This content was created by Victor Justin Rhodes. This content was uploaded by Victor Justin Rhodes. This is a YouTube video titled "Harvesting Walnuts | the Simple Way (1st time)" (posted 2023-11-04). The excerpt is a diarized transcript of an on-farm harvest vlog in which two participants, Justin and Rebecca, talk through their first-time walnut harvest and processing. They describe collecting and crushing green walnuts, pressure-washing, soaking to reduce anti-nutrients, dehydrating, cracking shells, extracting nuts, approximate yields and time required, needed tools and hacks, and plans to use the nuts in a spice nut cake. The conversation also includes memories about family walnut-cake traditions and practical notes about storage, rancidity, and alternatives to store-bought nuts.
Chapters
What are you doing?
Ouch!
And so we began the walnut harvest. There you go. Pile the green ones and we're gonna set them down to crush them. Does your pressure washer work? Yeah, we need a bucket and then a crate.
Damn, be quick, dude!
Is that enough?
Yes.
Okay, now fun job, walking on them. We walk so it's not crushed the nut nut, but crush the shell. Sam's got it. Now for the not so fun job. Break them open, get the nuts out, and throw them into the bucket.
Papa, he'd have— he'd collect walnuts and he'd have his mother make a spice nut cake for his birthday.
How do you remember that?
He told me.
Really? That's special. Well, maybe we'll have a special spice nut cake with this.
I ate spice nut cake for my birthday.
Be our first time harvesting walnuts. Just a little experiment, see if it's something we would enjoy and be worth the effort to harvest more. We have lots of walnuts voluntarily growing on our farm. Where's the, uh, pressure washer? What you'll do next is soak that, start loosening off all that.
Soak them first and then—
yeah, and then run them through the compost sifter. See how that's coming off of them? We have this tree up here by the people barn. These have already shelled and have revealed their nuts, so hey, why not? All right, put them back in the bucket. Look how clean that got them though. Do 2 more rounds, we're good. Hey, let's get it from the hydrant. That's the finished good. Now we just let them sit there and dry out for 2 weeks. If squirrels start getting them though, we're gonna have to cover it with a half-inch wire mesh or something. The walnuts have cured— well, a few days early, but my birthday's coming, but we need a spice nut cake. Why not get our nuts from the land, the walnuts. What have we been doing this for, 20 minutes? And this is what we got.
It's been a while. It's definitely not a fast process, let's just say that.
I asked Joel Salatin when I was visiting him a few weeks ago, we were going through some walnuts, and I said, hey Joe, you ever harvest those walnuts? And he's like, yeah, I get a bag, I go down to the local co-op, and I load up, and $10 later I got a big bag of walnuts. I see some wisdom in that. Jonas said— what did you say about Papaw doing this?
He made a walnut. He harvested these so he could have a walnut cake.
That's a memory you have of him? Uh, Granny, I don't have that memory.
Well, you were there when he told the story. No, he just was telling us a story. He told us a story where he— I think Phyllis did this. She did this. She did it with him for— this is my aunt too. Um, so that Granny could make the walnut cake.
It's a real fruity flavor, which I'm thinking is superior.
It's, it's definitely—
it feels superior to me.
Oh, that's it. It feels superior. Well, it feels superior because we've been doing this process for 2 weeks.
Nuts though wouldn't have lost their nutrients, the ones in the store. So that's even more tempting, right, Rebecca?
Well, okay, that's—
wouldn't have lost their nutrients.
So the problem with the ones in the store—
oh, but they're grown in poor soil.
Well, the ones— well, hold on a second. The ones with the store, so nuts go rancid. You have to put them in the freezer or the cooler, just depending on what nut. All nuts are different. Walnuts do need to be frozen though.
We're doing this the rough way with just a sledgehammer and our fingers.
Buy the walnut.
Well, I want to make sure they're good, you know. I didn't— you know, let's make sure we like it before we invest in a nutcracker. It's too much. And they make a little tweezer that you can pull the little nuts out with.
Okay, I'm leaving.
You can't pull that nut. Why? Oh, we're only a third way there in 20 minutes. It's gonna take an hour to get a cup.
Oh, that's funny.
Come on, it'll be special. We'll have stories. My birthday cake will have a story.
Well, crack them for me and then I'll pick the nuts out.
I'm not even having spice nut cake for my birthday.
I just remembered that you're having chocolate peanut butter pie. Cold.
None of that works. What am I doing with my life? Okay, I'm almost two-thirds there. I'm gonna keep going though. We're gonna see if we like it because we might want to harvest more walnuts. Yeah, and get some proper tools. Grandma coming with some? No, Grandma's got the old school nutcrackers and she has some, uh, needle— very fine needle nose pliers, right?
