Hickory trees are special. They have tremendous character. From the sprouted nut they will dive down 3 feet before the top is 6 inches tall. Hickory silhouettes in winter will give anyone good reason to pause and look at the sky. There is nothing like the shape of their branches zigzagging back and forth toward the radiant veil of infinity.
I cannot count the fall days I have spent gathering hickory nuts with friends, with family, and by myself. It is one of my favorite activities in all the world. Sometimes there are more nuts than ground showing. Among the diverse genus of the hickories you will find some trees that bear great big thin-shelled nuts, and others with the most delicious nut on Earth locked in a thick shell. There are hickory nuts that are best used for milk, and others that are going to be known as the oilnut. The trees all have tremendously strong wood and live much longer than people.
Species
There are several species of hickory and significant variation within each species. Many species hybridize with each other in the wild and under cultivation. I am only describing the few species that I am familiar with (here in the northeastern US). There are several others in different parts of the country and a handful in Southeast Asia.
Shagbark Hickory (Carya ovata)
This is the tree with the classic hickory bark that looks like it is peeling off in great vertical strips. Shagbarks are native to the eastern half of the United States. They are fairly common, growing well alongside oaks and maples. You can find shagbark hickory along the side of the road, on the edges of swamps, on ridgelines and hillsides. It is a very adaptable species.
Shagbark nuts have prominent ridgelines. The buds are large and blunt, shaped like a jester’s crown. When they open in the spring, the unfurling leaves are as striking as any flower. I have found shagbark nuts of many shapes and sizes. Flavor can vary from tree to tree; all are great, but some are exceptional.
The bark of mature shagbark hickory.
Shagbark hickory nuts are considered to be the best-flavored of all the hickories by everyone who has tasted them. The flavor is without parallel. These nuts can be as small as a marble or as big as a golf ball. The shells are very thick. Many attempts at breeding larger shagbark nuts with thinner shells have been made. The primary focus of these attempts involved hybridizing them with thinner-shelled species like pecan and bitternut. I think maybe the focus should be shifted away from breeding the right tree toward processing the enormous wild crop that already exists. Someone with some good mechanical hands should be able to figure out how to crack and separate hickory nuts efficiently. The raw kernels by themselves are the greatest product any nut grower could offer. Millions of pounds fall to the ground uncollected in my county alone. It is very strange that a food so delicious could be so ignored.
Shellbark Hickory (Carya lacinosa)
Very similar in appearance and growth habits to shagbark. Normally has bigger nuts, usually accompanied by a thicker shell. Shellbark is typically found in rich bottomlands.
Oilnut, aka Bitternut (Carya cordiformis)
I believe an entire book will be written about this tree one day. Virtually all literature considers C. cordiformis to be an inferior species. The nuts are horribly bitter when eaten raw. I always thought of them as a joke to play on people by offering a taste. However, I have since learned from Sam Thayer that the bitterness is water-soluble. This is a very big deal for people interested in tree crops.
The shells of bitternut are very thin, similar to the shell of an acorn. The nuts are packed full of meat that has an oil content of 75 to 80 percent. The shells are so thin that whole nuts can be run through a commercial oil press. The oil that comes out contains none of the water-soluble bitter tannins. The flavor is the same as shagbark hickory. Everyone I have offered a taste of the oil to looks up at me in surprise and says something like “Wow” or “Oh my God.”
Here is a hickory tree that we don’t have to shell to enjoy. Here is vegetable oil raining down from the sky in enormous quantities. A 5-gallon bucket of nuts in the shell will yield ¾ gallon of oil. I have filled 5-gallon buckets of bitternuts in as little as 30 minutes. This tree is offering a tremendous gift, if we only can see it. When a million gallons of high-quality vegetable oil fall on the ground and we ignore it and plow up the earth to grow rapeseed (for canola oil), there is a disconnect. The soil suffers, wildlife suffers, and we do, too. The time is here for us to use hickory oil.
Obviously everyone does not need to have their own oil press, but could we not take a lesson from our great-grandparents, who lived at a time when every town had a mill or a press? If there were just one or two oilnut presses set up in states where these trees are abundant, then people could bring nuts in from all over to collection points. High school kids, retired folks, inspired people of all ages can be a part of this. It seems that we would need machinery to compete with established oils like canola and sunflower, but it’s possible that this could be much simpler. This past year I collected enough nuts for 7 gallons of oil in only two days of harvesting.
