No, it’s not an artillery barrage I’m hearing, It’s our nearby walnut tree pelting the earth.
The nuts in the picture are peanuts, compared to our black walnuts. Ours are roughly the size of baseballs, and just a little heavier. The tree is full of hundreds of them–and don’t be standing under one, when it comes down. The other day one struck my writing chair and broke a hole in it.
We can’t make use of them because it’s way too labor=intensive to get the nut out. Under the green rind there used to be a layer of yellow stuff which by now has turned all black and gooey and disgusting. Squirrels like to perch on a branch over my head and spit this gunk onto my manuscript. They’re lucky I don’t have a slingshot.
Once the yard is covered with hundreds of these nuts, maybe even thousands of them, the footing becomes extremely iffy. Easy to turn your ankle!
In spite of all these drawbacks, though, I can still understand that these nuts are God’s stuff and He made them for a reason. They’re even sort of cool, and I have to admit I do enjoy picking one up, taking my stance on an imaginary mound, going into my glorious Luis Tiant windup, and firing a strike past Johnny Bench–who isn’t really there, but you get the idea.
He hasn’t gotten a hit off me yet.
Those things are valuable as well, although I imagine that they have to be properly harvested in order to be of use.
The squirrels get good use out of them.
Squirrels will eat just anything I think. A squirrel around here was seen eating a mushroom in the yard.
We have a couple walnut trees here, too, along with dark cherry trees. The squirrels, birds, chipmunks and bunnies gratefully dine on them 🙂 The driveway and neighboring cars wind up with those cherry stains, though, and they’re not easy to clean off (especially from our white paint). Our granddaughter loves flinging the walnuts as far as her little three year old arm will allow.
Our squirrels all have faces and hands stained walnut black by now.
We feed the squirrels in our neighborhood sunflower seed kernels. If we don’t they get into our flower gardens. You could say they are holding us captive.