the Walnut Diary

The new walnut field lies on the southern slope of the drumlin known locally as Young’s Hill. The rows run thirty-five stations down the hill, or 680 feet from first to last. So far I have marked sixteen of these rows and have planted all but the two closest to the woodlot.

I find an interesting variety in soil textures as I plant my way down the slope. The top has the usual sandy loam, relatively soft after a few recent rains, but prone to lumpiness from a high proportion of stone to soil. The bottom third of each row has clay which seems to suck the implements and the seeds down into it. A band about sixty feet wide in the middle of the slope seems very hard. Grass grows less readily on this band than on the till above and the clay below, though it still produces a decent crop. But the soil hasn’t loosened after the rains in the manner of the other two types. It seems closely-grained and largely stone-free, but it is very hard to poke a hole for a walnut, and even more difficult to force the nut down a bit further with the planting stick.

On this countour line sixty feet west the best walnuts on the property begin and continue along this part of the slope all the way to the end of the drumlin. I’ll be very interested to see how the new seeds make out in comparison to those planted in the same rows above and below.

Yesterday I spotted the new rodent control system at the farm. He stood in the middle of a field and watched me drive up to the house. When I stopped he bounded away like a coyote, even turning at the fence to look back, but I think this guy’s part German shepherd. I saw him up close along the road the other day and his tail shows a hint of curl up at the end. He has grown a great deal since the week before the plowing match when he seemed to be underfoot most of the time. Scat around the field shows that he’s eating a lot of squirrels and mice, so I just hope he can find enough food over the winter for that huge frame. He should be a valuable asset to a walnut farm for many years to come if he can survive.

BTW: Apparently my email address is hard to find. Please send comments to rodcros at webruler dot com. Feedback is welcome.

It’s been a serene couple of weeks during the harvest. The daily routine featured loading up the golf cart with a few 5 gallon pails, driving back to the woodlot, parking under a tree and picking nuts to fill the pails, then driving up to the house for a break.

The weather is fine in the woodlot at this time of year, and while there’s a certain urgency to find the nuts before the squirrels and chipmunks collect them, there’s little real pressure. It’s as good as fishing for the soul.

Grey squirrels adapt very quicky. Last year I harvested very few nuts in the woodlot. The squirrels picked them from the canopy, apparently never touching the ground. All I could see below were nut hulls and coyote scat. This year conditions have changed. The old coyote died over the winter and the apprentices seem to be wary after the confusion of the plowing match, but Zeke the red-tailed hawk had been a formidable presence around the walnut trees. Squirrels adapted by working from the ground.

I sat on a stump one day to reflect and wait for some more nuts to drop. One fell about twenty feet from me, and before I could collect my bones to get it, a magnificent grey sprinted out from under a log, nabbed the nut on first bounce, then stood, open-mouthed, as I swore at him. He recovered more quickly than I, grabbed the fallen nut and took off at full speed across the forest floor. The squirrels are using the cover created from the improvement cut last winter to harvest safely and avoid Zeke.

Then one day last week the trees were full of greys. Surely enough, Zeke was no longer to be found. They must have been waiting for him to fly south.

Rose Fleguel of the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority showed up today to look at butternut trees. It seems she tours the country tracking down rumours of blight-resistant trees as potential breeding stock. We toured the woodlot, checking out the new seedlings and a couple of dozen trees, some healthy and some with the canker. She was quite taken with the stand of wild walnuts and claimed she had never seen anything like it. Music to a windshield rancher=s ears. Windshield ranchers? Those are the yuppie idlers who can=t get off their golf carts to do any serious work, whose chief activity and pleasure of mind is to point something out to a visitor and say, ALook at that!@ Today I was the victim. The logging guys were all excited about the bald eagle that had hovered around the woodlot all morning. While they were telling me this the massive bird gathered his feathers for another pass over our heads. That left me with some score-settling to do, so poor Rose got quite the tour. She was a good sport about it and walked the legs off me in the ankle-deep snow. Then when she got me back to my truck she had the gall to flit off into the woods for another hour or two with her GPS to plot the locations of the butternuts for inclusion on the Canadian registry. Ah, youth. They just don=t know when to tire out. I last saw her heading off to Charleston Lake for another session in another woodlot. So many butternuts, so little time.

