Ahhhh….autumn. It’s my favorite time of year. It’s sunny and breezy and the sky is the perfect color of blue. The leaves are changing from green to an array of golds and reds. It’s just a beautiful time of year.
Every time I smell wood smoke it mentally takes me back to when my father used to burn leaves and limbs in the backyard. Yeah, it was illegal but he did it anyway. Single gal’s dad laughed in the face of the law….or a forest fire.
Autumn also reminds me of something else….harvesting black walnuts. I still cringe even thinking about it. What a tremendous pain in the ass for something I didn’t even like!!
We owned some land that had three huge black walnut trees on it. Every autumn we would go over in my father’s pickup truck, don super thick gloves, and toss them into the back of the truck them up. See black walnuts have this really thick hull that rots and if you get that stuff on you you’re basically marked for life...or at least for a couple days. Your hands or any part of your skin that touches the hull will turn a lovely shade of shit brown and it has to wear off.
In their hulls, black walnuts are roughly the size and weight of baseballs and my brother and cousins were known to throw them at each other and at me like they really were baseballs. You get hit by one of those bastards and it would hurt like hell. Oh top of that, if the hull had already started to rot it would splatter all over you. Many, many times I would end up screaming like a little bitch at the top of my lungs. Of course, screaming did no good. It just aggravated the adults, got you a dirty look, and a “get back to work…we ain’t got all day”. There was no escaping the wrath of the black walnut.
After we loaded them all up we would go back home. Once there, my father would spread these disgusting things in the far end of the back yard for a few weeks to let the hull completely rot. Then he would drive back and forth over them to break the hulls off.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You thinking you would crack them by driving over them? I laugh at your naïveté! On the Mohs scale of hardness, black walnuts are on par with a diamond….I’m not exaggerating. They H-A-R-D!
The tools of the trade for cracking black walnuts are not those dainty little nut crackers you put on your table at Christmas. You know the kind…the little metal nut cracker that fits into the little wooden holder? Hell no!!! To get these sons-of-bitches open you need a cinder block, a hammer, and a pair of work gloves. If you’re lucky you have 2 cinder blocks…one to sit on and one to hammer walnuts on.
You sit there for hammering on these things for hours and hours and after you crack open a couple hundred nuts you can be proud of the fruits of your labor. You end up with maybe 2 cups worth of black walnuts. WTF….all that work for 2 cups? Yep, and they don’t even taste good.
My mother has ruined many batches of fudge with these nasty little morsels. Of course, she and my father always loved them. To me they always tasted the way old, damp basements smell…moldy. If I were to ever eat mold I would bet my bottom dollar it would taste exactly like a black walnut.
Even after all that I still remember those times fondly because we this is something we did as a family. Since my father has passed, it’s an even more dear remembrance for me.
I still hate black walnuts though. They taste like shit…
Every time I smell wood smoke it mentally takes me back to when my father used to burn leaves and limbs in the backyard. Yeah, it was illegal but he did it anyway. Single gal’s dad laughed in the face of the law….or a forest fire.
Autumn also reminds me of something else….harvesting black walnuts. I still cringe even thinking about it. What a tremendous pain in the ass for something I didn’t even like!!
We owned some land that had three huge black walnut trees on it. Every autumn we would go over in my father’s pickup truck, don super thick gloves, and toss them into the back of the truck them up. See black walnuts have this really thick hull that rots and if you get that stuff on you you’re basically marked for life...or at least for a couple days. Your hands or any part of your skin that touches the hull will turn a lovely shade of shit brown and it has to wear off.
In their hulls, black walnuts are roughly the size and weight of baseballs and my brother and cousins were known to throw them at each other and at me like they really were baseballs. You get hit by one of those bastards and it would hurt like hell. Oh top of that, if the hull had already started to rot it would splatter all over you. Many, many times I would end up screaming like a little bitch at the top of my lungs. Of course, screaming did no good. It just aggravated the adults, got you a dirty look, and a “get back to work…we ain’t got all day”. There was no escaping the wrath of the black walnut.
After we loaded them all up we would go back home. Once there, my father would spread these disgusting things in the far end of the back yard for a few weeks to let the hull completely rot. Then he would drive back and forth over them to break the hulls off.
Now I know what you’re thinking. You thinking you would crack them by driving over them? I laugh at your naïveté! On the Mohs scale of hardness, black walnuts are on par with a diamond….I’m not exaggerating. They H-A-R-D!
The tools of the trade for cracking black walnuts are not those dainty little nut crackers you put on your table at Christmas. You know the kind…the little metal nut cracker that fits into the little wooden holder? Hell no!!! To get these sons-of-bitches open you need a cinder block, a hammer, and a pair of work gloves. If you’re lucky you have 2 cinder blocks…one to sit on and one to hammer walnuts on.
You sit there for hammering on these things for hours and hours and after you crack open a couple hundred nuts you can be proud of the fruits of your labor. You end up with maybe 2 cups worth of black walnuts. WTF….all that work for 2 cups? Yep, and they don’t even taste good.
My mother has ruined many batches of fudge with these nasty little morsels. Of course, she and my father always loved them. To me they always tasted the way old, damp basements smell…moldy. If I were to ever eat mold I would bet my bottom dollar it would taste exactly like a black walnut.
Even after all that I still remember those times fondly because we this is something we did as a family. Since my father has passed, it’s an even more dear remembrance for me.
I still hate black walnuts though. They taste like shit…
Chick out...
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