Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Late Harvest

With the days growing shorter and temperatures dipping ever lower, Brian and I have spent a lot of the past few weeks getting ready for winter. We've had our boiler tuned up, put our warm comforter on the bed, and gotten our flu and COVID jabs. I've stashed away my light cotton socks and filled up my sock drawer with my warmer wool and acrylic ones. My wearable blanket and pressure cooker space heater have already been pressed into service. And, out in the garden, we've harvested all the tender crops and pretty much everything else.

Sadly, this didn't take very long. Our gardening year appears to be ending not with a bang, but with a whimper, particularly in the squash department. After last year's 42-pound bumper crop, we thought we'd hit on a winning strategy by sticking to the Waltham variety, but this year it fell completely flat. Our four vines produced only six squash, including one so small you can't even see it in the photo. In total, they weighed just 14 pounds, one-third of what we got last year. 

This has me questioning whether our all-Waltham approach is so wise after all. Maybe next year, it would be a good idea to hedge our bets by adding a second variety, such as Burpee's Butterbush. Even if it's less productive overall, it could be something to fall back on if the Waltham is a flop again. Or perhaps we should upgrade to Fedco's new "primo strain," Wig Out Waltham, which promises "the best in yield and consistency" for only marginally higher cost.

However, there is one bright spot in our fall harvest. We currently have a pretty good haul of one crop that we didn't actually plant: black walnuts.

Every fall since we moved to Highland Park, I've noticed the ground in certain areas being strewn with these odd sort of greenish balls, roughly the size of an egg. Sometimes, I'd see one split open and what looked like a blackish nut poking out. However, I vaguely assumed they probably weren't edible because no one seemed to be gathering them. It wasn't until this year, when there were so many of the green balls underfoot that I had to kick them off the sidewalk to keep from slipping on them and tumbling arse-over-teakettle, that I bothered to investigate the matter. After a little research, I learned that the green balls are indeed the fruit of the black walnut tree, and while they aren't themselves edible, the nuts are.

Mind you, it takes a bit of work to get at them. First, you have to strip off the husk—carefully, as it can stain almost anything it touches. Then they need to cure in their shells for a couple of weeks to develop their flavor. And once they're ready to eat, you can't just crack them with an ordinary nutcracker; to get through their extremely hard shells, you have to bang them with a hammer, crush them in a vise, or even back over them with your car. But according to aficionados, their strong, earthy, bittersweet flavor is well worth the effort.

So, over the course of several walks, both in our neighborhood and while visiting friends in Virginia, we gathered up a whole bunch of these little walnut balls. I removed the hulls from a few of them by stepping on them and rolling them under my foot, but Brian threw caution to the wind and tore most of them off with his hands, which, just as the article warned, retained greenish-brown smudges for days afterwards. Then he spread them out in small batches in front of the dehumidifier in the laundry room to dry. It took a few weeks, but eventually we ended up with a quart or so of cured nuts in their shells—about 40 in total.

Then came the really hard part, both literally and figuratively: getting those shells open. Brian cracked the first one by putting it in a vise and tightening it until it snapped (the shell, not the vise, although it felt like kind of a close call which would give first). We each sampled a bit of the nutmeat and found it...odd. It was a bit like a regular walnut, but with a sort of funky, musty flavor underneath. Not bad, exactly, but weird. I kept nibbling at mine, trying to figure out what to compare it to, and the best I could come up with was to say it's a bit like a strong cheese but without the saltiness. Brian tried cracking a few more (taking about ten minutes to get through four nuts) and toasting them to see how that affected their flavor. The toasted nuts smelled absolutely lovely, powerfully nutty and rich, and their flavor was a bit darker, but that odd mustiness was still there. 

These nuts were so different from anything else we've tasted that we weren't quite sure what would be the best way to use them. I did a bit of searching and found several recipes at Southern Living, both savory and sweet: an ice cream, a pasta dish, a sweet bread, a pie, and a salad. To get a better idea of how the walnuts might taste in a sweet dish, I tried sprinkling some cinnamon sugar over one and found that the combination worked quite well: the sugar and spice seemed to soften the funkiness of the walnuts, making it just one element in a more complex blend. Then, for a savory counterpart, I tried one with a bit of our homemade spaghetti salt, and the effect was much the same: the mustiness blended into the background instead of dominating the flavor. So I think that will be the key to enjoying these walnuts: blend them with other strong-tasting ingredients so that their musty, earthy quality will become an interesting element of the flavor rather than the primary note. This recipe for maple-Dijon roasted Brussels sprouts with walnuts might be a good place to start.