Black Walnuts

A truck filled with tennis balls overturned on our road last month, or so it appears. The thousands of green spheres littering our pavement and lawns actually dropped from common black walnut trees, native to North America. Removing the thick hull reveals a shell much tougher than those of English walnuts you find in grocery stores. If you manage to crack the shell, you’ll finally get down to the earthy, robust, slightly bitter meat, a luxury ingredient for baking.

If you leave the green balls where they fall, they will crunch under your tires and threaten your lawnmower blades. As they rot and mold, they will leave black stain on whatever they touch. A few will grow into majestic shade trees, with roots that poison the soil under the branches so nothing else can grow there.

​Is it a waste of nature’s edible bounty to rake them up for compost? Most would say no; the cost in labor outweighs the benefit in flavor. For a few rare souls, processing black walnuts by hand is worth the trouble. If they enjoy it, the laborious task becomes part of the benefit. As people who love to knit elaborate sweaters or make fine furniture can attest, major efforts don’t always pay for themselves in terms of dollars and cents, but by the creative satisfaction that comes from both process and product.