Walnuts for Sale

Today was a beautiful day in Kentucky. Sunshine, mild temperatures and clear blue skies. Just the sort of day to enjoy being outside.

My son dropped by the house this morning bright and early to bring me yesterday's paper. The paper man leaves it in the middle of our drive at the foot of the hill, so he had picked it up to bring to the house....then forgot to deliver it yesterday. While he was here he mentioned that his oldest son, who is out of school for fall break this week, would be on the farm all day. It seems that he wanted to earn a little extra money and had seen a sign that a neighbor was buying walnuts. This is a dandy little business opportunity locally. They buy all the black walnuts you can bring in and pay you, according to my grandson, $1/pound. The buyer then hulls them and sells them to a factory that will shell them and package them to sell to you in the grocery.

Now one thing we have in this section of Kentucky is lots of walnut trees. They grow in lots of fence rows, or in scrubby woodlands or about anywhere you don't want them (I have two in the yard that just volunteered). They aren't a very pretty tree since they have sparse leaves that they drop in late summer. So there they stand, mostly leafless and covered with big green balls. Rather like a strange decoration. These balls contain the walnuts, but mother nature didn't intend to make it easy to enjoy them. The outer green hull has to be removed then the nut dried and then cracked open to enjoy the rich nutmeat. We used to put them in the driveway and let all the machinery drive over them to crush the hulls and get them to come loose. When they start to rot and come off they turn black and stain everything they touch. Thank goodness now they have a machine that will do this nasty part for us.

Anyway, my grandson decided this was a quick way to get rich. He gathered up some feed sacks, a couple of buckets and some gloves and started on the trees in the yard. It wasn't long before he came in for a little help. Naturally, I "volunteered" to help him. We picked up several buckets but still had lots of walnuts on the trees. A search of the barns yielded a long piece of quarter-round molding left over from a remodeling project some years ago. This became our "whacker". We would stretch it up and "whack" the limbs and walnuts until they rained down on us. When we couldn't reach any more we resorted to a piece of stove wood. My grandson has a great arm and he could really wing it into the top of the tree, raining down more walnuts.

We spent a great afternoon riding the four-wheeler, picking up walnuts, and visiting. We managed to get nine feed sacks of walnuts but more importantly, we had a time of sharing...sharing the work, laughs, secrets, hopes, dreams, and a beautiful day. We probably earned all of $12 after they were all hulled, but the day was priceless!