This year harvesting bigtime. Started with 100 gallons of unhusked and
looks to be 30 gallons of
husked black walnut. I have plastic containers with lids to keep the
squirrels and rodents out of
until unhusked.

I read somewhere that the green husked have a better flavor than
waiting for a black husk.

Alot of the fly and maggots in the husks.

Time consuming to place on the woodstove top to dry and roast the nut.

Maybe as the years roll by I can find some alternatives to make the
work easier.

Read that commercial operations have a sort of wheel belt that unhusks
the black walnut.

One year I tried soaking them in water until the husk was easy to
remove, but I wonder
if the water penetrated the nut itself which would be dirty water.

Tried a few and they are delicious with a strong flavor. And that the
small ones often
are better tasting than the larger nuts.

They do seem to take alot of time and will have to find better methods
of dehusking.

The only thing left to harvest now is frostbite tomatoes that are
green but will redden
in the winter and potatoes and rhubarb.

Also have to plant the strawberries out of their pots and into the
ground for the winter
and cover with straw.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

wrote in message
...

This year harvesting bigtime. Started with 100 gallons of unhusked and
looks to be 30 gallons of
husked black walnut.

You're sure going to have a "fun" time of it cracking open those many
gallons of wickedly hard black walnuts to engage in ultra-tedious picking
out of the meat.

We used to have a couple of prodigiously productive black walnut trees in
our back lot--every year, I'd gather up a bunch of the fallen nuts, placing
small lots of them in a cardboard box to shake around with vigorous vitality
in order to wear off most of the surface "black soot." And then the fun
began. In my spare time, I'd patiently crack open the nuts with my geology
hammer, then use one of those sharp dental tools (the variety a hygenist
uses to clean one's teeth) to poke around and pluck out the meat. After a
few weeks of occasional dedicated work, I'd have a nice cache of black
walnuts to store away.

In one of our better landscaping decisions, I must say, we finally removed
both the black walnut trees several years ago; but, if I ever wanted to
collect more black walnuts to mess around with, there are certainly numerous
huge, producing wild specimens concentrated down by our local river. Anyway,
good luck with your project--'cause you're gonna need it.

Fossil Plants Of The Ione Basin, California
http://members.aol.com/Waucoba5/ione/ioneproject.html
(An addendum here--all of my paleobotany web pages, plus all my paleontology
pages, in general, will not be found at their current URLs after October 31,
2008; this, because my ISP provider is eliminating all of their members' web
space.)

On or about Sun, 19 Oct 2008 01:37:07 -0700 (PDT) did
dribble thusly:

This year harvesting bigtime. Started with 100 gallons of unhusked and
looks to be 30 gallons of
husked black walnut. I have plastic containers with lids to keep the
squirrels and rodents out of
until unhusked.

One method of dehusking which I've heard of, but not tried personally, is to
put the walnuts in a sack (canvas or burlap) on your driveway and drive over
it repeatedly with your vehicle. There's no risk of cracking the nuts, as
anyone who's tried to open a black walnut knows well.

Inyo wrote:
wrote in message
...

This year harvesting bigtime. Started with 100 gallons of unhusked and
looks to be 30 gallons of
husked black walnut.

You're sure going to have a "fun" time of it cracking open those many
gallons of wickedly hard black walnuts to engage in ultra-tedious picking
out of the meat.

We used to have a couple of prodigiously productive black walnut trees in
our back lot--every year, I'd gather up a bunch of the fallen nuts, placing
small lots of them in a cardboard box to shake around with vigorous vitality
in order to wear off most of the surface "black soot." And then the fun
began. In my spare time, I'd patiently crack open the nuts with my geology
hammer, then use one of those sharp dental tools (the variety a hygenist
uses to clean one's teeth) to poke around and pluck out the meat. After a
few weeks of occasional dedicated work, I'd have a nice cache of black
walnuts to store away.


Cracking open and picking out is easy. You have half of the equation
of
ease as I also use dental tools. But the other half of the equation of
ease
is to use a vise-grip, I use a medium sized Vise-Grip which takes 1
second
to crack a nut, no mess, no splatter when held inside a container.

I am still experimenting as to where to take a hold of the nut and
crack
it so it maximizes the size of the meat to pull out. The ideal crack
is where
it is in two pieces and the four pieces of meat are lifted out.


In one of our better landscaping decisions, I must say, we finally removed
both the black walnut trees several years ago; but, if I ever wanted to
collect more black walnuts to mess around with, there are certainly numerous
huge, producing wild specimens concentrated down by our local river. Anyway,
good luck with your project--'cause you're gonna need it.


