Help from the Walnut Husk Fly maggot

So today I had to hull walnuts from their husks.

Not a job I was looking forward to because I'd never done it before and always heard they were a PITA. I was a little late getting to them because I had some tight deadlines in my job, so they started to turn dark and funky looking. I thought, ew. But thanks to the hard work of these little guys....

...hulling these bad boys turned out to be a breeze. They'd been working hard the last few weeks munching on the husk, turning it unto compost, and separating it from the nut shell. So by the time I sat down to do the work, all I had to do was don some plastic bread bags to keep my hands from getting stained and pull the husks off with my hands - no tools needed.

The green, untouched husks were so tough I had to use a sharp garden weeding tool, the kind you dig up dandelion roots with, to scrape off the hulls in a fashion not unlike flint-knapping, and ended up ripping the bread bags and jabbing my fingers a few times in the process. Their hard work saved me from having to use a few choice expletives, and turned what could've been a tiring day into a pleasant one. The image to the right shows how the green, uneaten hulls still stick to the shell, and literally have to be chiseled off.

So instead of all that chiseling, I was able to pick up the dark stained walnuts, which were soft under a flakey peeling, and just pull the husk away with ease. I gently picked off the babies, tossed them into the hull pile so they could finish their reward, and puffed the other ones off with a quick puff of air. The walnuts inside are fine - untouched, uneaten and clean. Dirty on the outside, but after they dry in the fall air the next few days (supposed to be in the 60's and 70's and sunny the next 4 days) all I have to do is brush them off and crack them open.

from ipm.ucdavis.edu

I looked the little guys up online and it appears that this is all these little flies do. They live underground by the walnut trees, turn into flies and lay eggs inside the walnuts' hulls, then put their babies to work gnawing away at the hulls. That's it. They don't go around biting people or build cocoons in your flour or drill into your fruit - they just eat walnut hulls.

And to think they're called pests - well at least by those corporate 'commercial growers', cuz they turn their walnut hulls from green to black, and their 'customers' want pretty green walnut hulls :-\ Funny these companies spend gobs of money poisoning their orchards with ridiculous amounts of pesticides to kill these creatures, who are doing absolutely no harm to the walnut meats at all, and who make the task of hulling them a total breeze.

Why I posted this here? Observing things like this in nature and using it to your advantage is what permaculture and sustainable agriculture is all about. I never knew these guys existed til today. I could have let prejudices about them being nasty little maggots cloud my sense of judgement. I could have thrown away all those walnuts without trying to understand the nature of these creatures. Instead, I saw the little guys for what they were - hungry babies - busy little walnut huskers - filling up for a long winter nap, and doing me a favor.

I have an idea for next year. Rather than disturb the little critters by pulling off their husks before they're finished eating, maybe I should just keep them under the walnut trees on a tray with a chickenwire bottom, maybe a few inches up off the ground so they don't get moldy or eaten by other bugs, and let the babies finish off their meals in peace. If I put another layer of chickenwire on the top of the tray, it'll keep the squirrels out of them.

That way, when they're done, they'll just burrow their way out of the hulls and drop down into the ground, where they'll dig down, hibernating for a year or two so they can grow up and make more workers for the next seasons. The hulls should be ready for me peel off easily without having to worry about hurting them or taking the time to pick them off the walnut shells..

I wasn't sure I'd be able to use my own observations to come up with my own time-saving methods of food growing and harvesting. I've read a lot about tricks to make gardening easier, but mostly the writers of permaculture books and articles all say that you have to observe your own environment and discover your own shortcuts and timesavers to let nature work for you. Now I'm seeing that even a noob like me can do it.