How to Forage and Harvest Hickory Nuts

Foraging is not only an essential survival skill to have honed if you ever find yourself in a survival situation, it should also be a vital part of your prepping and food security plan.

Free resources abound, thanks to nature, and all preppers should be taking advantage of them – especially when it comes to harvesting hickory nuts and the nut offering of all native trees in general.

There are 19 different varieties of hickory trees. Hickory nuts, which are full of vital nutrients, can be eaten raw, roasted, cooked, and used to smoke meat and fish. When preserved properly, hickory nuts have an amazingly long shelf-life.

If you are a rural prepper (which is the best type of prepper to be) odds are the woods and fields around your home are robust bounty of edible, medicinal, and useful foraging materials.

Even if you are prepping in a suburban or urban environment, foraging for hickory nuts near where you live (or while hiking along a trail) can still be possible.

If you are not prepping for emergencies in a metropolitan environment, learning how to forage the hickory nuts and other offerings of wooded areas should become a priority on your survival skills "to do" list.

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Yes, hickory nuts are definitely edible. You may read or have been told that only some types of hickory nuts are edible, but that is untrue. No type of hickory nut is poisonous to humans.

The misconception about the consumption of hickory nuts probably relates to the intensely bitter taste the produce from some tree varieties cause. Like with acorns, this bitter taste can be "leached out" during the boiling process.

Hickory nuts contain no sodium, cholesterol, trans fat, and a very small percentage of saturated fat. A standard size hickory nut contains approximately 19 calories.

A pecan tree is sometimes referred to as a hickory tree, sweet pecan, or butternut tree. The pecan and the hickory trees are from the same genus but not the same species.

Differentiating between the wood produced by a pecan and a hickory tree can be difficult to an untrained eye. A hickory tree is self-pollinating and a pecan tree is not.

Hickory nuts have been used to smoke both meat and fish for hundreds of years. The sweet flavor of some varieties of hickory nuts infuse into the meat or fish to create a moist and delicious taste. Smoking pork and beef ribs with hickory nuts has become quite popular in some BBQ circles.

Smoking meat or fish with the fruit from hickory tree nuts is strongly discouraged, even if you boil the nuts first to leech them. But, the outer husks and shells from bitter nuts still make excellent feed supplements for poultry birds.

During the first few weeks of October in the fall, as the trees shed their leaves, is the best time to find hickory nuts. You will be looking down and not up when foraging hickory nuts. Regardless of variety, nuts fall from the tree once they are mature, only the "green" nuts are still hanging from the tree.

Expect to be racing the squirrels for the nuts, who don't mind running up a tree and munching down on less than mature hickory tree offerings.

When in the woods foraging for hickory nuts (and acorns and walnuts as well) use both your ears and your eyes to guide you. It is not unusual to hear (sometimes even feel) a mass of nuts from multiple trees releasing at nearly the same time and falling to the ground with tiny thuds.

This effect is significantly increased when in the presence of hickory and oak trees. There has been many years of steady thumping on the front of my car as it's parked underneath an oak tree.

If the weather forecast is predicting a storm or significant winds, expect all of the nut bearing trees in your area to drop a great abundance of nuts – even if they are not yet ripe.

When an early hard frost is experienced, nuts can also fall before they are mature, reducing the amount of nuts that can be used for human consumption, but can still be collected for smoking or to be used as a livestock feed supplement.

The husks on both a hickory nut and a walnut tree are the easiest way to differentiate between the two trees. It is the shagbark hickory tree that produces a nut so large and initially green in color that it is often confused for a walnut by novice foragers.

A walnut husk has a spongy type feel, and it is not even half as hard as a hickory nut – not even a shagbark hickory nut. Walnut husks are also slightly corrugated, as is a shellbark nut to some degree, but the surface on the fruit from the hickory nut is smooth and not rough like a walnut.

As with other nuts, a shagbark hickory nut will fall from the tree when it is mature. While it might be tempting to pick one of the huge nuts from the tree, doing so will likely stunt its growth.