No, you meat eaters are goning to need more luck than I do.

I am not a complete vegetarian for I occasionally eat meat. But I am
looking into the data and research of nuts replacing all meat.

I see that someone computed that black-walnuts per weight are 1.5
times
more of all the protein found in beef. So let us say that a human
requires
at least 1 roast beef sandwich per day to survive with protein. So the
weight
of that roast beef let us say is the weight equivalent of 10 black
walnuts kernels.
And the cracking open of 10 black walnuts takes 10 seconds and
delivers
to me 1.5 more of all the protein I need per day. Not a bad trade off.

But it gets even better, in that, counting the time it takes for me to
process
black walnuts (1) collect (2) dehusk (3) dry or roast for storage; is
far less
of a time of processing than if I took a cattle, slaughtered it and
dressed out
the meat and then cured and storaged. And not counting the time it
took
me during the seasons to care for the cattle whereas the tree is
sitting there
doing what a tree does-- give off more nuts.

So I think scientists should be doing more of these sort of
calculations of
moving society over to better sustaining food. I am not saying we
eliminate
meat from diet, but saying that the bulk of human protein food should
come
from vegetative protein, since it decomposes in far longer time than
does
the decomposition of animal protein. And animal protein cares uric
acid
and other mild poisons.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

Mike Ruskai wrote:
On or about Sun, 19 Oct 2008 01:37:07 -0700 (PDT) did
dribble thusly:

This year harvesting bigtime. Started with 100 gallons of unhusked and
looks to be 30 gallons of
husked black walnut. I have plastic containers with lids to keep the
squirrels and rodents out of
until unhusked.

One method of dehusking which I've heard of, but not tried personally, is to
put the walnuts in a sack (canvas or burlap) on your driveway and drive over
it repeatedly with your vehicle. There's no risk of cracking the nuts, as
anyone who's tried to open a black walnut knows well.

Nay, that is a poor technique, for hand removal is far faster and less
messy. Besides
all the gasoline gone to waste.

If the husks are very green then just keep them in a squirrel free
container for about
2 weeks and when easy to pull off by hand wearing rubber gloves.

If I had hundreds of black walnut trees to harvest every year, I would
invent some
machine that would automatically dehusk.

At the moment I think I may have bypassed one of the time consuming
operations of drying
and roasting. I dehusked a bucket last week and seeing if it will just
naturally dry out in the
back room, and so far good news in that the upper layers are becoming
dry. So maybe I
do not have to put the wet nuts on the wood stove top and dry the
nuts.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

wrote:
(snipped)

At the moment I think I may have bypassed one of the time consuming
operations of drying
and roasting. I dehusked a bucket last week and seeing if it will just
naturally dry out in the
back room, and so far good news in that the upper layers are becoming
dry. So maybe I
do not have to put the wet nuts on the wood stove top and dry the
nuts.


No, I am wrong about that, I remember now in some past years ago, I
had
a bucket of them that were wet without the woodstove treatment, and
getting closer to the bottom of the bucket was massive whitish looking
some kind of fungus or mold or some growth. Whitish looking growth.
Anyone know what that whitish growth is? So I have to give them
the woodstove roasting treatment otherwise the nuts are covered
in some white growth.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

Two number assumptions I am going to go under. 1901 the human world
population was 1 billion
and by 2008 it reached 7 billion. Now there are some facts that anyone
can find out about agriculture and I would be surprized
if noone used these facts to compute the optimal human population
size. Earth has 150 million
km^2 of land of which 20 million km^2 is arable-- that is farmable
productive in growing food.

Not counting the Oceans for protein or food then 7,000,000,000 humans
has 20,000,000
km^2 of land to grow food upon. That means 350 people per every 1 km^2
of land to live
on. Now, how many walnut trees can grow on 1 km^2 of land?

In my previous posts, I outlined a Optimal Human Population as that of
1901 where we can say
that humanity could live on this planet by using purely, and only
renewable energy and nothing
else that dirtys the air and no Global Warming and preservation of
plant and animal wild species.
So that if we kept human population with 1 and 2 billion humans, and
no more that we would each
have plenty of food and plenty of energy.

But now, let me compute the 1 to 2 billion figure from agriculture.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

Earlier today I wrote:

Not counting the Oceans for protein or food then 7,000,000,000 humans
has 20,000,000
km^2 of land to grow food upon. That means 350 people per every 1 km^2
of land to live
on. Now, how many walnut trees can grow on 1 km^2 of land?


