Peter Leibert's Page

WALNUTS:  A PERSONAL STORY

Way back when, I learned about walnuts. At the place where I was being raised by my parents, they were growing trees which were known to us kids as “walnut trees”, probably because those big trees produced a lot of those so-called walnuts. As I grew older, I learned to refer to them as English Walnuts. Since I was raised on a farm, you should also be informed that we grew, or raised, a lot of other things, but those crops are subjects for other sessions.

During my early days, I knew nothing about the nutritional benefits of walnuts, nor the history of walnuts, nor the problems of growing them, and anything else - except, my Dad early on taught us to shake the nuts out of the tree, how to pick them up, and then how to carry them to where we would spread them out to dry. After they were dried, he taught us to peal the husk off, and then crack open the nut shell so we could eat the nut. No, that might have not been right. Perhaps it was “so my parents could sell them!”

On our family farm, we had about 60 to 70 large English walnut trees. On the farm right next door to ours, our grandparents had another 40 walnut trees. That is a lot of walnut trees. All of these trees had been planted during the latter part of the 1880’s, so these trees were forty or fifty years old by the time I became an active - working - kid. The key part about a walnut crop, as related to this story, is the harvesting of the “crop” of walnuts. This is when you gather the nuts. This activity started during early September, and continued into the month of October.

So what do I remember about that process. Our parents would contract with someone who would come and shake the trees, gather the fallen nuts, bag them and then carry them off. These people were paid for each sack of nuts they filled. The Leibert youngsters came into play after the main crop was picked by those contractors. We would be “requested to” re-shake the trees, gather any nuts which had not yet been gathered, peal off their husks, dry them, and perhaps crack them for their nuts. Each step in this process would result in a set amount of pay.

But there were side effects with this effort that you may never have heard about. How do you shake the walnuts out of the tree? You use a walnut shaker. These were long poles which contained a hook at one end. They came in various lengths of 20, 30 or even 40 feet. You would raise the pole and hook it onto a limb of the tree. Manually you would raise the pole and quickly lower it in order to physically vibrate the limb enough to shake the nuts loose. Then you picked up the fallen nuts and placed them into a gunny sack. One problem - the husks resulted in a stain on your fingers. You could always tell what children had walnut trees by these stains which they wore with honor during September through November of each year.

We were paid between 50 cents and 75 cents per gunny sack for those nuts - which probably weighed 50 pounds or so. Then you could choose to peal the husks off of all those nuts and get an additional 20 or 30 cents per filled gunny sack. Of course, you could also crack the shells of those nuts and get another bonus payment for the shelled nut.

In today’s environment, 99 percent of walnuts sold in the U.S. are produced in California, primarily in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys. Most of these commercially produced walnuts are hybrids of the English (Persian) walnut.