This guide is for participants in Black Squirrel Farms' 2026 Oak/Hickory Collection Pilot. Hickory seed accepted through the pilot must come from a registered source tree. If you haven't registered your tree yet, start there, or continue using this guide if you are in the process of registering a tree and need some help with species identification.
WHAT KIND OF HICKORY IS YOUR TREE?
Image credit: Archewild
Most of the time, hickories in our area can be identified by first figuring out whether or not the tree is a thin-husked hickory or a thick-husked hickory. Bitternut (also called yellowbud) and pignut hickories are thin-husked hickories. Shagbark hickories are thick-husked hickories. Mockernut hickory is not common in our area. Once it's clear whether the hickory produces a thin- or thick-husked nut, count the leaflets per leaf. Of the thin-husked hickories, pignut hickory usually has 5 leaflets per compound leaf, while bitternut hickory typically has 7 to 11 leaflets (mostly 7 to 9) per leaf. Shagbark hickory usually has 5 leaflets per leaf and a very distinctive looking shaggy bark, especially mature trees. There is another kind of thick-husked hickory called a shellbark (or kingnut) with bark that looks like a shagbark but it has 7 to 9 leaflets and giant nuts (without the husk, the nuts are about the size of a quarter and slightly more tan than shagbark). We'll take those too, if you find one!
You don't need to be fully confident about your hickory tree species identification in order to register your tree; we'll help confirm the tree's identification based on the pictures.
Register your tree here.
WHAT WE'LL PAY
For the 2026 pilot, we'll pay $75 per 100 lbs collected ($0.75/lb) for thin-husked hickories, including bitternut and pignut.
For thick-husked hickories, we'll pay $50 per 100 lbs collected ($0.50/lb) if delivered in-husk, with one caveat: shagbark hickories sometimes fall out of their husks when they hit the ground, especially later in the season. We don't want to collect or transport more husk than necessary, so if your thick-husked hickories are naturally partially or completely de-husked, we'll adjust the price upwards on a sliding scale—up to $150 per 100 lbs ($1.50/lb) for nuts with no husks.
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 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 harvest season can be helpful.
Figure out what good nuts from your tree look like. Not sure if they're ready? You can also crack one open with a hammer (watch your fingers!) and see if the seed looks fully developed inside. Nutmeat should be a creamy color and the voids in the shell should be fully filled in; any black inside or a shell that is empty or partially empty is a bad nut. If you do this a few times, your eye will start to learn to spot the difference between bad nuts and good nuts.
Another way to test whether hickory nuts are good is to see if the de-husked nuts float or sink in water. The good ones sink (or very close to sink, almost fully submerged but not quite sinking). The bad ones float. If you crack open sinkers vs. floaters, the nut quality difference should be clear.
We're not seeking perfection; we don't expect all gathered nuts to be good. The objective is to gather more good nuts than bad nuts. Most freshly-fallen in-husk pignut hickories are good, so gathering whole, freshly fallen pignut hickories is good enough. The same is generally true for bitternut hickories. Shagbarks and shellbarks gathered from the ground are the most likely to have a significant fraction of bad nuts. Here is a shagbark hickory example showing what to gather:
Image credit: https://foragerchef.com/the-foragers-guide-to-shagbark-hickory-nuts/
GATHERING HICKORY NUTS
Hickory nuts need to be gathered quickly after they fall in order to get in front of the 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. Wildlife especially love shagbark hickories.
If your tree is part of the 2026 pilot program, you should have received or picked up mesh collection bags pre-labeled with the name of your tree. You can gather the nuts however is easiest, but it can be helpful to put the mesh bag inside a 5-gallon bucket; the bags were sized to fit nicely inside one. For this program, we are trying to make sure that we know which trees grew the seed collected, so please only gather from trees that are registered as part of the 2026 program and don't intentionally combine nuts from different trees.
A mature hickory can produce over 100 lbs of nuts in a year, occasionally a few hundred! There is a lot of annual variability in productivity. In some years, production might be almost nothing. One reason that we are accepting registrations of hickory trees that have few or no nuts this year is because next year might be a completely different situation.
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 a few days or a couple weeks before dropping them off in order to keep collecting while nuts are falling, then once you are done gathering for the day, put the mesh bag somewhere cool and protected from drying out, with some air circulation, and safe from wildlife. Laying it on the cement floor in a basement works and so would putting them in a root cellar. Leaving them in the bucket in a garage with the garage door closed should work. If you need to store collected nuts for more than a week or two before dropping them off and don't really have a place to keep them, let us know and we'll figure out what to do. We're happy to accept your gathered nuts anytime that you want to drop them off 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. If you are transport-limited and cannot drop your collected nuts off, please contact us so that we can make some customized arrangement.