Banished from the fridge at Thanksgiving, the processed nuts have sat in the gazebo while I worked every available hour on the renovation of the second story of the house. A heating season can=t begin until the building is closed in, so the walnuts had to wait. With great relief I watched last week the first time a gust of wind made the vapour barrier flex like an enormous, complex diaphragm. I turned on the heat and the new room immediately became the warmest in the house. Then came this week=s run of mild weather. Perhaps the nuts wouldn=t have to wait until spring after all. I opened up the first bag. The nuts were damp, fresh-smelling, and as usual ready to stain everything they touched. Just in case I took a sample in to the work bench, encased it in the jaws of a pipe wrench and hit it a sharp crack with a hammer. Quite a lovely nut, actually. Maybe it=s the hydration, but the shell was completely filled with meat. It had a pleasant flavour — perhaps a little young, but definitely palatable. So little then remained to do but to seize the window, not look gift weather in the mouth, and get all my nuts in a row. Off I went to the back field with a large hamper full of wet walnuts, my magic planting stick, and not quite enough clothes for the deceptively cold and windy day.

The plan was to fill in the spots where walnuts hadn=t grown last spring. A secondary plan was to double the number of plants in the field to encourage a taller growth and to generate some mowing efficiencies. I would plant enough new hills to convert the existing 20′ X 20′ grid to 10′ X 20′. I had read that even nurseries only expect 50% germination from black walnuts, so I decided this year to hedge my bets by planting three nuts per hill, rather than last year=s two. I have read that some plant as many as six, but with my tendency to bond with each seedling I=d end up unable to cull the extras and then what would I do? Put them up for adoption? Grow a hedge? Anyway, out I went with the golf cart and in went the nuts. The gloves got soggy, and all my other clothes became filthy as I wrestled the first thousand nuts or so into the ground. It looked like a nice, sunny late-fall day. It felt cold and raw in the brisk wind. Still, the ground was soft and the nuts were going in. I finished off the back field shortly after lunch and then moved to the field closer to the house. I like its park-like aspect so I may not pack more hills into it after all. The rest of the afternoon went by quickly as I inspected each hill and replanted to fill gaps. I ran out of light, energy and seed with about an acre left. If I get another good day I=ll grab the remaining bag of nuts in the gazebo and have at this last patch. What have I learned from my day?

• From a look at the bare patches after last year=s planting, it is clear that walnuts don=t like wet feet. Butternut seedlings seem much more tolerant of standing water. While most of the walnuts which did not grow had been planted in wet areas, some spots seemed to be relatively high and dry, but when I re-planted them I hit the kind of silt one finds in low-lying areas and the ground was wet. I think the silty soil had retained the water from recent rains. Successful hills seem to have more grit in the soil and don=t hold the water as well.
• If they are stapled down so that they don=t become kites and destroy the seedlings, paper mâché mats greatly enhance the chances of the seedlings they surround.
• Roundup application is highly dependent upon the weather and the skill of the applicator. Both the best seedlings and the worst bare spots in the fields show the effects of Roundup. Too little doesn=t work and too much produces a mini-wasteland where nothing can grow. On average, however, the spraying gave the seedlings a much-needed boost. In the overall scheme of things all of my hours of weeding last summer didn=t count for as much as one bad spray-job.
• Where walnuts like to grow, they really like to grow. Many of the hills I visited today had two little seedlings, standing straight and as tall as one summer=s growth can let them.. Volunteers planted by squirrels and seedlings snipped off by mowers in previous years have wrecked any semblance of an orderly grid in the best area, an abandoned pasture with tired soil and much less aggressive grasses than those in the working field next door.
• While August=s drought caused the seedlings to drop back early while the butternuts charged forward, I saw no evidence that any had died from the lack of moisture.
• A one-year old walnut is mainly leaves. At this time of year there isn=t much left to see.
• It is still cool planting a tree.
• When one plants 1500 walnuts in a day, even with the magic planting stick, expect UNBELIEVABLE LEG CRAMPS later in the evening when you try to climb a set of stairs.

