I live in a very nutty place. There is a delicious irony to this, as anyone who has known me for very long will surely appreciate, and certainly there is more than one way to interpret that first sentence - but I am being literal here. There are nuts here. LOTS and LOTS of nuts.
To start with, we have a modest filbert orchard. Modest like over a hundred trees I think. That isn't so modest when you have to clean up after them, but as filbert growers go we are several notches beneath modest. Anyway, to start with I am still figuring out what to call them. I had frankly never heard of a filbert before moving to Oregon. Or actually I had, but I thought it was some kind of candy or cookie thing. I HAD heard of hazelnuts, and I guess that is part of the issue. At some point after moving here, and hearing of filberts, and asking what in tar they were, I was told that technically "filbert" refers to the tree and "hazelnuts" are what grow on them, which seems a little confusing. More recently, after visiting with some growers at an Octoberfest booth, it would appear that there has been consensus to go by the name "hazelnut growers", not in small part because people have heard of hazelnuts.
It was this grower who had some branches of trees with nuts attached that led me to discovering that my old orchard still works. Once I knew what I was looking for, they were all over the place. On the ground, in the trees, everywhere, bazillions of them. I was pretty darn excited about this. Ridiculously so, as a matter of fact. I couldn't wait to pick them all up. That lasted about 4 trees, and after my back started making itself heard I realized there was going to have to be (a)considerable cleanup in the orchard department and (b) a better way of getting these silly nuts off the ground and into wherever they had to go to be processed. Which is another whole story we will get to in a minute.
In an attempt to address (b) above - because (a) was way more time and effort than I had available at the moment - I took to driving the tractor into the orchard and just filling up the front-end loader and driving it back down to the house and dumping them. This is a pretty good advancement in the transportation end of things but I still have to pick them up to drop them into the front-end loader. Part of the problem is that there is so much debris (leaves, bits of dead wood, the last ten years' worth of hazlenut bodies in varying stages of decomposition) all over the orchard floor it is hard to discern quickly and accurately which ones to pick up, so you keep picking up empty ones, which is a waste of a bendover. Don't want to waste your time pointlessly bending over when bending over is not as easy as it used to be! But this brings us back to point (a) above, and the fact that I didn't have time to address that right now.
But even assuming I had a pristine orchard (maybe next year) and efficiently harvested them all (or better yet procured large numbers of happily underpaid teenagers to do so), I am then faced with just how I am supposed to handle them after that. The problem with agricultural enterprises is that there is just so much to learn!!! As I have said before, unless you come out of the womb knowing combines from cucumbers because everyone in your family for the last hundred years has farmed something, this is a surefire way to be humbled into an admission of mass ignorance.
SO in addition to the entire orchard full of hazelnuts, there are walnut trees everywhere. I happen to love walnuts (I can actually take or leave hazelnuts, but that doesn't matter a bit because apparently nine billion people in China love them and cannot grow them there, which makes it a very nice thing to grow some of!) and was pretty stoked to figure out that these green tennis balls dropping on my head as I drove the tractor or fed the horses were walnuts. They sort of smelled like walnuts, but I just wasn't sure. So I gather a few, picked them off the trees as a matter of fact, and tried picking the green part off. Then tried cutting the green part off. Then tried smashing the damn thing to get the green part off. Finally I forgot all about them for about 3 weeks and discovered them all over the ground with the green part rotting off leaving lots of lovely walnut-looking walnuts to just pick up off the ground. Lesson there about leaving Mother Nature to do her thing, and getting out of the way. ANYWAY, so now I have several thousand walnuts littering the ground.
I also happen to have this historic nut-drying barn, to which all the local nut growers back in the day brought their filberts or whatever. If I could only figure out how in the heck to stoke it back into operational status, I would try using it. But I have not a clue, and would probably burn it down or explode something if I tried. I do, however, also have about a thousand nut-drying screens. I figured to put them to good use, and spread the nuts out on them and washed the rotted-off hull debris off, and left them to dry. The filberts I just spread out on the screens and left in the barn, figuring even without a lovely trip through the drying closet they would eventually sort of dry out in the air.
The filberts are behaving themselves rather well. They eventually fall out of their little green feathery capes and look like self-respecting hazelnuts. Nothing too funky going on with them. The walnuts are an entirely different story. After "drying" for a couple weeks, they were not the least bit dry and in fact looked like they were trying to mold. I asked around, and it seemed one was supposed to spread them out on a cookie sheet and let them hang out in a low oven for a while. "A while" was about as specific as I could get. Seems there is some despicable little creature that lays some sort of eggs in the walnut husks and will start to make webs or something if the nuts are left in their natural state. Sounds way too much like spiders to me, and I am all for baking those out of existence, so into the oven went 5 trays of nuts today. I put the oven nice and low (between 200, the lowest number on my dial, and "off") for like an hour.
My kitchen smelled wonderful, like fresh-baked yumminess itself. I took the nuts out and dumped them all in a big produce box, and some of them were a little cracked apart. I thought this was a good thing, because they were easy to open without a nutcracker, which I am still lacking. So I pried one apart looking forward to enjoying my first home-grown walnut tidbit - and it was mush. Rubbery, nasty mush. Well, CRAP.
So I can't wash them, I can't leave them to air dry, I can't apparently low-roast them without killing them. What in tarnation AM I supposed to do with them? HEEELLLLLLLPPPP.
Am I going to have to go back to school for this? Is there an online degree at University of Phoenix perhaps, in nut-farming??? Jeezum. My head is going to implode from the simple mismatch between the quantity of agricultural how-to required and the emptiness of my brain. I will look like one of those walnuts in a minute.
So if anyone out there has a clue how to restore an old nut-drying barn to functional status, or how to process hazelnuts or walnuts without resorting to million-dollar technology, please do tell. I mean, people have been growing and eating these things for centuries, right? What did they do back then? I'm hoping fire is involved, fire is way cheaper than electricity or contractors. I can do fire.
Let the information flow, or I will be forced to commandeer large numbers of squirrels to take care of this mess.