Walnuts - wasted

A sad tale of the wasted walnuts...

At a French car boot sale (brocante) earlier in the week and I spotted a vendor selling bags of walnuts, obviously harvested from their tree.

Fantastic, I love walnuts, they're my favourite nut, and I bought a large bag for what I thought was a very reasonable €2.
Of course afterwards the boys then pointed out the subsequent vendors selling walnuts for €0.50, but I replied that the other sellers had much smaller bags so surely I had the best bargain.

Back home I cracked open a couple of nuts but found that as they were so fresh the nuts inside were quite moist and thus didn't taste as expected.

So I left the two open nuts and the rest of the bag to dry out.

Fatal mistake. I clearly have a lot to learn about how to harvest and eat walnuts straight from the tree because today when I came back to the opened nuts I found a nice growth of blue mould on them both, and the others that were unopened that I smelt also had a mouldy smell to them too.
Cracked a few open and some had small bits of visible mould, and whilst some didn't I decided not to risk it and consigned the whole bag to the composting bin.

€2 lost :-(

Maybe I should have dried them all in the oven straight away? Dunno, this was all new to me.