In my post of a couple of days ago entitled It’s Fall And They’re Fallin’, I showed how an amateur (myself) goes about collecting fallen black walnuts from his lawn.  Today I will introduce you to a friend of ours, Jasper, whom you may recall from a previous post entitled Bee Hunting In The Ozarks, is an experienced bee keeper, as well as the regions most skilled practitioner of the vanishing art of “coursing” bees.

 

  I would say without hesitation that Jasper (Jay) is an old pro at gathering black walnuts.  He is consistently this area’s top seller to Hammons Nut Products, who purchase black walnuts from local gatherers in 12-16 states each fall.  Jasper begins his nut gathering each year just prior to the opening of the Hammons collection stations, which, this year, will occur tomorrow.

 

The first step in the gathering process for this seasoned harvester is to shake the lower limbs of the trees, so that the loose nuts that remain attached to these limbs will fall to the ground.  The pole that Jay is using has a hook at the end, which Jay drapes over a limb and then tugs a few times.  As you can see from the photograph above, Jay wears a hard-hat while performing this task.  If you have even been hit in the head by a large, unhulled walnut that has fallen from the top of the tree, you will immediately understand the precaution that Jasper takes – it hurts!

 

The photograph above shows the effectiveness of shaking the limbs.  Now, one only has to pick up the nuts and load them into the truck.  On Jay’s next visit to pick up nuts, he will bring an extension for his pole, which will allow it to reach limbs 20 feet higher than the lower limbs of today’s harvest. 

In last Friday’s post, you may remember this photograph, which shows me using an interesting tool designed to make the nut gathering process easier to accomplish.  I love this tool.  Two years ago, I showed it to Jasper and asked if he would like to try it out.  “Sure would,” he replied.  About an hour later, when I looked across a pasture to see how Jay was coming along, I noticed that he wasn’t using the tool I had lent him.  When I inquired later as to why he had abandoned the tool, looked at me and replied “It just slows me down.”

And this is how Jasper prefers to gather the fallen walnuts – by hand, the old-fashioned way.  But that is how the pros do it.  Keep this photograph in mind as I take this opportunity to become a little bit analytical.

The record that the title of this post refers to is the personal annual total amount of nuts gathered by Jasper, which stands at over 17,000 pounds of hulled black walnuts, a record he achieved 2 years ago.  Jasper thinks he may top that amount this year, based upon the trees he has examined to date.  Now for some simple math.  Recall from It’s Fall And They’re Fallin’, that we derived the average weight of a small sample of black walnuts that I gathered the other day:  .0712 pounds/nut, or about 14 nuts per pound.

Jasper tells me, based upon his experiments, that a hulled walnut weighs about 60% less than it’s unhulled weight.  I have not confirmed this, but taking him at his word, we can derive the following.  To end up with 17,000 pounds of hulled walnuts, one has to start with 28,333 pounds of unhulled nuts (17,000#/.60).  If we take my calculation of 14 unhulled nuts per pound as accurate, then Jasper would have had to pick up a total of 396,666 nuts to arrive at 17,000 pounds of hulled walnuts.

When Jasper achieved this personal record two years ago, Hammons was paying $10.00/cwt for hulled walnuts.  So Jasper’s gross revenue from his efforts was $1700.  Considering the fuel expense involved in multiple trips to the collection station (about 25 miles distant), as well as multiple trips to many area farms, the net revenue does not amount to all that much income – especially when one imagines the amount of labor involved in hand gathering nearly 400,000 nuts!

By the way, Jasper will celebrate his 83rd birthday in two weeks.  Happy birthday, Jay, and we wish you many more to come!

Look closely at the passenger seat on our utility vehicle.  Do you see anything unusual in this picture?

 

Don’t give up – keep looking!

 

 

 Still haven’t spotted anything out of the ordinary?

 

 

Scroll down, and I’ll show you what I can plainly see (in person, of course).

 

 

Lookee what we’ve got here:

I’ve heard of not letting grass grow under you feet, but how about not letting it grow under your seat?

But the real question is – how am I going to mow this?

As you may recall from a previous post entitled Black Walnuts On My Mind, we have from 200-300 black walnut trees on our property, out of which I have located and mapped 94 individual trees that are prolific nut producers this season.  Eventually, the time comes for the nuts to fall from the protective limbs of the walnut trees onto the ground below – that time has now come, as you can see from the following photograph.

Of the 94 productive trees, 7 are located in the yard surrounding our house, which, for aesthetic reasons, I like to maintain as mowed lawn.  The walnuts that fall from trees in our pastures and fields remain where they lie, until our friend Jasper comes to gather them (which will probably be in the next two weeks, and the subject of a future post).  But the nuts that fall upon my lawn get gathered soon after they fall from the tree, for two reasons.  As you can see in the photo above, the walnuts can easily cause twisted or sprained ankles for the unwary person traversing the lawn, so for safety reasons I like to remove them quickly.

As you can see in the photo above, the walnuts begin their decomposition soon after hitting the ground, and the black, tar-like substance that emanates from within the husk will kill the grasses that lie beneath the rotting nut if it is allowed to remain on the ground.  If this happened with only a few nuts, it would not be a problem, but with thousands of nuts falling from each tree, the lawn would soon disappear beneath the trees if the nuts were not rapidly removed after falling.

What you see here is a tool for picking up walnuts (and other types of nuts, as well) that Retta was kind enough to purchase for me from a farm store she was visiting in Ozark, Missouri a couple of years ago.  Each and every time I use this tool, I am grateful to her for having had the foresight to buy it, as it has eliminated the back-wrenching stooping that I used to go through in order to pick up the walnuts that were befouling my cherished lawn.

Here, you can see how simple this tool is to use – simply roll it along the ground where the nuts have landed, and like magic, the nuts end up trapped inside.  Soon, the tool will fill with nuts, as seen below, but it is quick and easy to empty the nuts into a suitable container and continue with the task at hand.

Each morning, after gathering the nuts that have fallen the previous day, I dump them into a pile, where they will remain until either;  A) Jasper picks them up, or B) “my” squirrels gather and bury them for their winter sustenance.

The picture above is the pile of nuts that had fallen in one single day from these seven trees in my yard.  I will gather these nuts on a daily basis until the trees are barren and enter their winter slumber, saving their strength for the crop that they will surely produce next summer.

It is hard to say with any degree of certainty how much an un-hulled black walnut weighs.  As you can see in the photograph above, the size of the nuts that fell from the same tree are quite variable.  To try to ascertain an average weight of the un-hulled nuts, I filled a five gallon bucket with walnuts, as seen below.

After filling the bucket, I weighed it on our bathroom scale, and determined the net weight to be 24 pounds.  A manual count indicated that there were 337 nuts in the bucket.  Therefore, simple arithmetic yielded an average weight of .0712 pounds/nut, or about 14 nuts per pound.  Remember these figures, for they will be used in an analysis of Jasper’s labors in a post that will appear here in the near future.