The Light Lens: A hard nut to crack

by T. Touris –

We have a number of black walnut trees on our property.  I love them.  The irregular branching and the soaring canopy they provide is worth every day of wait for them to leaf out in late spring.  The nuts they drop in the fall are the bane of many obsessive mowers of grass in pursuit of perfect uniform greenness. I say live and let live, or die in the case of grass. I don’t want a lawn.  Juglone do your thing.  Call me a bit squirrely, but I’d rather spend my time collecting and cracking nuts.

So, this fall I was busy gathering the emerald-husked gems that fell around our pond. The same urge that motivates me to not mow grass also drove me to find a way to avoid exerting any physical energy to remove the messy husks. Google to the rescue. Some clever kindred soul with too much time on their hands thought of an idea to put the un-husked walnuts into a cement mixer with rocks.  My laziness to mix cement with a shovel has paid dividends!  Our small mixer with a few solid rocks thrown in, did indeed do the job.  In a short time, we had a beautiful crate of husked walnuts without tweaking nary a bicep.

I could end this story right now and lead you to believe that we would enjoy our bounty through the winter while munching on a steady supply of black walnut brownies and sipping hot cocoa in front of blazing fires.  Alas, it was not meant to be.  The next morning I discovered, to my horror, stealthy chipmunk commandoes darting in and out of what I thought was the well-secured milk crate of walnuts.  Overnight they decimated the supply by half.

Oh well. A chipmunk has to live too.

Next up is my search for a means to avoid the difficult task of cracking and extracting the nutmeats.

Google, don’t let me down.