Garden Journal - Walnuts !

We've got a walnut tree on the front flowerbed. It wasn't deliberate, the squirrels gave it to us when they dropped a walnut they'd stolen from a tree in the garden of a house around the back of ours.

It's actually in a really awkward place, with the lower ranches making it hard for people to get cars onto our drive. So awkward that I actually cut it down when it was just a sapling. It grew again. So I cut it down again. It grew again. At that point, I took the view that if it was trying that hard, it deserved to live.

That was about eight years ago. Our tree surgeon told us that walnut trees usually take about 15 years to mature enough to start making nuts. Yeah, not our one. It's precocious.

Last year for the first time it made just one or two nuts. This year, it made quite a lot - a good few dozen. Most are still in the tree, like the photo below.

What should happen is that the green outer husk is supposed to open when it's ripe and for the walnut to fall out. What actually seems to have happened is that the gale-force winds we've had intermittently for the last few weeks have blown some of the nuts off still inside their husks.

So I picked them up from the front flowerbed to see what we had. Some were a bit discoloured, two were still in their husks, and a couple were very small and immature.

I got to work with the nutcracker. About half of them (mostly the discoloured ones) had obviously been sitting on the ground too long, and the walnuts inside had gone black and rotten. One of the immature ones had nothing in at all. But we did get a few nice fresh walnuts (together with a stray hazelnut), which you can see in the photo below.

They'll be good in a salad - they are nice and fresh and tasty !

While it was a small crop, it wasn't bad for a tree that wasn't even supposed to make any nuts at all for another six or seven years, and there are still plenty more on the tree that haven't come down yet.

One thing to be aware of with walnuts is that you should wear gloves when you take the husks off. They were used in the past to make a really nice pale brown dye or dark brown ink. It doesn't even need a mordant if you are dying natural animal-sourced fibres (wool etc). If you get the juice on your hands they'll be black for days or weeks no matter how much you wash them !

Next year I might experiment with collecting all the husks up and trying to make dye with them. Walnuts are wonderful trees - literally every part is useful.