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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 20, 2016 16:57:10 GMT -5
Hi all,
Well, for the first time in a long time, someone in CT dug something interesting out I hadn't seen before (by now, I've seen so much it's hard to really surprise me).
This being near the season of Lunar New Year, a lot of small booths have shown up here and there selling odds and ends for the festivities. I was already familiar with the one with the pile of old Chinese banknotes (I have riffled through it to see if there was anything for my collection, but my collection is mainly coins and tokens, so I have no idea what is a good or bad banknote buy.) But today I was walking by one and found that one of the things being offered was......actual factual Manchurian Walnuts! Damn expensive (about $5 each) but I had to get a handful to try and grow them. If you are wondering why a souvenir shop had such things, apparently Manchurian walnuts that have been smoothed and polished a little are considered lucky charms in China. The tasty kernel in a hard shell (a Manchurian is more like a black walnut than an English one.) symbolizes the fruits of hard work. At least that is what a Chinese friend of mine told me (I guess that explains why I was seeing matched pairs in some Jewelry shops, and wooden carvings of them offered along other statuary (Interestingly, based on the grain, I suspect a lot of the walnut carvings are made of Manchurian walnut wood).
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Post by steev on Jan 20, 2016 21:22:23 GMT -5
Interesting. I'll have to keep an eye out for these, as I far prefer the flavor of black walnuts to English (best ice cream ever!).
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 20, 2016 21:57:31 GMT -5
picture (stock, not the ones I got)  Note that, despite the extreme crenelations of the outside, the inside is in fact probably completely devoid of them. Juglans mandashurica is very closely related to J. ailantifolia, the Japanese walnut (some people consider the latter a subspecies of the former) which is itself a super species for the Heartnut. So, for all intents and purposes, the Manchurian walnut is basically a Heartnut that hasn't been selected for the heart shape. |
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Post by diane on Jan 20, 2016 23:02:10 GMT -5
Well, I hope it grows more fruitfully than my Japanese heartnut which I cut down last year. Forty years, and not a single nut.
Ordinary English walnuts fruit prolifically all over the neighbourhood, so it wasn't lacking for pollen.
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Post by khoomeizhi on Jan 21, 2016 17:54:42 GMT -5
interesting. my nut orchard group has a half-dozen or so manchurian walnuts (from where, i couldn't tell you) growing at our orchard, but they're only about three years old, so i don't know them that well. with the relation to heartnut, i wonder about their disease resistance. in my area, the few heartnut trees that i know all have - what do you call it? witches broom? some sort of disease that makes them grow weirdly bunched groups of twigs and also aborts their nuts partway through the year.
i'm not sure now why we got the manchurians, other than just to see. out of curiosity, anyone know if there are there cultivars of J. mandashurica?
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 21, 2016 19:19:01 GMT -5
I'm not sure there are any per se (unless, as I said, you want to consider the Japanese walnut a cultivar rather than a subspecies) but there do seem to be at least two sort of general nut forms, one far shorter and fatter than the other (I'd say the short fat one was a cross between Manchurian and English, but thanks to that nut bin at that store I used to visit in Manhattan (remember that?) I think I have SEEN nuts that are such hybrids, and they tend to look more like English.
I really need to re-visit that store when I start going back to Manhattan in the spring. Manchurian trees would be interesting, but that bin probably also has Iron walnuts (J. regina silligata) if I can recognize them as such, and a tree of that could be really pretty (basically, from what I have read. Iron walnuts are generally similar to the standard english, except they are a LOT straighter (they sometimes used them for part trees in China) and taller. Assuming the picture I once saw is accurate, I should be planting the "puffy" nuts, those which are wider on the axis perpendicular to the plane of the seam than long (what I nickname the "Jowled" or "Dizzy Gillespie" walnuts)
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Post by khoomeizhi on Jan 21, 2016 20:16:18 GMT -5
cheeknuts!
i am curious about the flavor of any of these, manchurian, iron, etc. knowing how different black walnuts are to english makes me wonder how they all relate, tastewise: how many dimensions the spectrum is in.
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 21, 2016 21:36:44 GMT -5
The answer is, it depends. On ocassion, I have tasted ones from the bin that actually had flavor equal to a good English. But a lot are rather dark and bitter. That may be fine for some (you have to factor in I don;t actually like the taste of black walnut to begin with, so flavors I'd find repulsive might be fine for someone else
One in a while I've found a nut BEYOND the standard level and had a flavor that I can only describe as what a pecan would be like if it was as oily as a walnut. But those are few (and of course, by the time I taste one it's too late to plant it.)
It also seems that some of the genes don't mix reliably, given how many of the nuts in the bin often had withered kernels. Pity, especially since some of those bad nuts were HUGE (on the order of the size of small apricots.)
Finally there are actually one or two I can't comment on because they actually proved to be too dense to crack. Every now and again, a nut shows up that must be built like a black walnut on the inside, so it basically is one solid mass of shell around the kernel (some don't even have the bit of wiggle room black walnuts have). getting those open without pulverizing the nutmeat to dust and mushing it up with bits of shell is sometimes beyond me.
One other species I'd love to get my hands on is the Chilean Walnut a.k.a. nougales. Seems to be really popular in South America. I've seen seeds listed on ebay, but it is specifically said to be collected from the jungle floor and be neither edible nor viable (it's used for crafts). I have some feelers out (mostly with the person who runs Sacred Succulents.) Maybe one of them will play out.
As I have said before, I also have a soft spot for the Hind's Walnut of northern California. The fact that, unlike pretty much every other black walnut like nut, it's shell is completely smooth (it's like a gigantic hickory) and hence, really easy to clean without staining ones hands, makes it a really big plus in my book (by that logic the Paradox should be perfect for me. But while Luther Burbank's creation is supposed to be a great street tree, nut producing fertile ones are supposedly pretty hard to find.)
