Hi there my Hivean friends and followers!
First of all, I ´m really happy I can say that I´m finally back to my Hive daily routine and I even managed to catch up on most of the stuff that I had to miss out on during the past days and weeks. In this mushroomy post that I published here on my blog last week, I explained some of the reasons behind me having been so, well, behind :D with spending a lot of time outdoors being one of the reasons. I have been doing a plethora of things out there in nature lately and as you could see in the above mentioned post, mushroom picking was one of them.
Today, I´m coming with another post that will shed some light on my recent outdoor activities. Nuts, yeah! :D I mean walnuts! :D Now I know that for my fellow Hivers from the same or similar latitudes where walnut trees are common, this post will not be special at all but for our friends from tropical countries, the walnuts are probably just as exotic as their coconuts, cashews, pecans, macadamias and other tropical nuts are for us so let´s keep this in mind ;)
You might know that we are currently based in Prague, the capital city of the Czech Republic and to my surprise, the neighborhood where our apartment is located turned out to be a real paradise for walnut lovers. Honestly, I didn´t pay much attention to the trees in this neighborhood during the summer but when the autumn started to take control over the area, bringing the harvest season along, I realized that so many (if not most!) of the trees around here are actually walnut trees.
Therefore, over the past couple of weeks, we have made several "walnut hunting trips" around the neighborhood, which resulted in a total haul of some 15 kg (33 lb) of walnuts (in the shelled form) and I thought that photo documenting the whole thing might make up for some interesting post so let´s get started. Chronologically of course ;)
This is what the walnut tree actually looks like. If you zoom in a bit, you can see some walnuts there too, in their original green husks.
Here are some close ups of the husks. When the nut is getting ripe, the husk cracks and then keeps opening wide until the nut falls down to the ground. You can help them out a bit by giving the tree a little (hand)shake :D
When you bring the walnuts home, you need to spread them out on some paper and put them in a dry and warm place to dry out. This is a very important step as the walnuts tend to get moldy very fast when not dried up properly. Unfortunately, we learned this the hard way as quite a lot of our walnuts got moldy and we had to throw them away :(
Once the walnuts are dry, you can either store them in the shelled form for later or you can start cracking them to get the meat or the actual nut if you will.
The walnut meat is delicious and packed with all the good stuff that most other types of nuts contain too like proteins, carbs, the healthy fats, fibers, minerals, vitamins etc. However, the walnut meat also tends to get moldy when not stored properly so be very careful where you put them. Of course the safest way is to eat them right away haha :D
The walnuts are really amazing and their usage in the kitchen is very diverse. Here in my country, the walnuts are an important ingredient of so many traditional meals, cakes and desserts. I just wish they were not so prone to molding :D :/
So yeah, that was my little (wal)nutty post for you guys. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe also learned something new along the way.
How about you? Do you like the walnuts? Do they grow in your countries? Let me know in comment section below! :)
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Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about Nature, Animals, Ecology, Crypto, Traveling, Sport, Photography and discovering secrets and beauties of the World, feel free to follow me as these are the topics I mostly write about. Have a wonderful day and keep on hiving, guys! :)