Picking Walnuts

I took up walnut gathering at a young age. My friend Travis and I would roam the farm on a three-wheeler, pulling a little trailer that we would fill with bags of nuts, and at the end of the season we would load them all up in the truck and my dad would take us to a local buyer to sell them.

This weekend, about 30 years after Travis and I did our gleaning, I revisited those same trees with Ann and the boys. The trees haven’t changed much. I don’t think any have died, nor have they grown a noticeable amount. Walnuts tend to be an every-other-year crop on most trees, and the five mature walnuts in our yard in Columbia are on an off-year, producing some, but not a lot. And a lack of hickory nuts have put extra squirrel pressure on the walnut trees at our house. So the farm was our next-best option. We didn’t find many under the first trees we checked at the farm, but I kept following my memories to specific trees, and we ended up finding all we wanted.

Walnuts usually sell for about 10 cents per pound hulled. A hulled walnut weighs a lot less than a big green one. To give you an approximate scale, my sister piles the bed of her husband’s Ford F-350 truck high with sacks of walnuts, and can get about $60 worth on one load. She picks up a couple loads a year like that.

The walnuts that grow in Missouri are black walnuts, and are very different than English walnuts. You’re most likely to have encountered their distinctive flavor in black walnut ice cream.

All the walnuts purchased by buyers in Missouri and the surrounding states end up in Stockton, MO, at Hammons Black Walnuts.  Hammons has 250 buying stations, or hullers, in a 16 state area. They sell black walnuts directly to the food industry for products like black walnut ice cream, and even sell the hulls, which are used as an abrasive for polishing metal, as a filter to separate crude oil from water, in cosmetics and in dynamite.

If you don’t want to crack your own nuts, Hammons also has a retail division. You can purchase pure, wild black walnuts from them, or candy-coated nuts at their website www.hammonsproducts.com. The website will also tell you everything you ever wanted to know about walnuts.

Full disclosure, I’m acquainted with Brian Hammons through my employer, the United Methodist Church. Brian is the laity leader for the UMC in Missouri. He volunteers a ton of time to the church, and is an all-around great guy. 

I was happy to share my walnut-gathering heritage with my family this weekend, even if it was a little hard for the boys to stay on task. Come to think of it, Travis and I probably weren’t that speedy back in the day either. I think I remember my split of the take being something around $14 after a season of harvesting.