Beginning in July 2020, I became a regular contributor to Wisconsin Outdoor News (WON) in "From The Little Cabin In The Woods" column.
This article was published in the WON September 22, 2023 issue.
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“They are all gone,” I said in agitation, as my husband, Stan, looked up in confusion. “Every one of my 15 walnuts has disappeared. They were not even ripe. There is the largest crop of acorns I have ever seen. The crab apple trees are loaded. The cherry trees are virtually dripping with fruit. There are 26 acres of dry-land corn at the dent stage. The wild grape crop is perfectly ripe. The cabin yard, full of birdfeeders, is only 100 yards away. Why? Why did they need to take 15 unripe walnuts?
I was becoming louder and more overwrought with each sentence. Stan laughed.
It is very unusual to have a black walnut tree in our area. We must be at or near the northern part of their range. I discovered this one two years ago. It sits on a junction of the drive into the little cabin and a cross trail. It is 15-20 feet tall and overshadowed by a large red pine. On casual glance, it might be a sumac, with its pinnately compound leaflets arranged symmetrically along an extension of the leaf petiole. The thing that brought it to my attention was a single round fruit, the bright green color of which, stood starkly against the dark green of the leaves. One walnut does not a crop make. Stan pruned back the red pine to give my tree more sunlight. He fertilized it. There were no nuts in 2022. This year, it appeared that we had the motherlode.
I am very familiar with eastern black walnut trees. Early in our marriage, Stan and I rented a house from Stan’s grandmother, Ethyl Thomas. The family called it the Stucco House. It had been built in the 1920’s by Stan’s great-grandfather, the first Stanton Thomas. When I-94 was constructed across southern Michigan, the house was moved from the path of progress and located on part of a forty-acre parcel that was isolated from the rest of the family farm by the highway. The west fence line of the forty was planted with black walnut trees. The parcel that was carved out for the home site abutted that fence line.
In the days when we lived there, the mid-1970’s, black walnut trees were prized for their beautiful wood. Walnut cases for pianos were very popular. Highly figured walnut stocks for firearms brought good money. People would come home to find that the gigantic walnut tree that had shaded their homes for decades had been poached from their yards. Some of these trees brought thousands of dollars on the black (walnut) market. These were not our trees.
Our trees were planted close together and were not old enough to have achieved the girth that might attract tree thieves. They were, however, old enough to be something of a nuisance. In the fall, they showered bushels of husked nuts onto our driveway, and into the yard. Red squirrels gathered them up and found ways of “squirreling” them away in our attic. So, when our resident bats left for winter hibernation, they were replaced by the sound of red squirrels rolling husked walnuts across the floor of the attic. It sounded like they were bowling. During the summer, the trees rendered the west end of my garden useless. Walnuts emit a toxic substance, called juglone into the soil. Many plants, notably tomatoes, cannot tolerate this chemical.
Still, we did gather a few walnuts for our own consumption. They were a lot of work. I am not sure they did not require more calories to prepare, than they provided in the end. First you had to get the oily, black, stain-laden husks off them. We usually accomplished this by piling them in the driveway and running them over with a vehicle. You donned gloves for the peeling. What you were left with was a very hard, small nut. The fancy little nutcracker you use on English walnuts in front of your fireplace, at the holiday time, could not touch these. We used a hammer and an anvil. This means that you ended up with a pile of walnut shells from which you had to pick out of the tiny pieces of nut meats. Again, these did not even vaguely resemble the picture-perfect English walnut halves that sit prettily atop Christmas cookies. So, why bother? The flavor is sublime. The oil in black walnuts is intense, intoxicating, addictive, and not to be duplicated. It rivals the fanciest liqueur you have ever tasted. Vanilla extract pales by comparison. I thought my 15 walnuts would take my nearly world-famous oatmeal, chocolate chip, raisin, lucky deer hunting cookies to a whole new level. I envisioned black walnut ice cream. My visions were dashed.
The likely culprits were gray squirrels. Despite Dean Bortz’s admonition that Google is not my friend, I Googled this. It turns out, I am not the only one who has had this problem. In 2019, the Spokesman-Review, out of Spokane, Washington published an article detailing the travails of a woman who, frustrated by squirrel walnut thieves, installed an electric fence. She allegedly electrocuted nine squirrels, which she left hanging on the fence, as a “warning to the others.” She was prosecuted for animal cruelty. A judge, obviously a black walnut lover, dismissed the case.
You do not need to worry about me taking this kind of desperate measure next year. The little cabin does not have electricity.
It seems it should be easy to identify the culprit squirrels. Apparently, the black substance in the hulls stains the fur around squirrel mouths black. I have been wondering if that lovely black walnut essence would carry through as a delicate background flavor in squirrel and biscuit stew. I just need to look for the ones with the black beards and mustaches.
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