Once shagbark hickory nuts have fallen from the tree and you manage to snag them before the eager squirrels, you simply use a knife to cut the thick husk into quarters and then crack the nut to garner the meat inside.

Squirrels are not the only wildlife that love to munch down on nuts from other hickory trees. Woodpeckers, foxes, grosbeaks, blue jays, most wild duck species, and bobwhites also love the nuts from these trees.

A shagbark hickory tree produces nuts in a 3-year cycle once it reaches maturity.

The yield from the tree will likely vary sharply during this cycle.

When stored in a container (cardboard box works great) at 35 F (1 C), hickory nuts should remain good to use for about 24 months.

They begin drying right after they are harvested, but to keep the kernels inside of the nuts nice and crisp, they have to be stored out of direct sunlight in a cool, dry place.

Dried hickory nuts should be kept in a place like a root cellar, garage, or a basement for at least one month – providing that the air has good ventilation and is dry. When frozen, the meat inside of the hickory nuts should remain safe to eat for months.

Before storing hickory nuts, check them over really well for signs of weevils. If there is a hole in the husk, that is a good indication that an insect has already gotten inside. Perform the sink or float test to help determine if you have a good nut or a bad one.

The best way to do this is by getting a bucket or buckets of water and drop your haul in them. Filling the remainder of the bucket with water will then complete the test as the bad nuts will float and the edible nuts will stay at the bottom.

Speaking of pests, keep in mind most rodents such as mice, squirrels and raccoons are very fond of nuts, and will gladly feast on your stockpile – unless you take adequate precaution measures.

Nuts from hardwood hickory nut trees are notoriously difficult to crack. You can use a manual nutcracker on hickory nuts (or any other type of nut such as black walnuts or English walnuts) like the one below, but opening them this way to get the meat out will still be both frustrating and tiring.

The easiest (if you can call it that) way to open a hickory nut is with a hammer and a hard surface.

When cracked with a hammer, hickory nuts SHOULD break into multiple pieces and reveal the meat inside. But, it could take several whacks with a hammer to break open the nut completely.

You might need a nut pick to help free any chunks of meat that will not release after cracking the nut:

It takes roughly three days to one week to dry naturally. To make sure the nuts are dry before storing them away, give them a few shakes.

If you hear the nut meat moving about freely inside the shell, the nuts are sufficiently dried.

To roast hickory nuts in an oven, set the temperature at 300 F (148 C). If you want the roasted nuts to be a tasty treat, you should season them before roasting.

Roast hickory nuts for one and a half to two hours. After removing them from the oven and let them cool for approximately 40 minutes – or until they reach room temperature.

Roasted hickory nuts will not last as long as naturally dried hickory nuts. You should not eat hickory nuts that have been roasted once they are more than 21 days old.

You can dehydrate hickory nuts in the oven or a dehydrating machine.

You can use the oil from the hickory nuts you collected for cooking, baking, or making natural hair and beauty items like soap, chapstick, dry skin lotion, and shampoo.

If you have an oil press, you will only need to use cracked unroasted hickory nuts to make oil. If using a press, follow the manufacturer's instructions for loading the nuts into the press at the proper amounts before pressing them into oil either manually or via a switch on an electronic machine.

If you are using a blender or a food processor to make nut oil, you need to combine one to two teaspoons of carrier oil for every 2 cups of unroasted and cracked nuts used.

Hickory nuts are valuable in so many ways and can be found for free just laying on the ground. All you have to do is find some mature hickory trees on your land or in a place that you are given permission to forage, wait for fall, and then fill up a sturdy sack with as many as you can carry.

Tara Dodrill is a homesteading and survival journalist and author. She lives on a small ranch with her family in Appalachia. She has been both a host and frequent guest on preparedness radio shows. In addition to the publication of her first book, ‘Power Grid Down: How to Prepare, Survive, and Thrive after the Lights go Out’, Dodrill also travels to offer prepping tips and hands-on training and survival camps and expos.