Bitternuts have smooth bark with a lace pattern. Their buds are flattened and a yellow mustard color. The trees generally grow in rich bottomlands, but can also be found on hillsides and ridges. They often have a striking and beautiful root flare, as the bark is even smoother at the base. The husks do not peel off in segments as with most other hickories; they come off more like a rind. The husks have four ridges that only traverse half the nut.
Bitternut hickory nuts have a “tail” and no ridges along the sides.
Left, Bitternut hickory buds are mustard-colored and their bark is smooth, making them easy to differentiate from other hickories. Pignuts can also have smooth bark, but it’s usually more ridged, and they do not have yellow buds like these. Right, Bitternut hickory nuts are packed with nutmeat and have very thin shells.
Oil pressed from bitternuts tastes as good as shagbark hickory. Maybe it’s time to change the name of this tree to oilnut or something more appealing than bitternut.
It has been stated that animals will not eat bitternuts and they offer no wildlife value. From my observations this is not true. Squirrels, chipmunks, and mice will definitely eat them.
Pignut (Carya glabra)
Pignuts have a smooth bark, not shaggy, but rougher than bitternut. The bark protrudes a little and has an interlacing pattern. The husks are not segmented like shagbark, but instead peel off like bitternut. The husks lack the ridges found on bitternut and are usually pear-shaped. The nuts are very difficult to shell, but the flavor is very good. A lot of literature suggests that pignuts do not taste good and are only fit for pigs. This has not been my experience; I think they taste great, similar to shagbark. It’s possible that people would confuse this species with bitternut, but the husks, buds, and nuts are quite different. My favorite use for pignut is making hickory milk.
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis)
This is the most famous of all the hickories because it is so widely consumed and cultivated. Many wild pecans have a small nut with a thicker shell. These are still easier to shell than any other hickory because they are not locked inside the shell, but fall out freely when cracked. Most commercial pecans come from wild groves that were thinned out and managed for harvesting.
Many superior varieties of pecan exist. These trees have paper-thin shells and large nuts. Pecans have received a lot of their breeding work and cultivation because they are able to bear nuts at a young age. This allows breeders to make selections and crosses within a single career or lifetime.
Pecan hickories are cold-hardy. Many selections can survive zone 4 winters. However, it is not the cold hardiness that has kept pecan production out of the Northeast; it is the short season and lack of heat. Pecans take a long time to ripen their nuts. Here in the North, the nuts are usually killed by a hard freeze before they are able to mature. Work has been done to find pecans that are able to ripen in shorter, cooler summers, primarily by a few scattered nurseries and the Northern Nut Growers Association.
The Tree in the Woods
Hickories are a big part of the hardwood forests around here. They are full-sized canopy trees, growing alongside giants such as maple, oak, hemlock, and beech. They occur in pure groves and in mixed forests. They are opportunistic and do well in hedgerows and forest edges where sunlight and weeds are abundant. Hickories put down a strong, deep taproot upon sprouting. They will persist through severe abuse, enduring tremendous browse, drought, and competition.
Hickories cast a shade of medium density. They are not so dark as a maple, but not so light as locust. They will allow shrubs and weeds to grow under their closed canopy.
Hickory trees of all species are a serious magnet for squirrels, mice, chipmunks, and other small forest dwellers with sharp teeth. This in turn benefits hawks, owls, foxes, and the like. The hickory genus also hosts an abundance of Lepidoptera species.
Hickories are irregular croppers. They will rarely make two crops in a row. Usually, hickories will fruit heavily every two to three years or so. Some groves in heavy competition can go six years or more between mast years. I am blessed to have 100-year-old hickory trees nearby that drop a load of nuts just about every other year. This boom-and-bust cycle of fruiting can wreak havoc on rodent populations. In a well-balanced nut grove or forest, several species of nut trees take turns having mast years. Hickories can be one player in a collection of oak, chestnut, black walnut, butternut, beech, pine, and hazel.
