Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report: at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948
Science
Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report: at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948
Northern Nut Growers Association -- Periodicals; Nut trees -- Periodicals; Nuts -- Periodicals
Then we began to study the Government bulletins on how to produce good
walnut kernels, and there is a good bulletin on that; all of you are
acquainted with it, probably. When we began to harvest those nuts and
hull them as quickly as we could and wash them and dry them out
thoroughly and then crack them before they got too dry, we organized
what was called the Walnut Club. This Walnut Club mostly was composed of
some of the women of the community who lived up in one little cove where
the limestone outcroppings seem to favor the walnut and the air drainage
or whatever it was seemed to favor the crop yields rather regularly. We
don't have an every-year good walnut crop.
Well, these women got finally so that they could get 35 cents a pound
for their walnut kernels, then 45 cents a pound. Then we found a good
friend in Pennsylvania who would take those kernels, all we could send
her, and put them up in little pound packages and sell them for whatever
she could get and send us all the money. That's altogether contrary to
Hoyle I guess.
You merchants, if there are some of you here, who are dealers in walnut
kernels know that our people were just getting spoiled. Anytime now that
a merchant says, "I will give you such-and-such a price for the walnuts
and then I will sell them for such-and-such a price," he looks to them
like a robber. They want to sell them for what the people pay who eat
them. That isn't quite fair, maybe, but we got $1.39 a pound last year
for all the kernels we could produce, and the year before it was $1.40,
I believe, and it stays about that price.
That is about the story of the community project. It is a direct contact
by way of a benevolent friend between people in the mountains in
Tennessee and people in Pennsylvania who say that these kernels taste
better than black walnut kernels in Pennsylvania taste. I don't know
whether any Pennsylvanians here agree with that or not. I think they are
wonderfully mild-flavored, a good many of them very light-colored
kernels. Though Mr. Chase has made some beautiful exhibits of how the
color changes depending on how long a time you leave them in the hull,
we still have some that stay lighter than others. Some of them have
rather gray-colored kernels.
There is one of those trees that Mrs. Ledbetter has, on her husband's
farm. He was about to sell that tree for a log and a stump. They come
along and grub the stumps out and sell the stumps and all for
veneerwood. But she wouldn't let him sell it, and over the course of the
last few years they sold enough kernels more than to pay for that walnut
tree and it is still going to yield a good many years, probably better
and better as time goes on.
I think that possibly the community angle of this is a little bit
misrepresenting. It's not the entire community, but it is a little group
of the community who are interested in the wild black walnut.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account