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