Wood
Hickory is one of the toughest woods on Earth. It burns as hot as anthracite coal, having the same BTUs as black locust. It is a beautiful two-toned wood, with light sapwood and a darker heartwood. Hickory is used commercially for hardwood floors, cabinets, and tool handles.
I have carved several handles and longbows from hickory. When split along the grain (rather than sawn through), it is virtually unbreakable. A green hickory branch can be bent into a full circle easily without cracking. There is no comparable tree in the temperate world that grows such a tough and resilient lignin. Locust may be as dense, but it is nowhere near hickory in strength. Osage orange is stronger, but not by much, and it will never grow giant trunks like hickories do.
Harvesting
Hickory nuts really are the best-tasting nuts in the world. That is not an exaggeration or an overstatement. There’s nothing that compares to a kernel of shagbark. Roughly 70 to 80 percent oil by weight, hickories are very rich, tasty drops of butter falling from above. I think all the species taste amazing raw except for bitternut. Pecan is probably fourth on my list of best-tasting hickories. Shagbark, shellbark, and pignut are the top three.
There are plenty of ways to enjoy wild hickory nuts, and plenty of opportunity. In a decent mast year my family is able to gather a pickup truck’s worth of shagbark nuts from four large individuals, and we only take a fraction of the crop. The trees are 80 feet tall and covered in nuts from head to toe. Stacks and stacks of nuts rise up to the sky in a quantity so great that it’s hard not to gasp or laugh.
I often hear people complain that they can’t gather the nuts because of squirrels. I really don’t understand. The squirrels are so small and they are scared of you. Whenever I see squirrels gathering nuts, I grab a bucket and walk over. A person can gather so much more than a dozen squirrels if they have a bucket. Rodents have to run back and forth to store each nut away. Squirrels constantly running across the road in the fall is a sure indicator that nuts are ready. Check and see what they are up to; it is a good way to find treasure trees.
Hickories can be gathered with a nut wizard, but it is much faster to gather them on your hands and knees because there will often be so many in one spot. Bring kneepads if you get sore, or use a nut wizard. The window is short, usually only a couple of weeks total. However, bitternuts can often be gathered throughout the winter in a good year.
Once you find a good spot to gather hickory, you will never forget it.
Processing
Once hickory nuts are gathered, they need to be husked (hulled) and dried right away. You can wait on husking pignuts and bitternuts, but shagbark and shellbark will mold if the husks are not removed promptly. It is no big deal to husk shagbarks and shellbarks; the husk pops off with fingers easily. In fact, some trees will drop nuts right out of the husk for you. If the husk is stuck to the nut, it isn’t ripe. They will never ripen off the tree, so if the husk sticks, just forget it and find ones that are ripe.
You can husk bitternuts and pignuts by peeling the husk off, but this is easier if you either let them dry or let them rot. Dried, you have to husk them one by one, which is not that slow. If you let the husks rot, you can do them in batches. The nuts can be left in sacks with the hulls and some leaves until the hulls start to turn black and soft. You can rub your foot back and forth over the sack to loosen up the hulls. I imagine that as the bitternut oil industry develops, someone will come up with a good method for mechanically hulling them.
Drying
As soon as the nuts are out of the husks, they need to be dried. Simple air-drying on a countertop or on stacks of screen doors will do. I dry them for about a week before storing. They can be stored at room temperature in onion sacks or brown paper bags for years. We’ve had hickory nuts here that we ate three years after gathering and they tasted fine, without any rancidity. The key is to store them in the shell. Once they are cracked open, the kernels will age and oxidize. If you want to store shelled nuts, then keep them in the fridge or freezer.
Cracking
Shelling hickory nuts works best with a heavy-duty nutcracker. I highly recommend the Master Nut Cracker, which is made in Missouri. For years I only used a hammer and a stone. If you’re cracking the nuts out with a hammer, hold them on edge. You’ll get much bigger kernel pieces if the nuts are cracked along the seams rather than just laid down flat.
The Master Nut Cracker works well for butternuts, black walnuts, and hickory nuts.
The kernels are wonderful eaten raw by themselves. They are also an excellent addition to cookies, cereal, and everything else.
It takes time to crack and shell hickory nuts, but it’s worth it. Cracking hickories is great for kids and adults. It helps quiet the mind. Depending on nut size, it’s not that hard to fill a cup with kernels.
