Just wondering if certain nuts have a growing season. I eat walnuts in-shell year round, but lately I have noticed that the walnuts I purchase are a bit more, I don't know, "soft" or something. Not as crisp or "fresh". Could just be the batch.

Anyway, just curious...

I wouldn't know how to tell how fresh nuts are when they are in a store (unless they are shelled and obviously shriveled). So often it seems that nuts are on the verge of going rancid , but it's hard to judge their freshness except by tasting them. Good pecans are especially hard to find here in New Zealand. I remember picking newly fallen pecans off of the ground when I was a child and cracking them with a hammer. The nut meat was almost sweet! Ahh, the good ole days!


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Everything has a growing season as far as I know.
I harvested some walnuts that had just fallen once in BC but was told by an ancient Italian man who lived nearby not to eat them right away. He said they had to be left for a few months first. They were good when we finally did eat them. Hazelnuts grow all over the place around here but you've got to be pretty quick to beat the bugs and the squirrels to them!

Seems like most people prefer eating macadamia nuts at least a couple of weeks after harvesting. By then, the green outer husks will have cracked open, exposing the much harder shell. Until then, the nuts are not as sweet, and they're kind of watery. Where I live, macadamia nuts are harvested in the Fall. Most keep well and taste really good at least through the winter and spring months.

Might be the same for most tree nuts.

One time someone brought us a sealed pail of fresh organic walnuts. We put them in our pantry, and they kind of slid to the back of the pantry and were forgotten for several years. When we found them again and opened the seal, they were great!

I guess part of the keeping is how well they are kept. Not much we can do about nuts that are stored in a bin at a health food store, and before that, who knows?Small quatities of nuts probably keep best in the fridge.

I was wondering the same thing about the seasons of various nuts. Almonds are harvested in the fall and sold fresh by some growers for a time and put in cold storage or processed after that till next season. I've heard it's the same with peanuts and that they are particularly difficult to store as viable seeds. Then there's coconuts that don't keep long at all but are continuously ripening in the tropics, an ever-bearing fruit, so they are always in season. When in southern Florida in March once I picked up a coconut that had just fallen, dehusked it and found a fresh mature nut inside.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2010 11:51AM by loeve.

Yeah, walnuts are usually harvested in the fall. Almonds and filberts, late summer to early fall. Brazil nuts in the winter (of the northern hemisphere). This is also when they generally appear unshelled in bins in the stores. I remember as a kid seeing them start appear in September and finding it hard to wait for the sales that were usually between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

If you get them fresh in the fall or winter, they can be refrigerated for a couple of months to keep them fresh or frozen for even longer.