No, they're like, they're like these little— they're, they're like this and then they have like a little hook at the end and you take them and you pull the nuts out.
I'm about to run out. I'm gonna have to go get more walnuts too. That's demotivational, man. That was gonna be such a good story, make my own nuts from a for my birthday cake. How committed am I to eat what we grow? When it comes to peanut butter chocolate, not very committed.
It's your birthday. I think it's okay.
Can we grow our own peanut butter? Would that make it peanut butter healthier?
Um, make our own peanut butter.
Hey, we got some old-fashioned crackers. Did it work?
Yes, this works really well.
Really?
I can't either. This is a hard one.
Well, I think you're going at the wrong angle. Oh.
Maybe that could be it. I'm like, what in the world?
Oh, it's a little spear. Yes, I told you, like you like can fry it out. Two-thirds of the way making this spice nut cake. I'm not the imaginary— although, is that what you want for your birthday? Yeah, November 16th. That'll work. That work better, Jonah?
Yeah.
Oh, now we're moving. I think I like the hammer better. That pick is coming in handy though. Just figured out a little hack because we're almost done here. Probably one hour into this thing. I've been cracking it along this natural crack line. You go opposite of that. So if the natural crack line is there, don't break it open here. Breaking it up open here. Yeah, look. And then look at that.
So much easier.
And you are able to get more bigger pieces out.
You think?
Look, I'm learning how to crack them, y'. All. Oh, oh, oh, let me see it. It's really co. How to crack them.
Oh wow, that's really good, Justin.
Well, that just took an hour and a half. That's a half a pound. We need 10 pounds of walnuts a year.
It's approximately what we eat.
Yeah, because you eat chocolate and walnuts to snack, and then we have spiced nut cake. That's pretty much our main consumption of walnuts, wouldn't you say?
Yeah, or if we put them in brownies or on ice cream. But yes, those are— I would say it's snacking on them.
Uh, this took an hour and a half to get a cup. Of course, we didn't have the right tools, and we didn't count the actually harvesting them, spinning them, curing them.
Honestly, I felt like we could probably get what we need for walnuts in a day of doing this if we had the correct tools. We could probably get 10 pounds in a day.
Yeah, I guess that's kind of what we do with chicken. It takes us a day to harvest it get it in the freezer.
Maybe we could make a party out of it and then people could come and get walnuts if everybody pitched in.
There's the thing, Rebecca. Store-bought walnuts aren't going to be soaked, are they?
Probably.
Yeah. Rebecca, is it, uh, okay that some of this is floating?
Yes.
Okay, soaking is gonna be what you call breaking down its anti-nutrients. It's gonna be more digestible. And once that needs to soak overnight, 24 hours, No, 6. So maybe by this evening. By this evening we put it in the dehydrator?
Correct. Putting a little bit of salt.
What does that do?
I'm sure you're supposed to measure it. I don't.
What does that do to it?
Um, it helps with the soaking, and I think maybe lemon.
How exciting is this? Our first walnut harvest ever.
Yeah.
We have all these wild walnuts we've never done anything with. I know. I mean, I can see why.
It's a lot of work. The thing is, with soaking with the nuts is that they contain enzyme inhibitors, and so that's why they cause digestibility issues, because I guess they inhibit the enzymes that are in our— in our stomachs already. So what they were saying was you could also not do this and take enzymes with nuts to help break them down.
And what book is this?
This is Nourishing Traditions.
Time to rinse them. They've soaked. How come they don't need to soak for 12 hours?
Because they just don't.
How come grains need 24 hours then? How about that one? But nuts don't.
I think the grains have—
Or grains need 12 hours.
Grains have something else.
Why didn't you put them on the silicone thing?
Well, because I never do, but I've also never done like little pieces like this.
Well, what would it hurt to put them on the silicone thing?
Okay, we'll get out another one.
The shield, it just takes longer to dry them out? Is that the problem?
Yeah, because the air flows through this.
Yeah, and the air does not flow through this. Correct. Got them in the dehydrator. 24 hours at 150. 24 hours later. It's time. We have dehydrated these nuts. You want to try some nuts for me, Beck? Smells— smells fruity. And my hunch is they're also going to taste fruity. I don't know if that's because it's fresh or because of the kind it is, but it feels superior to me. Do you mind the fruity taste, Rebecca? You don't?
I think we're just gonna get used to it. It's not like a regular—
yeah, I won't say it's free because it sure did take a lot of time to process these, but I also will say it was pretty— like, didn't take any dollar bills. First on-farm harvest of walnuts. That's pretty neat.
