Cracking Butternuts

[Henry]

Hi All,

Ahhhhhhhhhhh Yes!!!  Don't know how many of you have cracked butternuts, but if you have, I am sure you have ended up with a black thumb from missing the butternut.  We had several butternut trees up on the farm on Fairfield Ridge and each fall, it was a race between the squirrels and us getting the butternuts.  When you first pick them they are green, so you have to let them dry, so what we used to do was take some burlap grain bags and pick those on the ground and put them up overhead of our old summer kitchen and let them dry.

After they were dry, then, if you had the patience of a Saint, you could take a bunch of them and and old iron anvil and hammer and crack them.  Now we didn't buy anything we didn't have to, so when it came to using nuts, we usually used butternuts, rather than those easy to crack walnuts we would have had to buy.

Never had to worry about chopping up the butternuts as they usually were always in little pieces.  Butternuts are very good, but I believe if it was a race between the calories I would burn cracking and eating them, I could lose weight in no time.  Mother used to make Maple Butternut Fudge, which is something you don't see around and no wonder as I am sure such labor intensive fudge would have a price nobody could afford.

What brought this to mind was an article in today's Burlington Free Press about our losing all of our Butternut Trees:

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200880706009

[rdmapes]

Henry,
What a bummer. I have been transplanting Butternuts as I find them. The fruit is good and like you mention it takes a bit of effort to get to it. So far I have nine that I have planted. Maybe they will get by. I will keep an eye on them. I remember reading about the Beeche trees have a problem as well. I had this big Beeche that died from some virus. The tree must have been over 100 yrs old.

Ron