hickory and butternuts

[Andy Alexis-Baker]

Got two grocery bags of hickory and butternuts today. (though I am not sure the one is butternut...they may simply be two differnt kinds of hickory nuts. I have to take my field guide to the trees next time to tell the difference in the leaves, cause I do not remember except that one of the kinds of trees that I call hickory, had big leaves, while the other kind of nut had small leaves...)

These are way easier to dehulled than walnuts! So much cleaner. I can now find these trees pretty easy and tell them apart from other trees which is good.

They need to dry out. Any special instruction on that? Anything I should know about these?

I plan to go back to the parks where I got these. There are still tons of them on the trees. So I can get a lot of them.

(I am done picking up walnuts for the year...there is a seemingly endless supply of those though...I am bit overwhelmed by those things).

[One Accord]

Butternuts are like the walnuts except they have a very oblong shape and a fuzzy, sticky hull that turns brown pretty quickly.

There is such a thing as a bitternut hickory, which is like the hiclory excpet their nuts are more oblong shaped as well. these are very bitter and nasty tasting. You might try cracking a couple of these and tasting them to be sure you aren't wasting your time picking them up.

As for the best ways to cure the nuts, your car idea was pretty good. Otherwise its a matter of ingenuity tailored to your particular situation.

[Andy Alexis-Baker]

There is a butternut tree then. I probably will not pick up too many of them cause I am a bit tired of dealing with those types of hulls.

Most of what I picked up were hickory nuts. One of them is oval shaped and bigger, the other has fours sides and is a bit smaller. But both had a similar type of shell that comes off fairly easy and were not messy at all (thankfully).