This evening I came through the door in a new coat and clean sweater. My wife chipped: AHey, you look kinda presentable B except for the hands.@ Yesterday the comment had been, AI guess I won=t be taking you to a restaurant for a while with those hands.@ I=ve been processing walnuts this week. I discovered half-way through the first morning that walnut hulls do an excellent job of staining whatever they touch. By then it was too late to bother with gloves, and I was separating the nuts from the black goo largely by feel at that point, so I carried on.

Apart from the mess, it=s not a bad job, harvesting walnuts. The weather when they fall is the best of the year: a warm fall day with a strong, dry wind. My Pennsylvania friend Tom complains about walnuts beaning him from a hundred feet up when he clears them off his lawn, but my trees were a good deal more polite when I was gathering. None hit me. I filled three large hampers and all of the 5 gallon pails I could find. Walnut grower Neil Thomas provided advice by email and I went at the job. The first hamper of nuts, the squishy ones, landed in a heap on a piece of flat concrete next to the barn: my threshing floor. The golf cart seems to find a role in just about every task around the farm. Its left rear wheel became my crusher, methodically flattening and breaking down the blackened hulls. Then comfortably seated on my four-wheeled garden cart from Lee Valley Tools, I casually picked up a hull, extracted the nut, tossed it into the tub of water, noted that it did not float, and reached for another. And again, and again, and again. Gradually improvements suggested themselves. Digging just the nuts out of the mess without picking the crushed hulls up worked well. I=d pick all of the nuts I could reach, then move the cart and do it again. Before long I had worked my way through about 20 gallons of nuts. Very few floated, so by Neil=s calculations, they should be viable as seed. The next stage was to clean, bag and chill them sixty days for fall planting. My wife may be a bit surprised the next time she opens the big three-doored fridge she bought for the dream kitchen. My morning=s work fitted easily into one vegetable drawer. I set the humidity to Ahigh@ and cleaned up some of my mess. Except for the hands. No hope there. Two days later I decided to complete the job. Thirty gallons of the freshest nuts still awaited me in the barn, but Neil had warned of mould, so I went at it again. By now I=d established that the hulls could be removed by hand without too much trouble, but I like tools, and my cement mixer was just standing there. I had a mind to get it into the game. The green hulls were harder than the gooey ones, as well. The golf cart barely dented the fresh hulls. I needed more weight. My SUV did no better, so I backed the Massey Harris out of the barn and tore into the pile of nuts with the ribbed tires, front and back. The Massey worked the threshing floor into a fleshy pulp, so I put it back and shovelled some of the mess into the cement mixer. It immediately caked in the back, just like my first few efforts with sand and Portland. Water helped a bit, and then I tossed in a few sharp rocks, just to liven things up. That worked. Walnuts don=t crush from a little rough treatment, even if their hulls turn to mush. After a few loads dumped into the wheelbarrow and separated by hand, I realized that if I overfilled the mixer, the goop that slopped over onto the concrete would not have any nuts or rocks in it, just whipped hulls. A large potash kettle full of rain water next to the barn provided the liquid as I flushed the hulls away from the nuts. This worked pretty well, and I ended up with three pails full of burnished, sinking walnuts. But oh, the mess around the mixer! A two-inch pool of sludge looking like some infernal attempt at whipped cream just lay there, burbling. I averted my eyes, heading for the house (and the new fridge) with my stained hands and next year=s nuts. The second morning=s efforts filled the other vegetable drawer and the deli tray underneath. Completely. They are all triple-bagged, so now all I have to do is keep my wife from looking into the fridge until December 1^st.

Meanwhile I=m slinking around like Lady Macbeth, groaning, AWhat? Will these hands never be clean?@

Whew! A rainy day at last. The last six weeks have been busy. Thirsty pine and spruce seedlings tend to grab one=s attention, and keeping the 1700 little conifers alive during the month of August took a couple of hours per day. I tried the one-man-bucket-brigade approach, hauling well water in seven plastic oil drums on one of the utility trailers. This grew old very quickly as my back couldn=t handle the strain of lifting several hundred buckets of water out of the oil drums. The golf cart again found itself pressed into service, towing the single oil drum on the little trailer, drained by gravity through a 50′ garden hose. This proved in most ways a very efficient watering method. The water could pre-heat a certain amount, the work wasn=t strenuous, especially when I discovered an abandoned ski pole could be used as a handle on the end of the hose, and little water went to waste because I could stop the flow at the first sign of run-off, wait for the ground to soften, and apply more a few minutes later. Unfortunately, this watering method took time, lots of it. I could deliver a gallon per minute, watering about eighty seedlings with a load. Then the old Ez-Go died. The gradual loss of compression of the motor from old age came as no surprise, so I quickly bought a replacement, another Ez-Go, but this one a little-used 2003 model. The trailer hitch I had improvised on the old model bolted right on to the new one. They have changed the chassis design to encourage the use of heavy hitches on carts now. I guess this is an indication of where the utility vehicle market is going: more and more of Textron=s products find themselves doing utility work around gardens and meadows, rather than golf courses.