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Post by taihaku on Jan 22, 2016 4:46:04 GMT -5
I'm planning to take back the last chunk of my orchard land from the grazer I rent it to next winter and load it with unusual Juglans and Carya (unusual to the UK that is). This thread reminded me of the things on offer from these guys: www.mailorder.crug-farm.co.uk/Search.aspx?keywords=juglansI wonder if anyone knows if these things are self-fertile? |
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Post by philagardener on Jan 22, 2016 6:53:39 GMT -5
by the time I taste one it's too late to plant it. Has anyone tried germinating a walnut once it has been shelled? Assuming you can get it out in mostly one piece; almost impossible for our native Black Walnut but by the descriptions in this thread some of these species seem less interlocked in their shells - a desirable trait by any measure! |
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Post by khoomeizhi on Jan 22, 2016 7:06:23 GMT -5
The answer is, it depends. On ocassion, I have tasted ones from the bin that actually had flavor equal to a good English. But a lot are rather dark and bitter. That may be fine for some (you have to factor in I don;t actually like the taste of black walnut to begin with, so flavors I'd find repulsive might be fine for someone else the dark and bitter ones may just be artifacts of the processing (or lack thereof). that's a pretty standard condition for walnuts that stayed in the hull too long. |
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 22, 2016 7:47:23 GMT -5
If I could get one out of the shell intact, I might try it. It might actually speed up germination a bit., and be a hand technique for gene combinations that, while yielding tasty results, produced trees that are a bit on the slow and weak side as seedlings and need a helping hand (sort of a nut version of embryo rescue). But as you pointed out getting a walnut out of it's shell completely intact is a very hard thing to do for most of them, and it doesn't help that the actual embryo is located at the structurally weakest point on the kernel (it's in that little point on the tip between the two "lobes" right?) The only times I have EVER done that is in cases where the space around the nut was SUPER wide (which usually translates to the kernel being withered in any case) and the internal walls being super thin (so they break off in the kernel, rather that staying put). It seems likely on the taste; Chinese markets often take customer/vendor selection or acceptance of waste far more than western markets would, so quality control is a little looser (or why my seed hunts work in the first place.) That being said the Chinese seem to be far more tolerant of bitter tasting nuts than we are. I regularly see packets of something referred to as "small walnut" which are actually seeds of some sort of Chinese hickory (probably Carya cathayensis) Taste like old stale wood shavings, but apparently they sell as a snack. If you wonder why I have never picked up a packet of those to try and grow, it's because, like a lot of other snacking nuts, they are sold pre-roasted, salted, and cracked (the shells are still there but each one will have some cracks put in it so you can get the nut open. They do the same thing with Macadamias). Tree list is interesting though I should point out two of the three are ones we have already discussed. The third is presumably a heartnut, the second some sort of round Japanese Walnut. I've heard of the first, but know little about it. No clue on the fertility. Oh and one other funny thing I forgot to mention, that might be of interest. Despite the fact that (I would assume) the English walnut is the standard walnut of consumption in Japan now, the Japanese is still so familiar to people it is the "go to" nut in illustrations in Japanese children's books. Look a the nuts on the table in this version of The Nutcracker
 It's sort of the same way pictures of corn in books like this will usually have a few purple kernels (since the corn most familiar to a lot of Asians is Glutinous corn), the beans are usually broad (fava) beans* the pumpkins will be pale and flattened (for anyone who grew up reading the Oz books, you'd be amazed what Jack Pumpkinhead looks like). *One of the few places you usually WILL see standard beans is in versions of Jack and the Beanstalk, which is funny, as it would probably be the one place favas would be more correct (If you think about it, since the story probably pre dates the introduction of the common bean into Britain (the oldest written copy dates to 1734, but it is generally assumed to be much, much older.) Fava's would really be the only option left. |
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Post by khoomeizhi on Jan 22, 2016 8:09:53 GMT -5
that is interesting. like how the vast majority of american children's book cows are holsteins (i have seen the occasional guernsey. and ferdinand doesn't count - bulls are different.) But as you pointed out getting a walnut out of it's shell completely intact is a very hard thing to do for most of them, and it doesn't help that the actual embryo is located at the structurally weakest point on the kernel (it's in that little point on the tip between the two "lobes" right?) The only times I have EVER done that is in cases where the space around the nut was SUPER wide (which usually translates to the kernel being withered in any case) and the internal walls being super thin (so they break off in the kernel, rather that staying put). yep. they've got to be pretty dried out to be that loose. and then you've the added ease from the nutmeat bending more. still tricky, though. we've used the expedient of grinding off one spot on the shell of hickories, just down to the skin on the kernel, which helps with germination, but sure doesn't let you analyse kernel shape or whathaveyou. and yeah, agreed on bitter being a more acceptable flavor in asia. and if that's okay, timing the hulling doesn't matter much. |
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Post by mskrieger on Jan 27, 2016 13:05:41 GMT -5
blueadzuki where were you in CT shopping at a Lunar New Year booth? Inquiring minds want to know!
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Post by blueadzuki on Jan 27, 2016 16:18:07 GMT -5
Not CT as in Connecticut, CT as in Chinatown. Flushing, to be precise.
If I got this wrong (i.e. you knew I meant Chinatown) I think the booth was somewhere between 41st ave. and Sanford. I know it was before Maple since I would have noticed leaving the "zone" (main street in Flushing is sort of divided into four or five "zones" if you are only focusing on the restaurants and shops. You get a cluster, then a few residential blocks then another cluster.)
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