On the West Coast where irrigation is necessary, it is important to keep water from standing around the tree trunks. Build a shallow, permanent earthen basin under the trees with a slight mound close to the trunks to keep the bases of the trunks dry.
Walnuts are valuable not only as fine nut producers but also as shade trees. They generally grow fast when young and do best when set out as 3- to 4-foot trees; they become about 20 feet tall in six to eight years. Female flowers are generally inconspicuous, but male flowers are slender scaly green clusters, or catkins, about 3 inches long.
Wild trees produce fine nuts, but a number of named varieties are especially valuable because they have larger, thinner-shelled nuts and because the trees begin to bear earlier, within two to four years after being planted. Good varieties are Craxezy, Lingle, Love, Sherwood, Thill, Van de Poppen and White. Butternut trees are short-lived, lasting 50 to 75 years; a mature tree produces 1 to 5 bushels of fruit each fall.
Black walnuts and English walnuts do well in almost any soil, adapting to a wide range of pH, from 6.0 to 8.0, but butternuts are more sensitive to alkalinity and do best in soil with a pH of 6.0 to 7.0. Black walnuts should be planted as soon as the ground can be worked in spring, and butternuts can be planted in early spring or fall.
One way to loosen the husks of butternuts and black walnuts sounds like a strange and extreme method but it works: put the nuts on the driveway and drive your car back and forth over them. (This may, however, stain a light-colored driveway.)
Nuts ripen in early autumn and frequently remain on the trees for one or two weeks after the leaves have fallen. Trees may live for 100 years or more, and a mature tree produces 1 to 3 bushels of nuts annually.
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