Time passes so quickly, February 2018 is almost over.
In New Zealand, it is end of summer now, and is a season for fresh walnuts.
Have you foraged this season’s walnuts yet?
Walnuts Picking?
Yes walnuts!
They can be roasted to eat as is, or can make an awesome addition to any baking foods like cookies, muffins or cakes.
Alternatively, roasted walnuts can be added to salad or stir-fry.
They are rich in vitamin E and unsaturated fat, making walnuts really healthy food for our body.
But when you have been only buying bagged walnuts out of shell, we tend not think about where they come from.
Walnuts are seed (or core) part of green fruits that grows on a walnut tree.
When the fruit matures, green fruit naturally drop from the tree.
As the fruit start to get rotten, the inside (walnut shell) becomes exposed.
At this timing, if you visit your local walnut tree, you can pick many natural, fresh, organic walnuts from under the tree!
And this season is usually around February in New Zealand.
Where Can I Find Walnut Tree?
Walnuts tree can be found in various places in New Zealand.
Some people have them in our garden, but if your garden doesn’t have a walnut tree, then try looking for one in...
- Parks
- Roadside
- Car parks with lots of green areas surrounding it
- Garden of churches and chapels
Walnuts tree typically grow really tall, so you are unlikely to find a walnut tree in a small park.
If there is a large park with many deciduous trees, you might find walnut trees, too.
Around February, walnuts trees would bear some green fruits, about size of kids’ fists on the tree.
Some are found fallen on the ground underneath the tree.
So looking for a tree with green fruits on it or underneath it around February may be the easiest way to spot a walnut tree.
Once you are used to finding a walnut tree, you will be able to spot them by looking at tree shape, skin and leaves.
Also, there are some “foraging” maps available online. You might decide to use these as a guideline to find our first walnut tree.
As long as you adhere to basic manners and good practice, there should not be any problem picking walnuts off the ground.
But hurting the tree or shaking the tree to access fruits on the tree should not be tolerated.
Also, even if you spot a good walnut tree, if it is on someone’s private properly you must not access it without asking for a permission from the owner.
How to Pick Fresh Walnuts
In the right season, walnuts fruit will naturally fall – so all you have to do is pick them off the ground.
Green fruit on the left is the walnut fruit.
If walnut shell is fully exposed without any fruit, then it may have been there on the ground for too long.
If the walnuts feel very light or shell is very fragile, and it is most likely already rotten inside.
If the fruit outside walnuts shell is fully intact and really firm, then the fruit may have fallen prematurely and inside walnuts may not be very tasty.
Apparently, a good walnut is the fresh walnut shell with fruit still adhered on it, but the fruit outside is starting to rot and turned black.
But I guess, you just don’t know what comes out of the shell until you crack it open...
We picked ours with either some fruit attached, or fully exposed ones as long as they feel heavy and hard.
Try squeezing walnut with hand, if they crack easily then it is definitely rotten inside.
One thing to be careful is that, liquid that comes out of walnut fruit stains your hand brown.
They do not come off easily even after washing our hands with soap.
So if you do not want your hands to get dirty, you might want to use vinyl gloves to prevent the liquid from touching your skin.
Likewise, you should not wear your new, favorite cloth that you do not want get stained on.
Picked Some Walnut –!!
So we came home with a bag of walnuts from our local park.
Some looked quite fresh and had just fallen off the tree, while others looked like they had been on the ground for a while.
The park we went to had more than two walnut trees on site, and each tree produced walnuts with difference sizes.
We believe that we were a bit late for the season, as many good ones were already picked, and many rotten ones were left on the ground.
Some with fruit on, look really clean when outside fruit is taken off.
There are some tips and ways you can clean your freshly picked walnuts on the internet.
We washed ours in a tub of water and scrapped any adhered fruits from the nuts manually, using brush.
We then dried our walnuts under the sun for a while.
Look some are huge! I think they are from different variations of walnuts.
We just picked and prepared them like above, but we plan on cracking them open next, and either roast the content to eat them, or use them for cooking.
You could roast walnuts while they are in the shell, but this time we prefer to crack it open first so that we can get rid of rotten ones and select good ones for eating.
In our regular life, walnuts come unshelled in a plastic bag from the supermarket, normally.
So it was quite a new experience picking and washing our own walnuts. Our children enjoyed it too.
Now, it would be perfect once we manage to make a yummy walnuts cookies from these... !
Planting Walnuts to Grow Walnut Seedling...?
If you get a hold on fresh walnuts from the latest season, it may be fun to keep some for planting next spring.
Walnuts break out of dormancy and germinate in the spring after experiencing the cold winter.
So if you want to plant some walnuts, keep some good looking walnuts wrapped in wet paper, put them in a plastic bag and store in the fridge, then plant them into a pot next spring.
According to some sites on the internet, fresh walnuts has pretty good success-rate for germination.
If you keep several walnuts in the fridge for next season, the chance is that you will see at least one germinating and growing.
You need to be careful if you decide to plant walnut seedling into your garden, as a walnut tree grows into a very large tree in years time.
Walnut trees also produce and release a type of toxin from their roots, that prevents other plants from growing.
So while it would be a great fun to plant your self-picked walnuts in pots and watch them grow, you might want to keep them in pots and not directly planted in your garden.
We kept a few walnuts in our fridge to plant next spring.
It would be a fun experiment to do in the garden with children!
Summary
- February - Walnuts picking season in New Zealand!
- You can often spot walnuts trees in public parks
- Be careful picking walnuts trees as they can stain
- Keep some for germinating experiment, but planting directly into a garden requires some thought
Some people sell fresh walnuts from their garden on Trademe or on a road-side market around February so keep eye out for them if you want locally grown organic walnuts.
Happy walnut picking/buying/eating!
