Walnut Weather

It's walnut weather in Tennessee. On my morning walk I spotted several walnuts, still in hulls, beneath trees in my neighborhood.

Dark spots on the green hulls reminded me of elementary school, and of the boys who would come to class with dark-stained hands this time of year. They had been hulling walnuts. Those stains would stay around for several days -- you can't scrub them off -- but the boys never seemed to mind. Walnuts were easy money for country boys with time on their hands.

The hulls, of course, are designed to protect and nurture the walnut seed until it can get implanted in the ground. They aren't easy to remove.

It is possible to speed up the process, though. On quiet country lanes it wasn't at all unusual to encounter piles of fresh walnuts across the road. When you drove your car across them, the weight from the tires helped loosen the hulls. Hard-shell American walnuts are tough enough to take the pressure.



Every couple of days, kids would clear out the old ones and put new walnuts in the road. Then, they would finish the hulling process, put the hulled nuts into sacks and save them to take to market. That's where they got the stains. There is no good way to get the hulls off except to pull the pieces off with your fingers.

I don't know the going rate for a pound of fresh walnuts these days, but many a country kid financed his Christmas presents, or maybe a new knife or bike, by picking up those much-desired nuts. Walnut-stained hands, this time of year, were a sure sign of ingenuity.