The nut cracker project story

The farm stand is open today (Saturday, March 5) from noon till 5 pm. Yes there is still some local food available even in March. One of these food items that is abundant is black walnuts. They are an extremely nutrient dense food that stores well. They have a unique fairly strong rich flavor that I really like. My daughter says they have an good earthy flavor. If you would like to taste black walnuts come out to the stand. Today I have cracked nuts samples available for tasting. I plan to have these samples available throughout the early spring as supplies allow. (We have cracked Black walnuts available for purchase also.) Walnuts grow in very sustainable permaculture way that should be developed wherever we can. These walnuts however are a tough nut to crack with one of the hardest shells that can be found in the nut world. In addition to being very hard and strong the nut meats are locked into the shell cavity in a way that makes them hard to separate. There are various traditional ways to crack them using hammers, vises or manual lever nut crackers. All these ways are very slow and it is hard to crack the shells with out smashing the nut meats more than needed which makes them hard to pick out from the shells. This winter my son Phillip and I built a tractor powered mechanical nut cracker. The machine we came up with ( we had no plans to follow) works reasonably well as I had in my vision. We ran 200 lbs. of nuts Thursday evening after supper. We learned that we can partially separate shells and fines by various sifting screens. The separation process is then completed by hand sorting. If any of you have any experience with nut cracking I would love to talk with you and learn what you know.