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Despite wearing two gloves on each hand, I managed to puncture both layers with the wire cleaning brush. What I learned is that I need to replace my wire brush more frequently. Meanwhile, I have brown hands for the next couple of weeks.

To date, I have harvested over 500 black walnuts. I can clean 25 walnuts an hour.

I’ve been stomping hulls of walnuts while singing Peppermint Twist or Twist and Shout. I try to mash the nuts on the road where I find them.

Then the real work starts. I put on my gloves and load the hulled nuts into a bucket.

I grab a wire brush and head for the car wash to scrub the remaining hull material from the nut. I find that if I pick up nuts that have been hulled or if I hull them several hours before I clean them, that it’s harder to clean the nuts.

Here’s what my tools look like after cleaning 400 nuts. Note the missing wire brush bristles and the shredded gloves, as well as the cleaned nuts.

Next, the cleaned nuts need to be allowed to cure for four or five weeks. You can eat them now, but the texture is rubbery. They will taste much better a month from now.

I don’t have a way to keep the drying walnuts from predators, so I put some storage baskets to use in a new way.

I’m motivated to do this, in part because George Johanson gifted me a walnut cracker. I now understand why black walnuts are expensive to purchase.

Foraging is hard work, but the quality of what I get to eat makes it worth the effort. There is simply no substitute for nutritious food.