This year, I got a wonderful surprise: nuts. They grew in leaf-like wrappers that were easy to pick. I wasn't expecting them to look like that. I read up on them and was reassured that they will no doubt produce many more nuts in years to come.
I picked a bowl of them and took them over to the pond and hulled them. They are darling.
This year, they are small, but I'm hopeful that this will be the start of something big.
I don't recall ever being so excited about Filberts. This was my first time to grow them. Had to take their pics and the squash and peppers barged into the shoot.
The hickory nuts dried enough to start splitting, after I set them out in the sunshine for weeks and brought them inside every night.
The hulls are best popped open with a flat-bladed screwdriver. This was not a big year for hickories. 2010 was a bumper crop. I froze enough nuts to last years. According to the literature (nuts are prolific writers) they only bear every two years. I'm always eager for a repeat of the bounty in 2010.
There is one black walnut down on the bottoms. I intend to get some of those, too, for some banana nut bread. The first year I was here, I stored the walnuts in the playhouse, where the mice surprised me by being able to gnaw through the hard hulls.
Another year, mice climbed down the strings on the hanging bags of hickory nuts and spoiled them. Mice suffer from incontinence.
This time, all the nuts are coming in with me. I hate to be greedy, but I am not sharing this tiny harvest with rodents.
