Life is busy. Food is plentiful.

And so, I do what most people do: I take the easy way when it comes to putting food on the table. Yes, I still raise vegetables and in earlier years I even grew enough to “put some by.”

I froze green beans, peas, and corn. I made raspberry and strawberry preserves, stored winter squash on shelves in the basement. But growing food was always something I wanted to do, not something I had to do.

This means that I never worked very hard to take advantage of the nuts that the big black walnut tree in our back yard drops every fall. Or of the hundreds of hickory nuts that I could easily collect from the roadside. The problem was, those nuts foiled me.

The black walnuts always ended up kind of rotted. I figured that the tree was too old to produce good fruit.

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