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Black Walnuts

Started by RavioliKid, October 01, 2000, 10:31:33 AM

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RavioliKid

Hi, all!

I am excited about having another place to go for answers to my forestry questions - and this one with a slant toward Michigan!

I am experimenting with black walnuts this fall. We've made ink (dye) out of them by boiling for several hours in water with a dollop of vinegar added.  

The resulting ink is rather pale.  Any ideas about how to get it darker?  

Also, I'd like to try to grow some trees from the seeds.  How much growth can I expect in one year? Can I plant them in containers? If so, does anyone have any recommendations on the size of the container?

Any interesting facts and figures or amusing anecdotes I can use with my third grade students?

RavioliKid

Jeff

Kim,
I am going up to cedarville this coming weekend bear hunting. I have a book at the cabin I picked up at an estate sale called "woodlore" I think it was published in the early part of this century and it has a multitude of neat things in it.

From how to make soap to tanning hides with "brains", and I think it had something about tannan Dye fromwalnuts hulls. I will bring it home with me and see what kind of things might be there that you might share with your class.

RavioliKid

Great, Jeff!

I look forward to what you can tell me - but don't bother "sharing" the info about tanning hides with brains.  We need every brain cell that comes in the classroom door!

Good luck with the bears! Or, did you mean you were going hunting bear? It's getting a little chilly for that, don't you think? <g>
RavioliKid

Jeff

uh... NO! We want to see bears! I KNOW they don't want to see me. Actually, I am a guide for this as I did not get a permit. A free trip to the U.P.! Can't beat it! The colors are really coming out here in Harrison, (it seems a little early) So I am looking forward to going north for a little fall color tour to boot.

Forester Frank

http://www.gapac.com/educationalinnature/

For your 3rd graders try the web site listed above. It is Georgia-Pacific's Educational in Nature Site. G-P is located in K'zoo and is very good about providing schools with educational materials right from their corporate office in Atlanta, GA. Lots of good forestry, energy, papermaking, birds/mammals, etc. material. Contact the K'zoo office or Jeff Asher at the corporate office. Good luck.

Black Walnut Council down in your neck of the woods may be of help on the Walnut Ink Question.

JGG
Forester Frank

RavioliKid

Thanks for the information! I will look them up soon.  I didn't know that there was a Black Walnut Council! Ya learn something new everyday!

RavioliKid

Frank_Pender

Hey Rav, I was going through some files this morning and found this postinf from 2 years ago and thought you might be intrested in trying to contact this fella about Black Walnut.  He has been a  good acquaintance of mine for some 10 years now and is a fine man.  He is a physican/ Surgeon about 35 miles South of where I live in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.  He has quite a web site if anyone is interested in viewing:   www.gobywalnut.com :P
Frank Pender

RavioliKid

Thanks, Frank!

I haven't been doing anything with black walnuts this year, but had to go look at the site anyways. Beautiful wood!

RavioliKid

Tom

It's got nothing to do with much but I found it interesting.  The TV show Monstor Garage built a Walnut Shaker last night onto a 3/4 ton pickup.  When they got through it had a tent under the shaker to catch the walnuts and sported a silver flame on imitation wood grain paint job.  Then they took it into a walnut grove and competed with a commercial walnut shaker.  The truck won.  

This took place in Northern California or Oregon and I was surprised at the small size of the walnut trees in the grove. They seemed to be 6 to 8 inch DBH and maybe 15 feet tall. I've seen orange groves with trees bigger than that.

Some of you who know, Do they keep the groves this size for harvesting purposes or do they let the tree attain its matur height?   Our Pecan groves are allowed to obtain mature height and still are mechanically harvested. ???


Frank_Pender

Tom, I believe they usually try to keep them down in size for higher production of walnuts, rather than letting all of the energy go to growing lots of long limbs.  What you saw may well have been an English Walnut orchard in the Modesto, Calif. area.
There are, I hear, some new species of walnut trees on the masrket that will produce a good quantity of fruit by the third year of being placed in an orchard.  
Frank Pender

Tillaway

Probably a young orchard or maybe they have a dwarf variety like apples now.  The Walnut orchards just south of me allow the trees to get pretty good sized before they take them out.  In fact I watched one taken out not long ago. They ground most of it up into hog fuel but kept the larger crotches or basically the first 8 feet.  I saw a bunch of flatbeds ready to convoy them somewhere.
Making Tillamook Bay safe for bait; one salmon at a time.

