Uses

Oil, fresh meats; hulls are used for dye, fertilizer, and medicine

Where you’ll find them

Stream banks, moist forests. They’re all over French Broad River watershed.

Identification

Smooth green hull, blackens with age, hulls will stain your hands during harvest
Leaf has many leaflets
Grey bark
Distinctive smell
Large nuts >1”

Here’s a downloadable ID sheet with photos

Harvest and Handling

Gather with hulls on. Gather into buckets or hefty boxes.

Don’t worry if you encounter worms in the hulls or on the surface of nuts. They just live in the hulls and don’t cause any issues for the nut.

Do not store fresh nuts in plastic buckets for more than a couple days. After harvest, you want to hull and cure them as soon as possible. Bring ’em to the Nuttery! We have a tractor-driven dehuller that makes quick work of getting the hull off, then we move the nuts into a cement mixer to get them fully clean.