I know someone who grows and sells walnuts. They have their own trees, then hire seasonal workers to crack them and extract the meat, package them and sell in bulk to Western Europe. A truck full of shelled and packaged walnuts can be worth $100k+. But those prices have been going down in recently.
Also if you get a chance, try green walnuts. They ones that are still in their green soft outer hulls. Have no idea where you'd find them in US. But they are pretty delicious - a completely different taste than the dried ones, I think somewhat similar to avocado. The juice from the green outer hulls will also stain anything they touch, including hands. Takes a few days to get it out, but given the taste, it's worth it.
My parents have two giant black walnut trees in their front yard in Norval, a sleepy town outside of Toronto. I used to have to pick up hundreds or thousands of these staining green balls of yuck. First couple years you go through the trouble of eating a few, but they're harder to extract than normal walnuts plus I was a kid and didn't appreciate it like I would at thirty-two.
One day I was out in yard after these bugger balls had started to fall and a Jamaican accented guy in his 50s drives up our one way street. He stops the car and asks if we're doing anything with the nuts. I say "we might eat 5 a year, if you want 'em you can have 'em, but try to get them before my mum yells at me" and that was it.
Twice a fall he drives up loads up his little car with walnuts and brings them back to his Jamaican themed natural foods store where he and his wife clean them and sell them.
What I love about this story is just how anti-internet it is. There was no web crawler looking for excess nuts, no search engines, no cold emails or fake users 'til you make it, just a dude driving around and a kid in a yard.
And a natural foods store that really lives up to its name.
> but they're harder to extract than normal walnuts
Heh no joke! Had to use a knife. Got lots cuts on my fingers from it.
One year my mom decided to make green walnut jam. It was delicious, but a lot of work. And then after helping her prepare the walnuts my hands were a dark brown color for about a week. Got made fun in school, though for good measure too, I looked ridiculous.
It would be "more Internet" if you took the chance and linked to the store (or at least named it), giving folks in the area a chance to discover something new and perhaps earn the man running the store a few extra dollars.
I know I would make an effort to go if I heard a similar local story. It's more fun when there's some kind of connection.
Totally, walnuts are great cash crop. It doesn't need basically any work during the year and you get huge stock out of every single tree. Also the market for shelled walnuts is big and even I (the world worst salesman) can sell full stock in few weeks.
There are two cons: shelling is really work intensive and it takes decades for trees to mature enough to give good yields.
Walnuts are hell on other plant life. I have a couple black walnut trees on the edge of my lawn, and I have had to experiment a bunch to see what vegetables I can actually get to grow in my garden...
I can't confirm that, there's plenty of plants around the regia tree in my garden. It has had fungus since forever (like every walnut tree I've ever seen), so that might keep it from doing that.
English walnut differs from black walnut in that the juglones -- the protective gas emitted by walnut trees -- are emitted less. Furthermore, it is easy to confuse water stress with juglone gas stress, so sometimes these symptoms can be remedied with more water.
Given what the parent commenter has said about having to experiment with different plants, it stands to reason that they have a healthy black walnut tree in their garden rather than a regia.
Most greens (spinach, kale, swiss chard, beets) seem to do pretty ok. Green and pole beans do quite well. Broccoli did alright, at least the plants, though I had a pack of baby rabbits that savaged it when it was small, and it never headed up after that.
Very mediocre results with my tomatoes and cucumbers this year, but it was very, very dry.
Oh, and zucchini. But you can almost plant zucchini on asphalt and it would find a way to produce bushels of the stuff...
You really need to take care of fallen leaves as they are the main way of walnut to combat a competition. Once you rake the leaves every year you should be quite fine growing most of the vegetables that didn't require a lot of sun.
Indeed, it's a strategy that a fair number of tree types employ. Off the top of my head, various pines and eucalyptus do the same. Usually part of the secretion happens via the roots, but a large part is done via leaves.
Presumably the same oils that deter insects from feeding on the leaves / needles tend to leach out into the soil over time. And all things being equal, the leaves are most likely to fall near the trunk, making it an excellent delivery mechanism, too.
Walnuts were one of the first foods certified by the American Heart Association as being heart healthy. Walnuts are especially high in omega-3 fatty acids.
> For former ranger Tarikov, the preservation of the ancient forest is the key. “If I had a million dollars, I would make a wall around the forest with checkpoints, great rangers with good salaries, and really encourage the wildlife to return,” he said.
they really get value for their money there. in Los Angeles a million dollars would not cover the pension for a single retired police officer.
I’ve already been downvoted into the bowels of the underworld but here’s a citation to support my claim:
In 2016, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) provided a Qualified Health Claim allowing products containing walnuts to state: "Supportive but not conclusive research shows that eating 1.5 ounces per day of walnuts, as part of a low saturated fat and low cholesterol diet and not resulting in increased caloric intake, may reduce the risk of coronary heart disease."
Also if you get a chance, try green walnuts. They ones that are still in their green soft outer hulls. Have no idea where you'd find them in US. But they are pretty delicious - a completely different taste than the dried ones, I think somewhat similar to avocado. The juice from the green outer hulls will also stain anything they touch, including hands. Takes a few days to get it out, but given the taste, it's worth it.