It was all carefully planned: the perfect hostess gift we can present to any guests who visit us during the holidays. A lovely basket or bag of our delicious English walnuts. Martha Stewart, eatcherheartout!
In one of the pastures here on Kartar Ridge Ranch, there dwells what may be the world’s most beautiful and graceful English Walnut tree (Juglans regia). She’s over 40 feet tall, about 35 years old, will live to be up to 200 years old, and, as far as we know, has never been exposed to sex or birth control.
In spite of her apparent virginity, however, she somehow manages to produce and deliver thousands of fat, healthy English walnuts every autumn. She’s probably very proud of her immaculate conception, but until this year, her fertile production has been largely ignored by everybody who lives here on the farm. But not Octo-woman. The nice thing about sharing one’s home with Octo-woman is that it seems to inspire in its residents an intense interest in the care and feeding of nuts.
This year, my daughter Susy decided to do something about it! She vowed that this would be the year we would learn all about nut harvesting. And because of our amazing walnut tree, we were certain to have enough to create and share dozens of decorated bags full of our nutty treasures with visitors!
While Susy researched harvesting tips and I combed Amazon.com for gift packaging tips, our intrepid tree kept right on producing walnuts on an Olympian scale. Even the squirrels couldn’t keep up with the blizzard of big green shelled husks that kept appearing in the branches and plopping themselves down on the ground.
But we were patiently waiting! Susy had read how the tree will tell us just when to harvest its bounty. Just when each nut is starting to get dry enough, the green husks that contain it will start to crack open and the edges of the crack will turn black.
At last! One day, Susy announced, “Okay, it’s time! I’m going to start collecting the walnuts tomorrow. It looks like the perfect time to start bringing them in for drying, and there’s going to be a ton of them. Let’s get some buckets ready and I’ll head out there first thing in the morning.“
And sure enough, she did. Head out there, I mean. She didn’t collect any English walnuts though because there was nothing there to collect. Of the thousands of nuts still on the tree and all over the ground the night before – there wasn’t a single nut in sight. Not. a. single. one!
We didn’t need Sherlock Holmes to solve our “Mystery of the Purloined Nuts”, though. It was very astute of the walnut tree to let Susy know the exact best time for her to make the harvest, but, obviously, our friendly Juglans regia also informed our squadron of very busy squirrels —- and they worked a very busy night shift!
At least, we now know why we have the fattest squirrels in Enumclaw, Washington.
We’re still in awe of both the tree and the industry of the squirrels! It reminds me of an incident at the Christian Brothers Winery in Napa, California. Husband Gene worked for the winery here in Washington State and in Montana, but once when we were visiting with Brother Timothy at the winery in Napa, we happened to be walking past one of the laboratories there. It was full of a plethora of scientific equipment all bubbling and steaming and gurgling with activity.
I was puzzled because the harvest hadn’t begun. “What are they working on, Brother Tim”, I asked. “Oh, they’re calculating their best guess for when we should begin harvesting the grapes”, he said. “But even so, we know we can always rely on the birds. They alway let us know when it’s time to begin.”
All I can say is Wow! What a shame.
Oh, no! What wonderful cookies, cakes and brownies I was imagining. Mom always liked English walnut ice cream. 🍨 Next year I can see Susy on the starting line ready to beat all those squirrels.
Have you thought of the ultrasonic animal repeller? Several versions available at Amazon. We had creatures, presumably raccoons, rolling back our newly installed front yard turf recently. We accidentally left it on the audible screechy sound effect range one day and unintentionally gave the Amazon guy a pretty good fright—the postman too, I think😵💫.