the Nutty Buddy Collective (SPAM alert)

[khoomeizhi]

i'm a member of a five-person group that's planting nut (and some fruit) orchards in the area around asheville, nc. we make long-term (99 years) lease agreements with landowners on a crop-sharing basis. we have two young orchards under lease and planted and are in conversation with a number of potential new landowner partners.

our website:
nuttybuddycollective.com/

here's the spam part:
while our orchards are growing up and we plant more, we're starting work on accessing more of the local native nuts - mostly black walnut and hickories. we're doing a fundraiser for equipment to open a nuttery where we can process nuts at a commercial volume. we hope to be a community resource that will be able to buy nuts from homeowners (many of whom view the numerous black walnuts as annoyances) and foragers, or process the nuts for the collector's use for a fee. lots of work yet to make this a reality, but we're getting much closer. the online fundraiser is here:
www.gofundme.com/nutfundraiser

we are technically a for-profit company, though for the establishment phase we're referring to ourselves as a 'non-profitable'. none of the individuals in our group have much money to invest, and we're not prepared to take out significant loans since we can't expect to make much money as we fine-tune some of our processes on wild nuts. hence the fundraiser. if you feel moved to donate or spread the word, it would be much appreciated. but please no one feel obligated.

i'm happy to talk about or clarify any of this stuff. we're all pretty excited about tree crops in general and nuts specifically. what we're doing is admittedly pretty 'outside the box' when it comes to modern agriculture.

[philagardener]

What a great bunch of nuts! Fabulous blog. More power to you all!

[billw]

Great idea!

[steev]

Excellent! Where I am, people also regard black walnuts as worthless; fine; more for me.

[taihaku]

Awesome project; good luck!

You've probably already come across them but Project Gutenberg has some of the very first Northern Nut Grower's Association AGM reports from the 1910's (here's one: 
www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/25597/pg25597-images.html ). You might find some useful info in there whether for actually growing the orchards and so on or just sweet old timey quotes about the importance of your work for a website/marketing campaign.....
Stuff like:

"I just want to call attention to one of the questions on our list. "What can we do to cheapen nuts and nut meats in the retail market so as to make this valuable food available to persons of small means?" It seems to me that we are going to do that with such nuts as the black walnut."

[steev]

IMHO, black walnuts are a very poorly-regarded nut for no reasons other than ignorance and laziness. Granted, they are harder to shell than English/Carpathian walnuts, but the reward is worth the effort. You may need to hull them on your driveway with your car; you may need to store them until they dry and shrink to facilitate cracking, but you will be rewarded with the best-flavored ice-cream or cookies ever, IMHO.

They are commonly regarded as "weed trees", growing without care or pests; what's wrong with that? Properly pruned, they produce gorgeous, valuable hardwood; how many such trouble-free nut-trees do that? Anybody ever seen much English walnut cabinetry? I think not.

[mjc]

Black walnut is one of the most valuable North American woods on the market...and every year the debate rages as to whether or not to take down one or more of the several dozen tree-rat magnets to sacrifice to becoming rifle stocks. But then the nuts drop and it's easy...they taste too damn good.

Oh, and the nuts keep for a long time, too...when cleaned and dried properly. Unshelled...shelled, they only last a short while, unless frozen.

Another very valuable use...especially with small/young volunteers...rootstock for English walnut cultivars. Yep, just graft onto it where it is (don't try to transplant them, you'll be surprised how deep a 1 ft seedling BW tap root is (hint, dig down AT LEAST 2x, they length of the 'trunk'). Among other things, it adds a bit of cold hardiness to the EW.

[reed]

I'm shocked that black walnuts are regarded unfavorably in some places. Around here, at least as far as my family and close associates go, black walnuts have always been regarded as almost sacred. 

[khoomeizhi]

May 4, 2017 13:15:14 GMT -5 mjc said:

Another very valuable use...especially with small/young volunteers...rootstock for English walnut cultivars.

i'm doing the same with black walnut cultivars - we are at the orchards, too. with rind grafts you can go up to about 4" rootstocks.