After I replaced the stock tires with others designed to be run soft, numbing somewhat the cart=s rather savage suspension, the fuel bill for the cart shot up. Everyone seems to have something for it to do, and most of it involves pulling a trailer. August 25^th was a very big day at the farm. Gary Nielsen had called a meeting of the Conservation Group for an inspection of the plantings on the property. Needless to say I spent the previous week mowing around seedlings, even using the riding lawn mower to work between the little trees after clearing the rows with the tractor and bush hog. The 18 hp Simplicity hydraulic runs back and forth with its foot control very smoothly, so I put that to use. With the cut set at 5″, the same as the bush hog=s, I learned to make a diagonal cut between the trees, brushing the seedling on the left, then stopping just before the blade annihilates the one on the right. Back up. Repeat the process. Only 1/4 mile to go. Three rows, though. The technique proved remarkably effective and not too hard on the mower. The overall improvement in the looks of the plantation later put the inspectors in quite an expansive mood, which prompted them to overlook my navigational errors with the bush hog in the pine plantation. The trouble was when we laid out this stand of pines I had volunteers at the ends of a 220′, knotted cord. Two of us sprayed the ground wherever we found a knot. Trouble was that nine feet means different things to different people, and so the rows took off on some unexpected diagonals, occasionally trapping the driver of a 5′ 6″ wide tractor in a 5′ row. With the seedlings more or less under control, the time had come at last to tackle the maple orchard. Originally I had intended to have the hay guy harvest between the twenty-foot rows, but the fear of a large round bale taking out a row of maples left the task to the bush hog. It responded to the stress of the long, dry hay by throwing off its blade, again. This time the dealer had a nut for it in his shop within two days, a great improvement over the two-month wait last summer. Forced back into service after a gruelling morning of wrench work, the rotary mower returned to the orchard to slay the grass. Anticipating a holiday, I guess, it retaliated by turning a bearing into a siren, disturbing my reverie with a high-pitched grating sound. Back to the barn, siphon out the gear oil, add heavier stuff, return to the maples, armed with earmuffs. Let it howl. I=ll take the gearbox for a rebuild the next time it manages to throw the blade off. On came the inspectors. They started, of course, with the one plot I hadn=t worked on all summer, the wet area near the house where we had planted spruce and cranberry. It turns out spruce don=t enjoy a good drowning, though about half managed to find high points on the rough ground and survived. The cranberries seemed fine down under the vegetation with the frogs.

The tour along the shelter belt of spruces and pines produced rave reviews. AWhatever you=re doing, keep it up. These trees are great!@ I pointed out some slightly yellowing pines, the cause of much of my anxiety which in turn had produced many hours of watering. AHmm, looks like a bit of overspray from the roundup. They=ll be fine.@ Here I=d been trying all summer to keep them wet enough they wouldn=t die, and … anyway, the others flourished because of my bad information and worry. I remembered Gary clearly saying, ABy the time a pine shows you that it needs water, it=s usually too late, anyway.@ I=d spent a lot of time in August trying to prove him wrong. Then came the maple orchard. In the early spring it had been such a morale boost for everyone, taking a bare field and in two days producing this wonderful grid of head-high trees. Now all I could see were the bare sticks of the fatalities. Gary, Rob, Donna and Lloyd seemed more inclined to look to the bottom of the glass, the half-full part, instead of my more pessimistic view. Everyone took a row and inspected each tree for signs of life. They broke the dead ones off to avoid confusion later in the fall when replacements arrive. By a rather generous estimate, Gary figures 75% of the maples survived. I counted 232 living stems of the 381 with which we started. 61%. And they accuse teachers of mark inflation? Mind you, those 232 trees look pretty nice on the side hill. They just don=t like wet feet, and so we=ll have to remember not to transplant into holes full of water. No doubt planted as a joke on the property owner, the two young basswoods are doing just fine.

