Taking the Time to Find the Treasure in the Trash

The black walnuts are back.  Last year's sparse crop lulled me away from the memory of prior seasons' black/green carpet.  Several ankle-twisting strolls through the yard in recent days have offered a PhD level refresher course.  The golf ball sized nuisances are everywhere -- at least everywhere I need to be; the driveway, the flower beds, the shortcuts through the lawn.   This morning, then, after the early morning chicken-releasing, potted plant and new seedling watering chores were completed I thought to make a first foray into nuisance clearing.  With an empty five-gallon bucket in one hand and the ingenious long-handled "picker-upper" tool I found at the garden center a few years ago, I went to work under the nearest tree.

 It doesn't take long to fill the wire basket of the tool, nor does it ultimately take long to fill a five-gallon bucket.

This, after clearing about a quarter of the space beneath a single tree.
This, with the nuts still falling.
This, with other tasks still to do today.

Perhaps a new perspective is called for.  Like dandelions, those edible "weeds" that prolifically populate a lawn that turn out to be one of nature's tools for breaking up compacted soil; like purslane, that edible "weed" I learned about earlier this summer, that is one of nature's tools for covering naked soil so as to protect it from erosion, perhaps I should walk around this pile of nuts and find a way to see them as a boon instead of a bother.

I'm not, let me assert, totally clueless about this matter.  Before you shake your head in bemused dismay at this city boy's blindness, let me interject that I am well aware of the culinary -- even nutritional -- value of this dubious harvest.  I know that a prudent steward would happily gather, de-husk, dry and shell this free bounty to good end.  My problem, these last few years of tending this windfall, has not been ignorance; it has been laziness.  Or perhaps more charitably assessed, triage.  "Nutting", as I might name it, takes time -- lots of it with all those multiple steps.  And I've got other, more accessible, things to do in the garden, in the chicken yard, in the orchard.  "Lower hanging fruit" so to speak.

But as we settle more comfortably into the undulations and rhythms of farmstead life, and as we anticipate the eventual harvest of nuts from trees we have actually planted, I'm rethinking this profligate waste.  After all, life is full of things difficult and superficially unattractive whose superior sweetness and beauty deep within gloriously rewards those who contribute the time and effort necessary to access it.  Think "geodes."  Think cultures that seem inscrutable and undesirable.  Think religious convictions that seem inane or bizarre or off-putting.   And think all of those people we have tripped over along the way who don't have initial "curb appeal" but who become life-long, life-supporting friends through the rich character and grace within.

Once we have taken the time to get inside.  And once they have allowed us there.

So I've started reading about how to accomplish these tedious steps for harvesting walnuts -- the erstwhile trash of the farmstead that could well become its quiet autumn treasure.

So I'll need to close for now.  I've got work to do.  Buckets of it.
If, that is, it doesn't drive me nuts.