Hiking and Walnuts

Hiking and Walnuts

With the weather being so nice lately (with the exception of the constant rain we’ve had these past two days), we’ve been trying to get out more to go hiking around local areas. Mom and Dad took us to a local hiking location in Frankfurt the other week at a place called Cove Spring Park. The scenery was lovely, reminding me of hiking in Gatlinburg in the fall with the hardwood trees, the changing leaf colors, and the sound of crunchy leaves underfoot. 

I started out with Rylee in the fancy smancy hiking backpack but barely five minutes in, my legs were burning.

Clearly, I need to walk with that thing more often. 

We gave Rylee giant Sycamore leaves to play with and she had a fun time fanning it over my head like a pharaoh being fanned by papyrus leaves. 

Dad found some cool senior picture locations.  

Mom took over carrying the baby and was much better at it (I think we figured out it was all in how the weight was distributed). Rylee had a great time with her Pippa. 

Our pretty baby. 

Oh, and Mom and I caught a field mouse that was hiding out under a car in the parking lot just casually hoping along. 

Mom helped Rylee pet the cutie before we released him in a safer location. 

Later that week, I decided to try and tackle hulling walnuts that we collected from my parent’s yard. 

With Rylee nearby being cute as always

making adorable faces like this, 

I moved walnuts back and forth between storage containers and an old dog crate for washing until all we were left with were hulls. 

We found a tutorial on youtube where you basically dump 5-10 gallons of walnuts into a container and mix it with a high powered paint paddle for 3-5 minutes to get most of the hulls off. 

Pour the walnuts onto the grate a bucket at a time. (We later had to move the grate to rest over the black trashcan you can see in the background. The weight became too heavy for the logs to hold.)

Wash them off so that you can see which nuts still have hull clinging to them, and move the mostly cleaned nuts to a new storage bin to mix up with the paddle one last time. After rinsing them off, I moved them to the trampoline to dry out—where they are currently getting torrentially rained on. About 6 ours of work for 16 gallons of walnuts. Not too bad. 

P.S. Rylee took her first steps yesterday! Videos to come! 

Pax Domini cum spirito tuo temper sit,

Torey, Sam & Rylee

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