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Black Walnuts

Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 9:59 pm
by Eugene
Walnut buying stations open 2 October 06. Current price is $13.00 per hundred pounds, hulled, for black walnuts.

It's time to check this years crop.

Eugene

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 4:27 am
by Merlin
How could a person get just a "few" pounds shipped to him? I used to work in NE quite a bit and that was on top of my get list and I would bring home a couple hundred lbs. When I was a kid there were walnut trees in everyone's yard and the woods were full of them also. There are probably still some around here, but the last one I knew where it was, got cut for timber.

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 8:27 am
by Carm
Geez, I'm gonna have to start collecting those little buggers.

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 9:27 am
by Rudi
Any way I can get some of them for planting??? Boy.. some American Black Walnut trees.. wow!

2 great sides to that coin...

Walnuts.. we all love em..

2 off cuts from pruning.. dry em and wafer them.. sure make some nice inlays :!: :!: :!:

Unfortunately, all the American Black Walnut we had here, got taken by the Brits to export back to the old country way back when.. there is next to no walnut trees native to NB anymore.. what a shame..

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 11:15 am
by cowboy
Hi Rudi

If you are planing on getting horses you have to wach where you plant them. Becuse of the PH in the leaves if a horse eats them it can kill him. You would not belive some of the things they eat :!: Dancer likes mulberry leaves, willow leaves eats the bark off my maple trees. One winter I saw their urine was way dark and thought they were passing blood. It turned out they wrere eating the lower branches off a spruce tree :!: As a matter of fact he reallly likes poisen ivy :shock:

I think their are some of them around my grandma's I'll look amd see what I find.

Billy

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 1:28 pm
by Eugene
The best method of getting walnut trees for planting, in Missouri, is through the Conservation Commission's nursery. They have an assortment of walnut tree seedling bundles for sale. A 25 seedling bundle sells for around $7.00 to $8.00.

Nursery sales catalogs have seedlings for sale.

Walnuts for eating or cooking. The cheapest method is to purchase packages from Wal-Mart. Shipping uncracked nuts is expensive.

We have a small walnut plantation and walnuts are quite common in this area. Picking up walnuts is stoop labor. Wife and I picked up walnuts two years ago on a trial basis. I think we made about $2.00 per hour each. The biggest time problem was waiting in line at the hulling/weighing station. There were farm grain trucks and 12/15 ton gravel trucks full of walnuts waiting in line along with 40 or 50 cars and pickups.

I have looked at mechanical nut pickers. I have also been thinking over several mechanical methods of sweeping the nuts into a row, then picking up with a shovel. At the present time I don't think the expense would could be justified.

The price of hulled walnuts has risen by 1/3 in the past three years. If there were some efficient economical method of picking up the nuts, then walnuts could be quite profitable.

Eugene

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 1:36 pm
by Eugene
Humm. Thinking. There may be a market for hulled walnuts, still in the shell. I have been asked to ship whole walnuts before.

I'll have to do some market research. Probably not economically viable to pickup, hull, store, dry, package and ship walnuts.

Anyone comming to Cubarama - bring gunny sacks. There should be a lot of free walnuts, for picking up, in the area.

Eugene

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 2:36 pm
by Dan England
We used to pick up walnuts in the fall to make spending money when I was a kid. Our method of removing the hull was not hi-tech but it worked. Make a trough out of 2X8's, open on each end. Jack up the rear wheel of a car or truck, slide the trough underneath the tire. Fire up the motor to spin the wheel. Pour walnuts in one end of the trough, the spinning wheel would remove the hull and kick the walnuts out of the other end. Any remnants of hulls left on the nut could be easily removed by hand. One could easily determine who was selling shelled walnuts. For a couple of weeks, their fingers carried a dark stain from the juices of the hull.

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 3:33 pm
by Eugene
In about my fourth or fifth grade in school I didn't get a gold star in health because I had walnut stain on my hands. I tried explaining to the city girl who did the hand and fingernail check that my hands were clean and that the stain wouldn't come out. Another dent in my psychologicial profile concerning my misspent youth and abuse by my parents for being a farm kid and having to do chores.

We put the walnuts in the drive way and drove over them with vehicles. After a week or two we would pick up the nuts. The buyer/hullers use a Minneapolis Moline corn sheller to hull walnuts.

Eugene

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 4:25 pm
by John *.?-!.* cub owner
Dad would put a snow tire (real snow tire, not all season) on rear of truck and jack one side up, with other wheels blocked. he had a wooden trough just wide enough for the tire to fit down into. He would let the jack down to the point a hulled wallnut was a tight fit under it. Start the truck and let it idle in high gear. fun part was throwing wlanuts down the trough and under the wheel. We put a piece of canvas on sticks aobut 15 or 20 feet behind truck to catch the walnuts as they came flying out. I would not suggest trying that on a modern truck with a limited slip differential, as a matter of fact I would not really reccomend doing that at all, but if you are reall couragous and foolhardy, go ahead, but try catching the wlanuts by hand instead of using the canvas. Don't ask, I was young and foolish.


The hullers around here have commercial hulling machines they bring in, and can go through a lot of walnuts in a hurry. About 10 or 12 years ago we had brought a truck load in, and they were braggign about how fast their machine was. A guy I used to play on the football team with and I proved to them we could shovel faster than their machine could hull. :lol:

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 6:18 pm
by (CUB HUT)
I got one of the NUTWIZARD'S two years ago and would not be without it.
I got the large one --great for black walnut and hickory nuts.
http://www.nutwizard.com

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 8:44 pm
by double R
Hand crank corn sheeler works good, I've sheeled many black walnuts with a corn sheeler.

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 10:21 pm
by Paul B
A golf ball retreiver like is used on a driving range should pick up walnuts, and a similar device should be fairly easy to build and mount on a Cub Cadet or other garden tractor. One that was built was by Wittek Golf Range Supply Co. Inc., Chicago, IL, and was sold as IH Special Duty Equipment. It mounted on the front of a Cub Cadet (and others) and was basically a series of closely spaced disc that when driven over the golf balls laying on the ground, the balls would wedge between the disc and as the disc rotated around, fingers would strip the balls out and drop them in baskets mounted in front of the disc. The company made "pickers" in widths from 3-1/2' to 18'.

Posted: Thu Sep 14, 2006 11:58 pm
by Eugene
I have obtained information on both the Nutwizzard and the golf ball retrievers.

My problem is that I am not a great believer in printed advertisements. I want opinions from someone who has used one for a while.

The nutwizzard is in my price range. Will order one tomorrow.

Thanks

Eugene

Posted: Fri Sep 15, 2006 8:57 am
by Merlin
My Father-in-Law had a few acres of paper shell walnuts in Hanford, Ca. and he had to haul them so far to have them hulled that he built a nut hulling plant and he got all the business from around there. He told me that in order to get a paper shell walnut tree to bear, it had to be grafted on a black walnut root stock, that the paper shell won't do anything but grow unless it is. Don't ask me, he said it.