Walnut Pickin' Time

Cousin Skeeter here telling you about a time in the fall when the Ozarks is just a buzz of excitement--that would be Walnut Pickin' Time. This is the time of year that you see how many black walnuts you can pickup off the ground before the squirrels are able to carry them off for their winter survival.

Lot's of hours are spent gatherin' these nuts into bags, buckets, boxes, hats pockets or even the bed of your truck. This is one activity the whole community can share in-men, women, young and old-even the Amish collect the nuts-They collect these black walnuts and load huge flatbed buggies drawn by big horses and then off to the walnut processing center everyone goes.

Well--I thought it would be a good idea for Denise to hop on this big money making hobby.

After all there are lots of black walnut trees in her yard--How hard could it be?

You put a little nut in a bag and turn it in for big bucks--NOT!!!!!

After a couple of hours of walnut pickin'-we decided it wasn't as much fun as it looked.

Denise did find a handy little tool that helped a lot. This thing as you can see in the picture looks like a bingo cage with a handle on it. You just roll it across the ground and it picks up the nuts that are about the size of a golfball.I think picking up golfballs would be a much better idea -especially if the golf course was in Hawaii not Missouri.

The day finally came---It was time to run in the black walnuts for the big time cash reward.

We were the 10th car in line to take the walnuts to the big walnut hulling machine. The time was 900a on Oct 20th 2006. At 10:30 we were still waiting-but at least we were only 3 cars back now.

You know how it is when you get in line at the grocery store and the register tape runs out just as it is your time to check out--well, it was our turn and they said it was time to change out the walnut hulling truck.

The man in front of us decided to hop out of his truck and came on back and wanted to jaw a bit with us. He was 48 yrs. old-no teeth-started smoking when he was 40-did a stint in a mental hospital and his Sunday school teacher died a few days before--we found all this out in just about 30 very long minutes.

After 4 hours in line it was finally our turn--Denise figured we made 4.35 an hour for 4 hours.-yes that is what you get 13.00 for 100 pounds. We had 100 pounds. Yippee.

Imagine how happy Denise's daughter Holly was when we made it back home and Denise gave Holly her half--6.50 for helping pick up those smelly black walnuts.

I got zippo-nada---Denise I didn't help---I said --HELLO--I am a dummy...what's you excuse!