The progression of the summer season is finally bringing the first of our staple Texas wild fruit harvests, which is just the beginning of a several month window where many wild fruits and nuts become ripe and ready to harvest, one species after another…
Grapes and elderberries in late summer, progressing to beautyberry and sumac in early fall, then farkleberry, hackberry, gum bumelia, blackhaw, persimmon, juniper berry and more.
These wild fruits are a welcome influx of wild vitamins, minerals, unique flavors, natural sweetness, and bright, interesting colors. However, if you’re wondering where to get denser quantities of protein and fat from wild plants, look for the nut harvests that come with the autumn season.
Our most common nut trees that grow wild in Texas are black walnut (Juglans nigra), pecan (Carya illinoinensis) and oak (Quercus spp.).
Why am I writing about the autumn nut harvest now, during peak summer season? The main reason is because I’m currently processing a lot of the nuts I collected last fall. With walnuts and acorns, I like to cure/age them for at least a few weeks before they’re perfect to process, and I also like to do a lot of my nut processing outdoors, so I tend to wait until spring when the weather is nicer to do most of it. Then I get super busy in the spring, teaching foraging classes and doing homeschool group activities with my kids, so at least half of this processing gets pushed off even further. I tend to prioritize the acorns first, since they spoil more easily, so get those leached and processed into flour during winter and early spring.
Summer is actually the perfect time to finish processing my nut harvests from the previous year, since the days are long, I have more time on my hands, and it gives me an excuse to get out into the heat and do something outside, instead of hiding out all day in overly comfortable air conditioned structures.
Another great reason to talk about nut harvesting now is if you haven’t done it yet, and want to get into it, this will give you a couple months to prepare. It is a process that requires the right techniques and equipment to make it efficient and worth your time.
I will write a separate article about acorn processing. This time, I want to talk about our wild pecans and black walnuts.
After a decade of cracking small, thick-shelled native pecans with a handheld nutcracker, and black walnuts with a hammer (praying for my fingers with each smack), I bought myself a special birthday present last December. As a longtime forager, I knew it would pay itself off quickly in my case!
It’s called Grandpa’s Goodie Getter, and is an incredibly heavy duty nutcracker created by a really cool old guy in the Ozark mountains, and the business is now run by his son. I don’t get any commissions for telling you about it, I just think it’s a high quality, extremely effective device. It was originally designed to crack black walnuts, which have the hardest shell of any nut, but will crack any other nut as well, including hickory nuts (which also have very hard, thick shells). The device is a spring loaded press that uses leverage to crack nuts that are almost impossible to get into otherwise.
The best thing about it is the way it cracks the nuts, which is very cleanly with almost no tiny shell shards or crushed nutmeats, as long as you don’t go overboard with the pressure. This means that picking the individual nutmeats out of the shell afterwards is a MUCH easier task than using a hammer. Having used a hammer to crack black walnuts for years, I will say that getting the pieces out afterward is a major headache. In contrast, picking out nutmeats after using this device is an enjoyable meditative experience you can do while listening to the birds (or a podcast), talking with friends, or watching your kids play outside.
Both pecans and black walnuts grow on medium to large trees with pinnately compound leaves with simple, lance-shaped, finely toothed leaflets growing in opposites/pairs. The nuts of both species ripen in the fall. Pecans have husks that open into four parts to expose the ripe nut, but the green walnut hulls do not open up on their own, and need to be removed.
The walnut hulls begin to turn black as the nut matures, and when greenish black, the hull can be removed by stomping on it with boots, then peeling it off to reveal a hard, black, furrowed nut shell underneath. We collect buckets of walnuts, then remove all the hulls in one stomping session (outdoors on hard ground, or a hard surface that you don’t mind getting temporarily stained), and rinse the walnuts in buckets with lots of water after the hulls have been removed. The hull contains a thick, dark black dye that stains everything orange, including your hands. The stains can last about two weeks, fading gradually.
With a job description of foraging teacher, I personally find these hand stains to be quite okay, and a great conversation starter. However, if your job description frowns upon orange stained hands with brownish fingernails, you may want to wear gloves for this part.
After you’ve rinsed the walnuts a few times (you will never remove all the black juice and remaining hull residue, so don’t try too hard), place them on a large screen next to a fan, and they will dry fully in several hours or overnight. A garage is great for this, but be sure to put something under the screen to catch the liquid while they dry.
Then you can store your walnuts in a cool, dry, dark place, in shallow boxes. The ones I’m currently processing were stored for 8 months or so in this way, without spoilage, and they’re absolutely perfect.
You can crack them with a hammer (watch your fingers), or a fancy device like the Grandpa’s Goodie Getter (much preferred!). You’ll need a nut pick to remove the small pieces from the furrows inside the shell.
Pecans are much easier, and do not require any processing besides cracking the shells open to remove the nutmeats. Occasionally the husks will cling to the pecan a little bit, but those are easy to remove by hand.
There are some pecan tree cultivars that are used in landscaping, planted in city parks, and even growing wild/feral, often called “papershell” varieties. These are larger nuts, with thinner shells are larger nutmeats, and incredibly easy to remove from the shell with a simple handheld nutcracker, or even just a rock and a hard surface. These are my favorite, and always the ones that get eaten first around here, since they’re so easy!
It’s more common to find the smaller native pecans, which are about 1 inch long and half an inch thick. They have harder shells and smaller nutmeats, but are just as delicious. You can crack them with a handheld nutcracker, but cracking them across the width and not the length results in the nutmeat being very hard to remove. It’s much better to crack them lengthwise, which is easily done with light pressure using my favorite nut cracking device you’ve already heard me heap copious praise upon. Cracking them lengthwise allows for very easy and fast nutmeat removal.
It may seem like harvesting and processing these nuts is time consuming for the calories you’re getting from it, but if that was the end of the story for you, you would still be fully content getting all your food from grocery store shelves.
For me, the number of calories harvested is the least intriguing and important thing about foraging. Of course, it would be vital in a true survival situation, where we are forced to acquire all our calories from the land, but almost none of us are in this situation. Standard American diets are abundant in empty calories, and sorely lacking in vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients. This is a much better reason to seek out wild food, in my opinion. Wild plants are generally very rich in micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), health-sustaining flavonoids and polyphenols, and even medicinal properties that can help us maintain good health and ward off disease before it starts. If you consider how much money people spend on supplements, herbs, and pharmaceutical drugs, foraging for your own sources of these (or similar) essential and helpful compounds suddenly becomes much more valuable.
Besides being a source of sustaining and satiating healthy fats, pecans contain more than 19 vitamins and minerals – including beta carotene, vitamin E, folic acid, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, several B vitamins, zinc, dietary fiber and protein.
Black walnuts also contain healthy fats, including omega-3s, but they also happen to have the highest protein content of any tree nut! There are even protein powders now being made from black walnuts. They are also an excellent source of iron, magnesium, phosphorous, potassium, zinc, selenium, copper, manganese, various B vitamins, fiber, beta carotene and vitamin E.
Something else I personally think about when consuming wild foods is more esoteric. For me, eating foods that contain hardy, wild genetics that are perfectly adapted to my local environment is something I seek out, as I feel that doing this imbues me with these same qualities.
The entire process of seeking out these wild organisms, waiting for the perfect harvesting window, the process of harvesting itself, and the meditative enjoyment of preparing them for consumption is a whole adventure to me, which enriches my life in a way that I can’t fully put into words.
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