Black Walnut Harvest and Processing (2024 edition)

We'll share more as time allows on our process for taking high quality named cultivar nut seeds and cold stratifying them for winter storage for nursery work and seed sales. For now, this is a short and sweet synopsis of a pretty darn productive day in the mid-fall. Such abundance from the trees to try to collect and sequester for future enjoyment!

Edible Acres is a full service permaculture nursery located in the Finger Lakes area of NY state. We grow all layers of perennial food forest systems and provide super hardy, edible, useful, medicinal, easy to propagate, perennial plants for sale locally or for shipping around the country…
Happy growing!

[gkiferonhs]

I was a judge at the science fair where the kid who invented the nut wizard first presented it. I'm glad it took off for him.

[RobbieRad]

Wow 😮 that’s nuts! 😊 we harvest about 70 gallons of black walnuts from our mature trees this fall. Still got more to get off the ground. Happy harvesting friends and thanks for all the inspiration

[baileydonahue]

I really love the way you load down that little car more than the average pickup truck driving around ha! Reminds me of the old pictures of model t jalopies stacked to the gills with food going to market

[RandyLayhey-ti]

Thank you sean. You are awesome. Another great update on how to make life easier on the farm. ❤

[disbemetube]

A weak crop of black walnuts up here in Ontario zone 5b of the trees I've observed (or last year was a great crop of squirrels). Still excited to see the young ones grow, and have a lot stored from last year still. Thanks once again for the useful video on processing this very underrated crop!

[christopherd.winnan]

A harvesting and processing video! Thank you so much for filling my request. More like this please!

[nesforce]

Making me hungry for some walnuts. Love this channel, so much practical advice.

[misstobiano]

Haha how perfect! I have a bunch of walnuts that I need to figure out how to process and here's your video.
Thank you!!

[GrowCookPreserveWithKellyDawn]

Thank you for showing your method. Please do show us the rest of the story.

[garrettpeters]

What an amazing harvest! This is amazing. 🤩

[ghup]

I use a drill and paint mixer in a bucket of water to husk them. It takes a lot of water but they are beautifully clean.

[Mindy]

I just made a black walnut tincture this year. Black walnuts are my favorite nut. They have the most flavor of all the nuts I have tried and I just love them. I may try a black walnut extract for baking this year also. They are a amazing nut from a beautiful tree

[sneekiepete]

Love it..I have 1 tree in my yard so many nuts

[HoboGardenerBen]

Really cool, I like the shelf dehusker. I've just been rolling a bread knife down the center and the stirring them in a bucket of water with a stick and spraying everything off after draining. Got them drying in paper bags and cardboard boxes on top of the fridge. Nowhere near the amount you guys have done, but I'm still happy about it. Foraging nuts is the best, so satisfying, I feel like a human animal in the best way possible when forgaing real sustenance. The pecan trees in Springdale, UT were so fun to harvest, much easier than goopy walnuts, and so tasty. You could easily get fat just from foraged pecans there when they are in season, absurd abundance getting smashed on the sidewalks. Some toursits grab one here and there, but most remain blind to it.

[OublietteTight]

This is great. So much potential in each and every tree! I would totally help.
I hate walnuts.
Haha more for everyone else!

[nataliebolyard]

This has really made me rethink how I should plant out the numerous Chinese Chestnuts I have ready to field grow. We built your air prune beds and grew hundreds of chestnuts that need transplanting to the field this fall. My experience is in food forest growing in a dense tangle of plants. That is working well for fruit, but will I regret planting dozens of chestnuts that way instead of on a mat of grass?

[BackyardBerry]

I’m glad to know that having maggots in the hull doesn’t spoil them.

Do you plan to sell seedlings from the cultivar seed? Or seed from the cultivars?

Do you happen to remember the names of the cultivars?

[djmoulton]

Do you have any processing videos for English walnuts? I seem to recall that you sell trees for these. Thx.

[askavettech]

thank you for your video- You got yourself a new sub! I have a lady who is giving us all the walnuts we can gather from under her tree. How do you tell what kind of walnut variety it would be? She said she has no idea.

[Romans.]

Its interesting this came up in my feed. This is the first year we collected them for - ultimately, Hammond Nuts but I brought a large amount to a hulling station about 2 hrs north of us. It was an Amish farm. They did use a gas powered huller. All this was a new experience for me. We had such a large harvest this year that you couldnt walk in certain areas of our 5 acre parcel. They are black walnuts, I dont know how to tell the type. The man at the hulling station said they were very nice nuts. They had a team of horses standing by to take the wagon full of hulls out to the field. It paid very little $12/100 lbs after hulling. But we were very glad to bring - after hulling 175lbs of nuts.I also hear you can burn them for heat. We are going to try that this winter mixed with wood. Not sure what else we would use them for . They are super hard to crack. Do you know some sort of trick to opening them easily? We are located in Northern Illinois right on the Wisconsin border. Absolutely huge amount of nuts this year and I didnt have a nut wizard - I didnt even know the tool existed. I ordered one for next year. 😃 Thank you for this interesting video.