Guide and Information on Harvesting Walnuts

With money being tight and the economy the way it is, everyone is looking for ways to make extra money. Getting a second part time job isn’t usually and option, as there are so many out there looking for work, that it is impossible to be able to find a second job, let alone a first one. So many people are looking for ways to make money other than that. They are taking in steel scraps, old cars, growing vegetables and selling them, and harvesting other natural items, such as walnuts.

Black walnuts were in an abundance this year. Trees that I have never seen with nuts were loaded. Mowing the lawns became difficult and hazardous. A walnut caught up in a mower can cause a lot of damage to cars and homes, and break windows, not to mention that they could hurt you badly if you are in its line of fire.

While mowing this year, there were so many that the mower tires spun and slipped on the nut covered ground. I finally resorted to picking up the nuts and was soon surprised when the back of our E-Z Go Workhorse was full in less than an hour and a half. What was I going to do with this many nuts. Many said to sell them, and soon I was picking up all of the walnuts, not just those that were difficult to mow over.

It was easy work as I had a tool made for picking up walnuts. This item looked like a cross between a large wire whisk shaped like a football laying on its side. It was attached to what looked like the upper part of a clothes hanger, but much stronger, then a broom handle on the end of it. All that you needed to do was to roll this across the ground, and the wires would open up and the walnut would enter the inside and become trapped in the picker. A neat piece of metal wire that you fastened to a bucket, helped release the nuts. You never had to bend over except to pick up your bucket, dump it and set it back down.

Just for fun, I decided to weigh a bucket and then start weighing nuts that were already out of their hulls. They still had on their shells, the same way that they will be when they weighed them. I was surprised when I saw that it would take 40 nuts hulled, to make 2 pounds. That would mean that I would need to pick two thousand nuts to average out to one hundred pounds. And I was looking to try to get at least half a ton on the pickup.

I enjoyed the time outside in the nature, going from tree to tree. I listened to all the birds. I listened to the wind. And before I knew it, I was finished with one tree, and moving on. I was amazed at how quickly they added up, especially if you just filled up buckets then dumped several at a time. After cleaning up the lawns of the man I mow for, I cleaned up our lawns and went on down to a neighbor and cleaned up all of their nuts also. By the time I was finished, I had the bed of our Dodge Ram pickup about 3/4 of the way full. I was excited when we were finally on our way to the place that was buying nuts.

When we got there, we were about tenth in line, and it still wasn’t time for them to open. There were some that had already left, and it was only about half past ten in the morning, and they weren’t supposed to open until eleven. I watched as pickup after pickup after car went through getting nuts hulled, weighed, and collecting pay. People were bringing nuts in the back of their pickups loose, as we had, or bagged in trash bags, onion bags, and dog food bags. They were even using store grocery bags.

There are many uses for the walnuts. From cooking and baking as we generally see, to uses for its shell alone. The shell can be used as an abrasive to blast clean many soft metals, plastics, fiberglass, wood and stone. It is also used in cosmetics and soaps, in filtration systems. Black walnut powder is also used in dynamite as a filler, and black walnut shell flour is used as a filler ingredient in adhesives in making plywood. There are many uses of the shells and they are biodegradable.

Some were even bringing in nuts and paying them to hull them, so that they could have their own fresh walnuts for eating. Some were splitting the amounts of what they brought in, selling only part of what they had on in exchange for the people that were buying them. This made for a long day. After three hours in line, we were ready to dump our nuts out of our pickup into the hopper that hulled them. We used scoop shovels to scoop them off the truck bed. It was a lot faster getting them out than it was putting them in. It was just a matter of twenty minutes when I got off the back of the truck and watched as they weighed the bags, seven all total, and added them up. I fell short of my goal, I had just 403 pounds. Although they were paying more this year than they had in the past, I still walked away with $52.39 to show for my efforts. A long ways away from the $130 I was looking to make.

Although some say that wasn’t much, and it wasn’t worth it, I looked at it like this. I had time to kill. I had no place I had to be or wanted to be. And to me, even after putting gas in the truck, I was $40 richer than I was four hours earlier.

For many, there were bigger checks than I got, people with full trucks, or trailers, and others that came in with two or more truck loads. It is a situation where if you have nothing to loose, you have much to gain. I didn’t have to take time out of work, or out of anything else needed to be done. For those of us like this, it is profitable. For others that work other jobs and would be giving up other money, it would not be profitable.

So as you sit down to having your banana nut bread at Thanksgiving and Christmas, think about how much it takes to gather enough walnuts to make that one batch of banana nut bread, and thank those that did the hardest part of it all.