Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Bucket o' Black Walnuts

Come get all you want in California…. They ain’t worth crap anymore….. guys used to get over $3 a pound until the Chinese planted a couple hundred thousand acres…. I heard one guy got about .04 cents a pound after cost but Most guys that still have them planted can’t afford the cost to harvest them.

I went for a drive in the country today and I ran over about 95 of those damn things.
Every hour one lands on the metal roof of my toolshed, quite noisy.

Here is a good use. I made my summerbeam from black walnut. Plus this tree killed every potato and blueberry in my garden, so I had an axe to grind.

As the others said. Make dye/stain with them. This rifle was refinished with my homemade stain made from black walnut hulls.

The squirrels went bonkers with all the nuts. Pecan trees around here as well. This is the best crop of black walnuts we've had in 40 years.

When I was a kid (60+ years ago) myself and a couple neighbor kids gathered up a couple bushel baskets of black walnuts just to peel the green bark off the nuts. We were stained so bad we looked like darkies (at least our hands). Ruined our clothes and my parents loving temperment (especially my Dad's).

around the farm this year there's more on the ground than one could ever pick up in a month or two.. $16 /100 is a starting price at the whole of this year in this area. sometimes we have some kids pick them up around here sometimes we don't... we literally have thousands of pounds on the ground... last year year before last youngsters really like picking him up and done an excellent job got a big majority of them and made like $3,000 in a month of picking..

I sold the heck out of them when I was a kid. That & shoveling snow off neighbors sidewalks was about the only cash source I had before I was 13 or 14.

Just checked, $16 this year, hulled hundred weight. A kid could still make decent pocket change.

Your mom douches with it.

Nice

Got a 5 gallon bucket of them and there's a lot more where they came from. Elderly friend of mine has a big tree next to his gravel driveway and the yard & driveway are loaded with them. One day I was picking them up for him and almost got hit by a few that were falling down every couple minutes. I know the squirrels love them but other than that I don't use 'em for anything. Any uses for them that won't require a lot of time & effort? I have zero experience with them.

How do you make stain out of them?

My cousin uses them to dye his gray hair.

If you let them lay out in the back yard, the outer hulls will eventually turn dark brown and start to slough off the nut. If you handle them at that point, it will become obvious about the "dye". Your hands will turn dark brown like the hull.

I have 20 acres of timber with 2 or 3 walnut trees per acre. The squirrels and deer love them.

kwg

That 99 looks REAL nice. What's your black walnut stain recipe?

Yeah, I don't remember ever seeing the price that high... $6- $7 on a good year maybe. That being said, I've only seen two pickups hauling walnuts this year but the closest buyer is about 20 miles away.

I have a (plastic) bucket full in my garage I picked up in Ohio (??) driving back from NY State a couple of years back, all dried out now.

Old Ohio Territory camo; I have a white pair of period pants I’ve been intending to dye with ‘em, I recently bought another (not white) pair so I can afford to ruin the white ones 🙂

I’m told rusty iron nails as a mordant, leave em soak with the walnut husks. Gonna have to get a pair of long kitchen gloves.

That's a walnut?

Birdy,

If you can find an old cast iron wash pot to dye in, you don’t need a mordant. Got two here on the place if you wanna come dye them. Matter of fact, got a big jug of dye I boiled up week before last