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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

I know someone who grows and sells walnuts. They have their own trees, then hire seasonal workers to crack them and extract the meat, package them and sell in bulk to Western Europe. A truck full of shelled and packaged walnuts can be worth $100k+. But those prices have been going down in recently.

Also if you get a chance, try green walnuts. They ones that are still in their green soft outer hulls. Have no idea where you'd find them in US. But they are pretty delicious - a completely different taste than the dried ones, I think somewhat similar to avocado. The juice from the green outer hulls will also stain anything they touch, including hands. Takes a few days to get it out, but given the taste, it's worth it.

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My parents have two giant black walnut trees in their front yard in Norval, a sleepy town outside of Toronto. I used to have to pick up hundreds or thousands of these staining green balls of yuck. First couple years you go through the trouble of eating a few, but they're harder to extract than normal walnuts plus I was a kid and didn't appreciate it like I would at thirty-two.

One day I was out in yard after these bugger balls had started to fall and a Jamaican accented guy in his 50s drives up our one way street. He stops the car and asks if we're doing anything with the nuts. I say "we might eat 5 a year, if you want 'em you can have 'em, but try to get them before my mum yells at me" and that was it.

Twice a fall he drives up loads up his little car with walnuts and brings them back to his Jamaican themed natural foods store where he and his wife clean them and sell them.

What I love about this story is just how anti-internet it is. There was no web crawler looking for excess nuts, no search engines, no cold emails or fake users 'til you make it, just a dude driving around and a kid in a yard.

And a natural foods store that really lives up to its name.

Awesome!

It would be "more Internet" if you took the chance and linked to the store (or at least named it), giving folks in the area a chance to discover something new and perhaps earn the man running the store a few extra dollars.

I know I would make an effort to go if I heard a similar local story. It's more fun when there's some kind of connection.

Haha, I would have if I could remember anything about the store. I don't even remember the name of the nearby town that its in.

> but they're harder to extract than normal walnuts

Heh no joke! Had to use a knife. Got lots cuts on my fingers from it.

One year my mom decided to make green walnut jam. It was delicious, but a lot of work. And then after helping her prepare the walnuts my hands were a dark brown color for about a week. Got made fun in school, though for good measure too, I looked ridiculous.

Totally, walnuts are great cash crop. It doesn't need basically any work during the year and you get huge stock out of every single tree. Also the market for shelled walnuts is big and even I (the world worst salesman) can sell full stock in few weeks.

There are two cons: shelling is really work intensive and it takes decades for trees to mature enough to give good yields.

> and you get huge stock out of every single tree

except of course those afflicted with fungi, which causes them to basically bear no fruit at all and spreads through the soil.

That must be location dependent. In my area there are no fungi problem with walnuts and I get consistent crop every, biggest problem is spring frost.

Shipments of almonds, walnuts, and pistachios are being stolen in California | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14487166 (Jun 2017, 58 comments)

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