It's the time of year to collect green walnuts for making nocino or vin de noix. Ive never done it before, but figured I should try since I have so many black walnut trees growing near me. Apparently, you should only use nuts you've picked yourself, not the immature fruit on the ground because the tree has rejected it, and it likely has pest damage.
I made a fruit picker out of a plastic bottle cut to have a notch at the top to hook around stems. What I've learned so far is that most walnut trees are either too tall to reach the nuts, even with a long pole, or they are too young to produce nuts. It seems like the best place to gather them is on the edge of fields/paths/etc, where big trees may have low branches. Standard fruit pickers will likely not work, either, because they are designed for larger fruit like apples, so they cant grip something as small as an immature walnut. Since they are not ripe, the tree also does not want to release them. I was only able to get a few to start, because I need to modify my picker to have a cutter or something like that.
Since I only gathered a few, I figured it wasn't worth doing nocino as it takes 6 months, so it did "walnut molasses" while I figure out how to modify my picker.
