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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Hi Donna and All</span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I never had much experience with nuts - at least<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">the kind that grow on trees but your observations are interesting.<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Nick included cucumber magnolia - a friend gave me a seedling<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">of that species or at least a hybrid. No fruit yet but it is a<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">very fast grower - nearly 1 meter per year. could be a useful tree in NS!<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Beech nuts are delicious but I hardly ever see them any more. I once<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">saw a bear in the spring time searching the ground under some beech<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">trees I presume it was getting last fall nuts. The trees were just before<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Peskawesk Brook - a long walk in early spring so I don't go there often.<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">A relative once sent my Grandmother a fruit cake. It was nothing but<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">nuts and a little dough. Everybody though it unfit to eat but I loved it<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">and got to eat the whole big cake - excepting a few taste samples.<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I think it was Black Walnut so they are good!<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Enjoy the last of 2016<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Paul<br/></span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span>
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<br/>> On December 18, 2016 at 10:03 PM Donna Crossland <dcrossland@eastlink.ca> wrote:
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<br/>> Without having researched this species much, I would add that the fleshy husks are full of tannins. I've learned that they can heavily stain the hands that attempt to husk them. The tannin compounds would certainly assist in lending a bitter taste, but the nuts are supposed to be delicious. (I never actually got through the process far enough to taste the nuts.) Did you dry the nuts first? Were they stained with tannins from the husks?
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<br/>> My husband's aunt who lives in the region that would have originally grown Carolinian forest, had plenty of black walnut trees. She used to purposefully run over the husks in the driveway to get the nuts out of the fleshy husks. Primitive, but I suppose it worked!
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<br/>> I planted some black walnuts on my property in the valley, but the deer promptly ate them, although the tannins should have kept them away. I am now more interested in planting bur oak (producing edible acorns that the Maliseet used to pound into flour, unlike our red oak that has far too many bitter-tasting tannins to be useful to us... admit it, most of us have tasted a red oak acorn somewhere in our childhood, right?). Butternut and walnut might be better options. I have a friend who has cultivated a hazelnut crop. That sounds like fun.
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<br/>> All in all, I think it is worthwhile trying to grow more mast-bearing trees, particularly as we've pretty well destroyed the beech trees with their amazing nut crop (which is also delicious and nutritious whenever the trees that remain on our landscape decide to produce a mast crop).
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<br/>> Keep the gray squirrels at bay any way that you can, however! They are expanding intruders.
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<br/>> Donna
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<br/>> -----Original Message-----
<br/>> From: naturens-owner@chebucto.ns.ca [mailto:naturens-owner@chebucto.ns.ca] On Behalf Of Burkhard Plache
<br/>> Sent: December-18-16 7:01 PM
<br/>> To: naturens@chebucto.ns.ca
<br/>> Subject: [NatureNS] The Taste of Black Walnut
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<br/>> This October, I collected a few dozen black walnuts from two trees in Halifax. Today I cracked a few open, and found they tasted quite bitter.
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<br/>> I was planning on planting a black walnut tree as a fruit tree, but now I have second thoughts.
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<br/>> Is the bitter taste to be expected?
<br/>> Is there a possibility to make them more palatable?
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<br/>> Thanks for any insight,
<br/>> Burkhard
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