Wild Nuts by Osker Brown

Wild Nuts, by Osker Brown
Saturday, March 8 4:00


"Honestly, I have had ecstatic experiences crawling around the forest floor collecting acorns."
                                                                                                     -Osker Brown

Osker Brown is bonkers over wild nuts. And I don't blame him. Come the fall of the year, I, too find myself growing rather excited with the possibilities of so much protein, fat, caloric value and flavor at my fingertips- free of charge! This past fall I picked every hazelnut my fingers could reach, and I also collected storage tubs of what surely was a bumper crop of black walnuts. In years past I have hoarded Chinese chestnuts to roast and enjoy with winter company, and growing up in the piedmont, I munched on my fair share of pecans foraged from the row of pecan trees growing in the median of the main street in our neighborhood.

My amateur wild nut eating efforts just got schooled and are ready to kick it up a few notches come next fall! Osker Brown, the same guy who blisses out on crawling around in the ground looking for acorns, presented a very organized, well-informed, thorough and cohesive lecture about the logistics of foraging, preparing and eating wild nuts on a serious scale. He and his family live on some wooded acreage in the Mars Hill area which they have named Glorious Forest Farm and apparently are well on their way to figuring out the art of subsisting on a diet largely comprised of wild foods, particularly nuts. He presented the key players to us in order of subsistence importance to him and delivered practical information about identification, nutrition, habitat, harvesting, processing, storage and use of four main types of nuts found in abundance in the Southern Appalachian forests. His selections were: American hazelnut (Corylus americana), acorns (Quercus spp.), hickory (Carya spp.), and walnuts/butternuts (Juglans nigra, J. cinerea).
From roasting and salting, to grinding for flour, to blending for nut milk and pressing for oil, the gamut of uses for these humble nuts is vast and glorious. Osker's talk served to fill in the gaps of missing information about wild nut foraging and preparing needed to make that leap from theoretically cool to tangibly awesome!

With so many of us realizing the joy and importance of procuring our own food supplies, often the whole world of natural fat and protein can seem intimidating, controversial and sometimes unattainable. Even if we are animal eaters, we don't always have the ability to get our teeth into some good, clean wild or well-raised meat. The meat of our native nuts is, in my opinion, an excellent addition to the staples of our clean home-grown veggie staples, for both omnivores and vegetarians alike. For those of us with land, Osker urged us to start planting these native species near the home for future ease of harvest. For the rest, he suggests getting out there into public spaces and finding or creating your own nutty honey-holes from which to collect the collective bounty. I was also proud to hear him suggest dabbling in the enjoyment of some squirrel meat now and then if the nut-collecting competition ever gets a little too steep...

I have pages of precious detailed notes which I can consult later in the year, after the frenzied months of gardening, freezing, canning, and swimming has muddied my memory of that Saturday in March. Come next fall I will be much better equipped to get out there and get my nut on! If you are the least bit interested in nut eating, I suggest you take a gander over to the Glorious Forest Farm website, and sign up to take his class at next year's OGS. In the meantime, you can keep yourself busy with Osker's selected reading: Nature's Garden by Samuel Thayer and Wildflower and Plant Communities of the Southern Appalachian Mountains and Piedmont by Timothy P. Spira. And if you're out and about in the next couple weeks, look for the roadside lovemaking endeavors of the American hazelnuts in all their catkin glory!


American hazelnut with catkins (photo from Glorious Forest Farm website)