Awww, nuts!

Walnuts, hickory nuts and beech nuts are all in relative abundance on our property this year. Trees that are not producing much mast this year are buckeyes and oak trees. Regardless, the squirrels are working hard, especially on the hickory nuts. It is not uncommon to wake up in the morning to hear little drops among the leaves, only to realize it isn't raining. Well, not from the sky, anyway. It is raining nuts, though! The metal roof on our house amplifies the sound when nuts and nut bits rain down from the trees. I have an image in my mind of the squirrels maniacally hurling husks and shell down at our house, laughing merrily in the early dawn light as they wake us from sound sleep.

Bits and pieces of nut shell fragments litter the property during late summer and early autumn. Can you pick them out among the gravel?

In addition to all the tiny shell remains, there are also a good number of nuts still in their husks. I can't tell if this one's been chewed, or if it's just rotten (or maybe both).

So what happened here? What caused a squirrel to gnaw and gnaw and gnaw on this hickory nut and then toss it away? Did it decide it wasn't yet ripe enough? Did it get disturbed by a hawk or another squirrel and decided it was better to abandon its post and its meal rather than stay where it was? Whatever the cause for abandonment, it gives us a good chance to see the kind of damage a squirrel's teeth can do. I sure don't ever want to be bitten by a squirrel!

This nut turned out to be a waste of time. It was more intact when I found it, but upon breaking it open, I found that the nut meat was not ripe. If you look closely, you can see some shininess to the meat right in the center of the photo. That is one raw nut. Yuck!

Just to give you an idea of size, here's a husked nut in the hand. I think this is a Shellbark Hickory nut. We definitely have Shagbark Hickories on our property, and this nut, along with some others I found, are much larger than the Shagbark nuts. I'll try to find some nuts from each species of tree to make some comparisons at a later date.

Much daintier is the nut of the Beech tree. I usually only find the husk after it has come open and dispersed the seed pods, but this year I have found quite a few where the seeds are still in the husk.

Without much effort, the 2 seed pods slip right out of the spiny husk. The seed pods kind of remind me of Hershey's kisses, but without the flat bottom.

What nuts are you seeing around these days?

Birding and baking

Today was a pretty dreary day - very windy all day, drizzling off and on. What better way to spend part of the day than by doing some bird watching and some baking?

We bought some new feeders this week, and luckily the birds seem to have adapted to them pretty quickly.

The birding view from the dining room

The view with my camera pressed against the patio door

The birding view from the kitchen window - the goldfinch spot

'Tis the season for baking with pumpkin. I had a crazy idea the other day that I want to make pumpkin meringues, which is going to be a challenge. While I scanned the interwebs for inspiration with the meringues, I ran into so many other yummy-sounding pumpkin recipes. One of them was a recipe for pumpkin biscotti on Simply Recipe which sounded too good to pass up. I added a scant cup of Craisins and a scant cup of some of the hickory nuts that we coaxed out of their shells.









While the biscotti bake for the first round, time to take a bird break

alternate view from the kitchen window

Emmet says "Hey, what smells good in there?"

After the loafs cooled enough for me to handle, it was time to cut them.

Ah, the finished product! Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go enjoy one of these with a nice cup of sweet coconut Thai Chai.

Offering competition to the squirrels

We have several Shagbark Hickory trees on our property, one of which branches out right over our house.  Come fall, its abundant supply of nuts bombs our rooftop when it's windy, when it rains, when the squirrels decide they want a snack...

This year, after trying some hickory nuts at our friend Brian's house, we decided to make nice with the tree that bombs our house and harvest some of those nuts.

So far we've collected about 3 lbs. 4 oz. of nuts in their shell.  Our first harvest, about 10 oz. of nuts in the shell, yielded about 2.5 oz. nut meat.

The process of getting to the meat is tedious. It involves a hammer and some kind of pick-like tool.

One thing I have decided after cracking many a nut with a hammer is that I don't really want to provoke a squirrel or chipmunk to bite me. If they can do with their teeth what we need a hammer and a pick to do, well... those are some bad-*** teeth!

Squirrel's dining table

Thankfully, the end result of all this trouble is a delicious-tasting nut. The taste, to me, is reminiscent of maple, and butter pecan ice cream. (I have learned that pecans and hickory nuts are related, but the hickory nuts taste nothing like pecans to my tongue.)

They are good for eating out of hand, and are tasty on top of some vanilla frozen yogurt, but what recipes will make the best use of their deliciousness? I surely intend to find out!