberries (got loads of them) … easy-pickin’, easy-eatin’.
I haven’t gotten to the beeches yet. This is a very, very diverse forest.
There’s a hickory tree in my front yard. The squirrels love it. But the nuts hiding in the grass, even after raking, become dangerous shrapnel when the lawnmower goes through!!
We have loads of hazelnuts and some pecans (a species of hickory) but can never beat the squirrels to the nuts. The black walnuts and butternuts, on the other hand, produce so profusely that we always get plenty of them–unfortunately they’re also killing off many of our other trees.
I know of one pecan tree around here. It doesn’t always produce nuts. It’s not native, but they are cold tolerant enough to grow here. I think they can grow as far north as southern Minnesota.
We have hazelnuts and beechnuts here too. During the fall, the nuts are really what makes the whole ecosystem work. All the herbivorous animals living on nuts all winter, and in order to build a goo layer of fat for the winter, they usually gorge when the nuts are falling in the autumn,
I bought the nuts from the Northern Nut Grower’s Assn. If memory serves, they in turn got them from N. IL/S. WI–their theory being that the originals were planted by native peoples and these were the ones that survived.
Dang it–I meant to say pecans not nuts–I bought the pecans.:^(