[mjc]

You can also graft butternut and heartnut onto BW rootstock.

With the bigger sizes, be careful, if not closely watched, the original can still take over...I prefer smaller ones, but that's just me. I've got a couple of trees that have very thin 'new' wood and very dark heartwood, so I've been grafting them onto random seedlings.

I must have over 2 dozen large, nut bearing sized trees and hundreds of smaller (4" trunks down to last years sprouts) fairly close to the house...not counting the stand of butternuts and other random black walnuts in the woods.

[Walk]

May 4, 2017 16:08:17 GMT -5 mjc said:

You can also graft butternut and heartnut onto BW rootstock.

With the bigger sizes, be careful, if not closely watched, the original can still take over...I prefer smaller ones, but that's just me. I've got a couple of trees that have very thin 'new' wood and very dark heartwood, so I've been grafting them onto random seedlings.

I must have over 2 dozen large, nut bearing sized trees and hundreds of smaller (4" trunks down to last years sprouts) fairly close to the house...not counting the stand of butternuts and other random black walnuts in the woods.

Interesting about grafting butternut to BW stock. What type of graft? Does the BW rootstock confer any disease resistance to the butternut? Around here the native butternuts have almost disappeared due to a blight.

[mjc]

Any kind of graft, really...but I prefer using smaller ones. I've had more trouble with the BW taking over on the larger type grafts...cleft, etc.

Not sure about the disease resistance.

But, as far as the blight goes, we have it here in WV, too...but my trees seem to be holding their own.

[steev]

May 4, 2017 15:14:32 GMT -5 reed said:

I'm shocked that black walnuts are regarded unfavorably in some places. Around here, at least as far as my family and close associates go, black walnuts have always been regarded as almost sacred. 

As they well should be.

[blueadzuki]

Assuming you have the climate, if you are actually trying to grow Black walnuts (as opposed to simply taking advantage of whatever wild trees are around one) it may be worthwhile to look into the Claro/Hind's walnut, Juglans hindsii (a subspecies of the California black walnut). As far as I can tell it has more or less the same flavor as a black walnut, and so presumably the same uses. The difference (and it is a fairly important one) is that, unlike a normal black walnut, Hind's walnut has no crenelations/ridges on the nut shell (it looks like an over-sized hickory nut), This makes them a LOT easier to clean during harvest. A normal black walnut usually does need things like being run over with a car and allowed to weather for mass harvest. With a hinds all you really need is a brillo pad (or other scrubbing sponge) and running water to get them squeaky clean without your hands getting stained)

The only tricky bit may be getting them. there are two sellers on ebay who SAY they have them, and one of them can do bulk orders) However I can't help but notice that neither is using any pictures of actual hinds (the whole fruit is a standard black and all the other pics are of English). And that could be a problem as Hinds is both obscure enough to often get confused with other walnuts (like the standard California) and hybridized with both the normal California and Eastern black (which brings back the ridges usually) and the English in the form of the Paradox walnut which has it's own problems (Burbank created the Paradox as a street tree, so a lot of them are designed purposely to be extremely poor nut producers (actually a lot are totally sterile, but by definition you wouldn't get those if you were starting from seed.)

[khoomeizhi]

May 7, 2017 1:05:37 GMT -5 blueadzuki said:

A normal black walnut usually does need things like being run over with a car and allowed to weather for mass harvest. With a hinds all you really need is a brillo pad (or other scrubbing sponge) and running water to get them squeaky clean without your hands getting stained)

they do still have hulls, though, right? in my experience the running-over-with-a-car trick is really only useful for de-hulling. when dealing with volume, it would probably be the same process for cleaning, since i don't want to touch each nut with a scrubber: cement mixer or the one-bucket-batch equivalent, the five gallon bucket with nuts, water, an couple handfuls of sharp gravel, and an electric drill with cement-mixer attachment.