WAIT FOR THE RIGHT TIME
Timing is an important part of harvesting from your hickory tree.
The best time to harvest is during the main nutfall. For shagbark and shellbark hickory, you can often hear nuts dropping when it is the right time to gather nuts. Starting mid-September, check on your tree every few days. When you hear nuts falling regularly and the nuts that are falling look well-developed and fully formed, it's time to start gathering. Checking your tree right after a storm or period of high winds during the weeks that the main nutfall could be expected can be helpful. Not sure if they're ready? Pick up a few and pull the hull off or pull the partial hull off (sometimes the hulls detach). See if the in-shell nut sinks or floats in water. If they sink, those nuts are probably good so feel free to start harvesting!
GET YOUR SUPPLIES
For shagbark and shellbark hickory, we suggest a medium-sized nut roller, the mesh bags that are pre-labeled with the name of your tree and one or more 5 gallon buckets. Put the mesh bags in the buckets as shown:
Head out to your tree and start gathering. There are always some early-falling nuts which didn't develop correctly and we don't want those. For seed, we want the best developed nuts because those are likely to have the best genetics. For this program, we are trying to make sure that we know exactly which trees grew the seed collected so please only gather from under trees which are part of the program. If you have multiple program trees, make sure to have at least a bucket /bag per tree. Use the roller to gather up the freshly fallen nuts and, to the degree possible, leave the old / early-falling nuts.
Image credit: https://foragerchef.com/the-foragers-guide-to-shagbark-hickory-nuts/
Besides avoiding early-falling nuts, the reason timing is important for shagbark and shellbark hickory nut gathering is because they are a great food for wildlife. If they are not gathered soon after they fall, most are gone and the ones that are left aren't the high quality seed that we are seeking.
An old hickory can produce over 100 lbs of nuts in a year! There is a lot of annual variability in productivity rates. In some years, production might be almost nothing and some years it could be even higher. That's one reason that we don't want to use a year or two of nut production information to assess the overall productivity of a hickory tree.
STORE OR DELIVER YOUR HARVEST
There are two ways to preserve the quality of your gathered nuts. If you are going to hang on to them for just a few days before dropping them off (this would make sense if you want to collect from your tree over the course of a few days), then once you are done gathering for the day, take the mesh bag out of the bucket and hang it or lay it somewhere that it will get some air circulation but is safe from wildlife. If you need to store collected nuts for more than a week before dropping them off and are limited on available space with air circulation sage from wildlife, it would be great if you could et us know that you have collected nuts that may require pickup. In-husk hickories that do not have sufficient air circulation are prone to developing mold.
We're happy to accept your gathered nuts anytime that you want to drop them off with us at Black Squirrel Farms, 590 NY 14, Penn Yan, NY. Partially filled bags are no problem and we can supply additional mesh bags and tree labels as needed.