Hickory Brew/Milk
Cracking hickory nuts takes time. It is doable, but it does take a while. On some productive winter evenings, I will crack out a pint of nutmeat in an hour or so. This is great for snacking, but difficult to sustain yourself on. To really consume hickory nuts as a part of your diet and fill your body with their tremendous power, boiling them is the way to go.
Cracking nuts on a stone with a hammer is an age-old activity that reminds me of people playing cards. I have seen it keep the most rambunctious kids busy for surprisingly long periods of time.
I learned about this method after reading about traditional Cherokee uses of hickory. Hickory nuts were staples in their cooking. Families had hundreds of bushels of nuts stored. They would crush and boil the nuts for days to extract the oil that would eventually float to the surface. I use a modified version of this. My family, using hammers or mallets, crushes hickory nuts, shells and all, on a big stone. We then boil the nuts and shells together. The more crushed up the nuts, the better. After they have been boiling for a while (10 minutes to two days is how long we boil for, as we just throw the pot on the woodstove), a lot of the nutmeat will float to the surface and the shells will sink. The nutmeat can be skimmed off and eaten and/or added to other dishes. The broth is a great fortifying drink. It can be drunk by itself, or you can add cocoa, maple syrup, or any other spices you’d like. In early spring we like to make hickory brew by boiling the nuts in maple sap rather than water. Throw in some chopped black birch twigs and you have the best possible drink from the forest.
Hickory brew has been a game changer for us. It’s allowed us to really use and even sell hickory nuts. We’ve brought the drink to festivals and shared with many friends. It is a welcome, hearty drink on chilly days that will line your bones with the strength of a hickory tree.
Taking this a step further, you can pound the nuts into a powder with a mortar and pestle. Boiling them this way yields an even thicker liquid that is a high-quality nut milk.
Candy
Any nut can be candied, and they’re all pretty good, but candied hickory nuts are something else. In a saucepan over low heat, I add equal parts hickory kernels, butter, and maple syrup. Keep stirring until the syrup becomes thick like taffy and then remove the pan from the heat. Allow it to cool, and you now have the best candy this Earth has ever seen.
Oil
Bitternut and pecan are the only two hickories that can be run through a press with the shells on. In most presses, you have to crush the nuts to fit. You do, however, need a commercial oil press of significant strength to do this; a home press can only work with shelled nuts. The oil is of exceptional quality and easily rivals olive oil. I add hickory oil to most meals I eat lately. I put it on salad, rice, beans, popcorn—just about everything.
Propagation
Hickories are most commonly propagated by seed. Cuttings are not a practical method. Grafting is difficult, though it’s certainly done. One of the most difficult aspects of propagating hickory is in transplanting young trees. Hickories put down a strong taproot when they sprout; damage to it can often kill the seedling.
Hickory nuts require a cold moist stratification to germinate. They can dry a little bit, but really should be kept moist. In nature, nuts are planted by squirrels under leaf litter. Mimicking these conditions is the key to sprouting hickory nuts. I store hickory seed nuts in damp sand: in bags in the fridge, in buckets in the basement, or in buckets buried outside. It is essential to protect the nuts from being eaten by rodents, which is why I overwinter them in a controlled space.
I plant them out in beds in the spring and keep a vigilant eye out for rodent tunnels. The nuts sprout very late, usually in June or July. It is easy to forget about them because they come up so late.
There are a few methods to avoid transplant damage with hickory. The first and best is to directly seed the nut into where you want the tree to grow permanently. This works well, especially if you can keep weeds under control and protect the seed and then the seedling from rodents and birds. Short tree tubes work well for direct-seeding hickories in the field.
Another option to ease transplanting of the taproot is to raise the trees in pots. Personally I dislike raising trees in pots. They need frequent watering, require potting soil, and end up with strangely shaped root systems, but it’s better than not growing them. There are specialized root pruning pots available if you choose to go that route.
A third method is to raise them in air-pruned beds. This leads to a fibrous root system and also makes it easier to keep rodents out of the bed. For a detailed explanation of air-pruning beds, see chapter 4. Air-pruning beds work very well for hickory. Trees will often reach about 6 to 12 inches tall with a strong, fibrous, intact root system their first year. Planted just in the ground, they will usually only be a few inches tall with one straight, very deep taproot.