SwampDonkey

Hi:

I've been experimenting with Black Walnut and Butternut the last 12 years. I planted 2 Black Walnut I ordered from a Nursery in Quebec and in the last 3 years they have produced nuts.The trees are 12 years old now and 12-14 feet tall. I do get some die-back occasionally, since they are planted outside their range in Western New Brunswick. But, we have been experiencing milder winter weather here for the past 10 years now. The 4th year after I planted the black walnut they grew 22 - 30 inches and were quite weak stemed. We had high winds that broke several laterals, so I fixed them up and staked them for 4 years. They are doing well now. Butternut on the other hand is found naturally here and I have a 30 year old tree bearing plentiful nuts every 2 years, but it also produces male flowers annually. This tree was transplanted with a diameter of 8 inches at the root collar. I have gathered walnut seed from several areas in Va, NC, and TN and out planted them on my woodlot. I bury them 1-2 inches in sandy clay loam soil. The ground is quite gravelly since its an esker deposit. Alot of gravel pits locally. Anyway, I've germinated several walnuts, probably a 20 % germination success. As far as butternut is concerned I've had 90 % germination success. Both tree seed seems to germinate in July and there is a very fast growth spirt the first year, up to 18 inches, averaging 10 inches. The second year, its less dramatic, about 1- 4 inches. Probably dependent on direct sunlight since they are not very shade tolerant. Next year will be the 3rd season and I'm expecting 6 to 10 inches of growth. I have my butternut in grass, some in low herb cover and some with haircap moss cover. All seem to germinate successfully. The black walnut are planted in soil with haircap moss cover and the seedlings seem to die-back a bit the first winter, I need to check them again this season for survival. I do not think any nuts from my walnut trees have germinated, since they are not mature trees. I have all my germinates locations GPS'ed to make it easier to find. Some time you can be looking right at them and not see them at all, they blend in with their surroundings so well.
I've also experimented with basswood also, which is very hard to germinate, only 2 % germination success. I only have juvenile tree seed. I have not germinated any successfully yet. It is also native here. I transplanted 3 wild trees 12 years ago from my woodlot. They are starting to produce seed now and are 8 to 14 feet tall. Flowers are very fragrant and they take a long time to bloom once budded out (mid-july). I've been planting yellow birch also. I've found that you cannot plant them in grasses because of mice and moles, but they do well in low herbs or moss covered soil if you keep the snow-shoe hare away. My 1 year old seedlings were 12 to 20 inches when outplanted from jiffy containers (1 inch diam jiffy). The seed was collected locally also. Trees planted in areas of low herbs have 95 % survival.The good thing about yellow birch, if it does get browsed it has several buds above the root collar that can sprout. Last year, the second season in the field, they grew 4 to 6 inches. I planted several hundred. I've seen natural yellow birch that had several years of browse, but they keep on ticking. I think of yellow birch as the candy mint tree species, it tastes minty and sweet, that's why all the wildlife eats it. The ruffed grouse love the catkins in mid fall, and pollen catkins in late winter, early spring.

Anyway, thought it might be of interest to someone
"No amount of belief makes something a fact." James Randi

1 Thessalonians 5:21

2020 Polaris Ranger 570 to forward firewood, Husqvarna 555 XT Pro, Stihl FS560 clearing saw and continuously thinning my ground, on the side. Grow them trees. (((o)))

Tom

Swamp Donkey

You bet it was interesting. I like reading it even though I'm not in the area that these trees thrive.  It makes me feel good to see someone enjoy his efforts as much as you apparently do. I have a hardwood swamp behind the house and know most of my trees intimately. :D   It's not understood by many who don't own land how you can identify with each tree on the place.  They become good friends.

 I'll bet Rav never pictured this thread seeing the light of day again. :D   All the way from 2000.... wow!

I have an old timer who plants Black Walnut.  I asked him how he did it and how deep one time and he said, "I step on them".  :D  I guess he was just making sure that they made good contact with the soil. He had Black Walnuts coming up everywhere even though they aren't natural or common to the area.

RavioliKid

You're right about that one, Tom! When I got the notification that there was a posting in this thread, I figured that there were computer gremlins afoot.