Now km^2 means a square kilometer or a square whose sides are 1,000 by
1,000 meters.
Now a mature black walnut tree is about 10 meters spacing between
trees, so that in
a square kilometer we can expect 100 by 100 black walnut trees or
10,000 black walnut
trees growing in such a nut orchard of km^2.

Now let us assume humans only ate black walnuts and that ten trees
supplied the food
of one human for a full year. So that each square kilometer of arable
land supports a
population of 1,000 humans.

Now looking at the arable land of UK, of Germany, of USA of China we
have
60,000 sq km, 120,000 sq. km, 2,000,000 sq km, and 930,000 sq km
respectively. Now
we make the assumption that all the arable land can grow black walnuts
or some equivalent nut tree. Then given these assumptions we can
derive
what a optimal human population is for UK as 60,000 x 1,000 which
gives us 60
million and from looking at the data the population of UK in the 1997
census was
58 million. Germany would yield 120,000 x 1,000 which would be 120
million
people and Germany was 82 million in the 1997 census. The USA could
have an optimal population of 2,000,000 x 1,000 or 2 billion humans
whereas
its actual population is 268 million in the 1997 census. China
could have optimal population of 930,000 x 1,000 = 930 million whereas
its actual population is 1.2 billion in the 1997 census.

Now the data of the total arable land in the world is 20 million
square kilometers
which when multiplied by 1,000 would give a population of 20 billion
humans.

But there are huge flawed assumptions in the arable land. The worst
assumption
is that all the arable land of 20 million square km cannot support
trees such as
black walnut but that much of this arable land is grassland farmed
land where the
rainfall is not for trees but for grassland which requires alot of
yearly energy
inputs whereas black walnuts require little energy inputs. Of the
arable land
that can support perennial trees for food is about 1/5 of the 20
million square
km. That means only 4 billion humans and not 20 billion humans. Now
there
is another flawed assumption in arable lands is the energy input for
annual
plants such as wheat, corn, rice etc rather than perennials such as
black
walnuts. Energy inputs of tilling, fertilizing, herbicides, pesticides
and then
of erosion of soil. I have not calculated what affect energy has on 20
million
square km arable land has.

I would guess that when it is detailed computed that the 20 million
square km
of arable land of planet Earth can support only at maximum 6 billion
humans.
In other words, we already surpassed the upper reaches of feeding the
human
population and that every year a billion humans will die of
starvation.

There is another assumption I have not included and that is the food
of oceans
and waters such as the fish and marine life we eat. But also, on the
negative
ledger side I have not accounted for the food spoilage or the insect
and rodent
and other pests that eat the food before we can eat.

Summary: in posts a long time ago, I said that the human population of
the
year 1901 was a watershed year because in that year we had 1 billion
humans
as census and when we had 1 billion humans we could live on purely
renewable
energy and obviously we could all feed 1 billion humans so that noone
starves or
has a dismal life. Now I believe that a range of 1 to 2 billion humans
but no more
than 2 billion can still meet all the energy needs by renewable
sources where
we do not have to burn coal or wood but can live on purely clean
energy of
wind, hydroelectric, solar. And where we do not need to use gasoline.
Where the air can be as pristine clean as it was before we ever burned
a single
air polluter device. Where the oxygen content of the air we breathe is
back to
the 21 to 22% of air and not the dirty air we now breathe where the
oxygen content
is less than 18% (need some reliable data on oxygen content in air).

So anyway, the picture is beginning to form that the optimal human
population for
planet Earth looks to be between 1 to 2 billion humans.

Now we have to begin to teach the politicians that we want our
countries to slim
down and decrease their populations to that 1 to 2 billion mark.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

In article ,
PAM (Mike Ruskai) says...
On or about Sun, 19 Oct 2008 01:37:07 -0700 (PDT) did
dribble thusly:

This year harvesting bigtime. Started with 100 gallons of unhusked and
looks to be 30 gallons of
husked black walnut. I have plastic containers with lids to keep the
squirrels and rodents out of
until unhusked.

One method of dehusking which I've heard of, but not tried personally, is to
put the walnuts in a sack (canvas or burlap) on your driveway and drive over
it repeatedly with your vehicle. There's no risk of cracking the nuts, as
anyone who's tried to open a black walnut knows well.

We have a black walnut nut cracker. It's a pair of angled, serrated
vise jaws mounted on a board, operated by about a one foot handle. A
full stroke of the handle closes the jaws about 1/4", just enough to
crack the shell of the nut.

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