The Final Nut

Finally. The final nuts have come down and they are about 95% bagged. It's a record year and I have a very sore back from dealing with all those nuts. I have 74 full bags and about three piles of nuts on the side of the shed that will probably take another three bags or so. That is a record amount. The previous record was 60 bags in one year. During the past few years there have hardly been any nuts on the ground in our backyard. The trees drop nuts in cycles. Most of the time there are moderate amounts and by that I mean about 20 to 30 bags. That would be average. The bags need to be strong too. Those thin clear bags don't work well. We do have eight trees dropping nuts in our yard. Six are our trees and two more on our neighbors property consistently drop nuts in our yard. We have three trees dropping a significant amount of nuts into our other neighbors yard too.

The process of dealing with these nuts is time consuming and physically challenging. We put them in plastic bags along with the leaves that have come down and fill the bag until it is just heavy enough to lift. Most of the time there is still plenty of room in the bag when there are a lot of nuts in it. I try to spread the leaves around to different bags to take up some of that room.

We also use the smaller white kitchen bags to fill with nuts when there are not a lot of leaves around. That way you can fill a bag with nuts and not waste so much bag space.

Earlier in the season when just a few nuts have come down I will walk around the yard, pick up a nut and then toss it over the fence into the debris pile behind the neighbors garage. They dump lots of garden clippings, branches, nuts and piles of stuff. The squirrels love it and I add a few nuts now and then. If I come across any stray nuts now that the bagging is done I may toss them into that pile too. 

When we first moved into this house we had no idea how bad the nut situation would be. The people who lived here before us didn't always clean up the nuts and apparently there were lots of old shells throughout the yard. Katie was 12 and Sean was 8 when we moved in and they were used to running around barefoot in the yard of our previous house. They immediately ran around in our new yard and cut their feet on old nut shells. We had to insist on them wearing shoes or sneakers all the time in the backyard and they painfully learned that lesson. Because they also spent a lot of time playing in the yard I became obsessed with cleaning up the nuts every fall.

Not everybody does it and it looks like our next door neighbor with several nut trees is not doing her backyard anymore. She cleans up around the house, garage and driveway with the help of a grandson but this year has not touched the backyard. It's a mess.

She has also arranged to take down the really big black walnut tree in her driveway. It has been dropping a lot of nuts on our house this year. The tree contractor was waiting for the leaves and nuts to drop before taking it down. That should be soon now and will be worth another post at that time.