When the crew got to the silver maples I had carefully carved out of the 6′ orchard grass with the lawn mower, they were highly complimentary. I groused that no more will I allow tree planters loose without a pre-measured grid. The work crew planted in a stream-of consciousness pattern which looks great but doesn=t allow me access with the bush hog, producing severe wear and tear on the lawn mower. Rule: if you can’t mow around it, you’ll mow over it.

The butternut plantation is a triumph. The centrepiece of the conservation display, these 132 seedlings took off in late July with a growth spurt leaving them lush and tall in the centres of their plastic spirals and mulch mats.

The transplanted walnuts stubbornly cling to life, but they are tall and make for interesting pictures, more so than the walnut seedlings in the field, which by the time of the inspection had decided to recede into the grass and concentrate on putting down roots for next year. A year later I learned that they had needed water, and my time spent on the pines might better have gone to the needier walnuts. Who’s to know?

I insistently dragged the crew over to the field by the barn, my original walnut plantation, where things have gone quite well, by my estimation. In Gary=s mind, though, this plot is off the beaten path and of primary interest as a source of transplants to repair the broken grid of the other field. In fact there are a number of double hills in the field and a lot of squirrel-relocations and volunteers which should yield some good transplants. It remains to be seen how well my little proteges will enjoy a new location, but I guess it=s inevitable. I can=t have two, 60 foot walnuts growing within a foot of each other. They=d fight.

So the next steps for the plantation? More mowing, gravel for the trails through the woodlot, plans for a fall/winter work crew on the site. In all, a pleasing end to a harrowing month in the tree-hugging business.

It’s been a blur this last month with the drought and the watering, but the sharp pain whenever I type an “A” indicates that the long dry spell may be over and the watering equipment put to rest. A lot of little trees will rest more easily when the fall rains begin in earnest. This all started when Rob Prosser and Howard French showed up in Forfar to tell us about the upcoming International Plowing Match in 2007 and their intended role for the Croskery farm and family in the event. The focus would be upon the woodlot and the conservation committee’s plans for a major display, highlighting one of the few remaining old‑growth forests in the area.

One of the early innovations was a management plan for the property drafted by Stewart Hamill and subjected to numerous revisions by a committee of family members. Stewart suggested a list of nursery stock for spring planting and we agreed. Little did we know, eh? Stew also wanted to extend the woodlot so that it would have a larger footprint for his precious birds. We chewed this one back and forth a bit. Stew wanted a wooded connection to the other, larger woodlots on the hill. I saw no advantage to providing a boulevard for raccoons to raid our sweet corn patch. Stew wanted forest cover. I wanted lines of sight. Educated through a round of meetings, focus groups, a symposium, and even a testimonial dinner for volunteers, I found myself gently led toward a rather elegant compromise. The deer and the raccoons will have to walk all the way around the perimeter fences if they want to travel in the cover of shelter belts. We will still get to see Newboro Lake from the kitchen, and passers‑by on the road will see clumps of evergreen and shrubs, rather than a wall of green. The line fences, however, will gradually disappear behind rows of pine and spruce. Then they took me to meet Neil Thomas.

Neil is something of a legend among tree huggers, having worked tirelessly for sixteen years to cultivate a plantation of black walnuts. His well-documented experience and active assistance made it inevitable that I would follow my own obsession with walnut trees and start a plantation as a display project for the plowing match.

Working alone, how does one mark a 20′ grid on a four‑acre field? With several summers of surveying experience during my salad years, I eventually hit upon using the skids of my 5′ bush hog as a marker on soil. That meant a great deal of mowing, but eventually I had a grid. Neil used posts made from brace wire to mark his plantings. I decided to make some, so off I went to Baker’s Feed Store and forked out $57. for a 50 pound roll of 9 gauge galvanized wire.

Then came the question: How do I make the posts? The wire’s too stiff to bend easily. Lee Valley Tools had the answer, of course, in a six‑dollar brace wire bender, easily mounted in your vice or screwed to your utility trailer. Two hundred pounds of 9 gauge wire later, I had enough posts to mark the walnut hills.