Young trees often make larger nuts than when they mature. I’ve had Hay #1 nuts twice as large as from a mature tree. I’ve picked up 20 buckets (5 gallon) of walnuts from a 30 year old Thomas tree and left another 10 buckets on the ground because I did not have time to keep picking up. I have no idea how many bushels that is, but you get the idea it is a productive tree.
A professor at Cornell about 50 years ago said that so far he had found no walnut that was overall better than Thomas. The only weakness with Thomas is that the kernel percentage is a tad low. As far as the tree is concerned, it is intolerant of shading but this is a typical issue with black walnut. Thin the trees at the right time and it will outproduce almost everything else I have. McGinnis is another that is highly productive in terms of number of nuts produced, but the nuts are small which reduces the number of pounds of kernel produced per tree. McGinnis is still an excellent walnut for Nebraska and other northern locations. It matures up to a month before Thomas.
I’m not trying to derail the thread, just had a question.
Has anyone tried making walnut butter? What were the results? If it’s garbage let me know. You need a lot of meat and blacks are a lot of work to get that much.
I’ve tasted walnut syrup made the same as maple syrup by tapping the trees in the spring. I have not tried walnut butter though it should be easy to make. The only problem I can see is that black walnut is a very oily nut so the butter would be thin and probably have to set it settle and pour off some of the oil. Other than that, I would only try making it if I had plenty of good quality walnuts harvested promptly, dried, and shelled.
I watched a few videos of it and the oil is something they were talking about. If you have ever had home made peanut butter, it usually has an oil layer on top. Thinking this would be the same, but with more oil. I’m dying to try it. Add a little maple syrup and cinnamon maybe. They say adding syrup will thicken it.
I saw this in action at the KY nut growers meeting about 2002 or 2003. It was demonstrated with Stoker walnuts which crack a bit different than most varieties. The first crack was with the stub to split the walnut in half. Once split in half, one of the halves is put into the jaws about 1/3 of the way and the base end is cracked off. This should NOT split the kernel leaving the quarters intact. Then the large piece of shell is put back beneath the stub and used inside the kernel cavity to split the cavity on each side dropping the kernels out as intact quarters. Once you figure it out, it is far and away the fastest way I’ve seen to crack black walnuts. Unfortunately, many named varieties don’t work so well for this cracking method because the kernel is bound in the shell too tightly.
I’ll look thru my cracked black walnut photos with this cracker and get back with you, however, it does seem to me that most of what I cracked separated easy from shells or ribs within the dorsal grooves.
It seems that all the cultivars I cracked I didn’t photograph which is strange cause I always do that when cracking cultivars of any nut. However, walnuts are not something I eat. Gosh, I cracked, Emma K, Bowser, G4, Myers Sport, Oldham, and a few more for sure.
I also may be remembering incorrectly just how well they cracked.