 :D
RavioliKid

Bud Man

Swamp Donkey, The 20% germination for Walnut seeds sounds mighty low, it is maybe due to the translocating of the nuts to such a far away location. While the nuts planted (if fertile) will germinate and grow and become fertile trees, they will have the parental habit of flowering and pollinating at the time of year that they did in their natural location and as such will not correspond to the pollination and flowering in the area that they have been moved to ! As a result their seed will be less likely to be fertile.  I've always experienced 85% and up on Walnuts collected, float sorted,  protected, stratified,  and planted properly. Just some sharing of my own personal experiences with Walnut trees !
The groves were God's first temples.. " A Forest Hymn"  by.. William Cullen Bryant

SwampDonkey

Bud Man:

Yes, I agree about the flowering and fertility of the fruit. But flowers don't appear on them untill the butternut are flowering also, usually mid-may here. We don't get fall frosts until the end of september here. The last few years we haven't had killing frost until mid October, although in low lands and river valleys they get frost in late august or mid september most of the time. The corn field by the house didn't get killed until mid October this year and I've seen other fields on the high lands be frost free untill October 25th because the corn was still green. Corn isn't very resilient to frosts. And the thing about walnut is that its not an early bloomer like red maple, box elder (manitoba maple) or the birches, so planting it here shouldn't hurt the blossoms. But, I suspect our winters damage the over wintering buds. Its probably 20 F colder than it should be for them. Our winter temps average 0 F, should be 20 F or a bit higher I think. So far this winter has been more in line with that. We only have a couple inches of snow so far and today is 18 F. Last winter was severe with alot of cold winds but the previous 3 were milder than this winter.  Oh and the seed that germinated was from VA and NC origin, my own juvenile seed didn't take. Research has shown that seed from mature trees has higher germinatation success also. This is one of the reasons why we have seed orchards here from cloned mature trees (rooted cuttings). Another reason was the cuttings were taken from trees with desireable form and vigour. Research in tree improvement has only yielded a 4 % genetic gain in our softwood species after millions of $$ spent.  ???

What's interesting is the high germination success of my butternut, since I have one tree which is self pollinating. The closest wild butternut trees are 1/2 mile away to the east, so the chance is nill for cross pollination. I stratify all my seed outside in the soil. Although I have stratified oak inside by placing the acorns in a ziplock with water, then freezing the package in the freezer for 2 weeks. Had  1 out of 3 seed germinate, that tree is now 15 feet tall and producing seed the last 5 years. The local red squirrels are smarter than me picking them tho. I didn't float the seed to test for viability. I did later on with another batch of acorns, but I opened the floaters and most all had a good centre with healthy looking cotelydons and embryo. So I never had much faith in the float test. I planted several pail fulls in the garden, covered them with a thin veneer of soil and placed sugar maple leaves on top. And I had 100's of little seedlings. But trouble is that the grass got heavy and the mice invaded so I don't have many left. If your growing hardwood you have to be grass free around here or 'mmmm mmmm yummy yummy' for the mice and moles.  ;D

I've been told not to out plant wildling spruce because of low success. I've had 95 % success, it just takes careful handling of the stock and proper selection of microsite. I do prefer container spruce though, alot less work. We used to plant alot of red pine around here on old abondoned fields and they were bare-root stock. Then they went to container and a much smaller tree. The bare-root was alot better but it had to be planted before mid june because the sod-ground gets so hard after that. We also found they were not being handled properly even when people were educated about how to plant them and sometimes they were just being stuffed into the planting hole with bunched up roots. Contractors were thinking of $$ not quality. The pay was very good, so that wasn't the factor, just greed. No good. ::)

Ooops , too much rambling on   ;)

Anyway, I'm just experimenting.  ;D

regards
"No amount of belief makes something a fact." James Randi

1 Thessalonians 5:21

2020 Polaris Ranger 570 to forward firewood, Husqvarna 555 XT Pro, Stihl FS560 clearing saw and continuously thinning my ground, on the side. Grow them trees. (((o)))

IndyIan

Hi SwampDonkey,

Thanks for your posts.  I've been planting B. walnut and Butternut on my property.  For now I've just been putting the nuts where I'd like the trees.  This spring I got BW's coming up in about 3/4's of my sites which I was happy with.  
This fall I put in about 200 butternut sites with 2 or 3 nuts per site.  Hopefully they'll do as well as the BW.  
I do like that I don't have to buy seedlings and I prefer to plant the nuts.
Keep us up to date on your seedling adventures, I'd like to hear more.

Ian

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