The pungent black mountains grew taller as the loud clanging of the chains in the huller separated the green outer hulls from the hard black nuts on the McKinney farm north of town.
Cars, trucks and SUVs were lined up on the hillside north of town, their drivers waiting for their turn to back up to the huller and unload the black walnuts they’d been gathering.
Flies buzzed around some of the tall, dark, pointed mounds in front of square green stacks of bags of hulled walnuts atop pallets waiting for their delivery to Hammons Nut Products.
A young woman and her husband poured the nuts from the plastic feed bags stacked neatly in the bed of their pickup truck.
Erin Pamplin of Little Flock with her two daughters, shoveled walnuts piled loose in the bed of their pickup truck. Pamplin saidher yard was full of walnut trees and the walnuts on the ground made it dangerous for the girls to play outside. “It’s not safe; it’s like walking on marbles,” she said, wryly. She had nearly 300 pounds of walnuts in the back of her truck and she said there were stillmany more in her yard.
Christina Anderson and Danny Freeman, both of Pea Ridge, backed their SUV up to the edge of the bin of the huller and opened the tailgate to reveala cache of walnuts in dog food bags, trash bags and buckets.
Metal stock tanks and plastic garbage pails on a trailer were brought by Blake Blevins, 16, of Mc-Donald County, Mo., and Richard Dennis, 22, of Rogers. The two are soon to be brothers-in-law, Dennis said. Blevins grabbed a shovel and helped the young woman in line in front of them unload her loose walnuts.
Walnuts were exceedingly plentiful this year and many people took advantage of that, profiting $12 and $10 per 100 pounds of hulled walnuts by picking up the Ozark delicacies and selling them to Webb’s Feed Store, who in turn, sells them to Hammon’s Product Company, Stockton, Mo.
“We had more Monday than we had all year last year,” Aaron David said.
David, grandson of Fred McKinney, owner of Webb Feed and Seed, and an employee of the feed store, worked at the collection site with Roland Moore Saturday.
Many of the walnuts brought in Saturday were large and damp with wet hulls that clogged the huller.
David and Moore turned off the machine, opened the metal sides and began scraping the thick black goo from between the metal bars, then turned on the rumbling yellow monster once again.
“I want to keep those,”said Vickie Henson, pointing to three five-gallon buckets heaped with huge green-hulled black walnuts, as she prepared to unload her the treasury of walnuts.
“Okay, we’ll run those through first,” David said, as he hung a green mesh bag over the tines at the end of the huller to catch the hulled nuts.
Henson was on her third trip to the huller Saturday, and sold about 300 pounds that day alone. She had previously sold almost 700, bringing her total to nearly 1,000 pounds of walnuts.
“Connie Thompson and I work about an hour every day after work,” Henson said, “And I took half a day off Friday.”
“My grandson thinks they’re balls,” she said, laughing about his help. “I think I started (gathering walnuts) when I was 16.
“I learned years ago to save bags and bring them in bags,” she said.
Webb’s Feed and Seed is one of the oldest suppliers of black walnuts to Hammons, Fred McKinney said.
News, Pages 1 on 10/26/2011