Nuts No Nuts

This has been an extraordinary fall season of no nuts in our backyard. Well, there have been a few here and there, not many, not many at all and the squirrels are going nuts. You can see it in their beady little eyes. It's going to be a tough winter for them.

Usually by now I've filled up dozens of bags of nuts and would be out in the yard every day picking them up. Hundreds of them a week. Not this year. I've not put any nuts in a bag this year. There have been some years when I filled over 50 bags with leaves and nuts. The record is 60 but the average is around 40. 

So far this season I've had about 8 bags of just leaves. No nuts. There are still plenty of leaves on the trees and the ground and I'm sure there will be about 6 or so more bags but there are no nuts on the trees now. Whatever ones there were have come down and there were not very many.

The black walnuts on these trees are cyclical. Some years there are many of them and some years not so much. There are years when you can have trouble walking around in the yard because of all the nuts and then like this year there are almost none at all.