Working with Hickory Trees
A few years ago I found some excellent shagbark hickory trees cropping heavily along the street. The nuts were mostly falling on someone’s lawn, so I knocked on the door to ask permission to gather. The man who answered the door was glad to have me take as many as I could. He explained to me that he had planted the trees 30 years ago by just sticking some nuts in the ground. That story says a lot. With a few minutes of effort, that man had set something very powerful in motion. If we work with hickory, we can establish groves of trees that produce easy-to-gather large nuts.
Planting hickory nuts is fine by itself, but when we select unique and excellent trees, then we can take hickory nuts to a higher level. People have taken small wild grasses and through selecting seed sources have been able to cultivate wheat, corn, and a host of other grains. When breeding hickory, we can look to the famous pecan hickory tree.
Left, Hicans are a cross between pecan and shagbark hickory. Right, Large shagbark hickory nuts like these are out there waiting to be found.
Pecans have been bred to have thin shells and big nuts. They can start bearing in three to five years, so breeders are able to work with them. Most other species of hickory, however, can take 10 to 30 years to make nuts. This has been a big impediment to breeders making crosses through generations of seedlings. Still, I think this is a poor excuse for our lack of attention on breeding hickory. We have institutions and universities that persist through generations of people. There are also countless individuals who would love to leave behind something for future generations, like a planting of hickory trees. Surely the resources to work with hickory exist. What a gift we can kick down the road, if we can be part of the journey toward a thin-shelled shagbark hickory nut the size of a golf ball. The genetics do exist.
Some work has been done making selections of hickory trees. There are grafted cultivars of hickory available from a few specialized nurseries. If we plant the seeds from those trees or from other excellent sources, what new trees might we find? I have found an excellent shagbark hickory growing in a cemetery of Revolutionary War vets. The tree appears to be as old as the cemetery. It has outstanding form and health and bears beautiful football-shaped nuts that crack out well. Another tree a few miles away makes large heart-shaped nuts that are just bursting with meat. The more hickory seeds that people plant, the more we can discover trees with outstanding qualities. It seems to me that most schoolyards and parks could use at least a handful of hickory trees planted by kids who will see the nuts one day.
Working with Hickory Nuts
I realize the challenge in breeding a wild tree that can take 30 years to flower. Perhaps it is not just the trees that we need to work with but also the nuts. The wild crop is already here, already planted, and is enormous. It is our failing in not knowing how to use it. The gift is here and we do not know how to open the package. If this civilization can fly into outer space, then surely we can overcome a thick nut shell. We do have the means; it is a question of will and inspiration.
How complicated a machine would be needed to crack and separate kernels from shells? Whoever can answer this question will start an industry around shagbark hickory. You will see the planting of orchards, the tending of wild groves, and the busy hands of countless people harvesting.
Commercial Possibilities
Hickory trees allow people who want to be nut growers to start without having to wait for planted trees to grow. There is already an abundant wild crop; it just needs to be harvested.
Hickory milk is one avenue that I have pursued. We have brewed it on-site at festivals to avoid needing a commercial kitchen. Sold by the individual cup, hickory nuts are worth quite a bit of money. If I were to take the milk further, I would approach local coffee shops. And to go further still, it could be bottled and packaged like any other nut milk.
Making kernels into candy greatly increases their value and makes the slow cracking process worthwhile.
Wild pecans abound in their native range and can be harvested for free in many places.
I believe the oil from bitternut hickories offers a really great way to make a living with these trees. As enthusiasm for tree crops builds, the oilnut may become an industry, feeding people and the trees at the same time. How many farmers would leave bitternut hickories around the edges of their fields if they knew the in-shell nuts were worth up to $20 a gallon?
Hickory seeds of all species are also of significant value to the nursery trade, particularly for restoration, wildlife plantings, and soil and water conservation. A normal price for seed is around $6 per pound. A healthy person can gather hundreds of pounds in a day.
Maybe you will plant a hickory tree; maybe you’ll carve some of that wood, or burn it in your stove; maybe you’ll eat hickory nuts in pies and ice cream and all by themselves around a fire. Whatever you do, I hope that you enjoy hickory trees. They are one of the best gifts from the forest to you.