{"id":5348,"date":"2014-10-29T00:19:26","date_gmt":"2014-10-29T04:19:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tusentakk2.com\/wordpress\/?p=5348"},"modified":"2014-10-29T09:41:14","modified_gmt":"2014-10-29T13:41:14","slug":"harvesting-almonds-spain-october-1-18-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tusentakk2.com\/wordpress\/2014\/10\/harvesting-almonds-spain-october-1-18-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvesting Almonds — Spain, October 1-18, 2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lars Helge & Tove have a villa up on a ridge that separates the little village of Itrabo from the little village of Jete.\u00a0 On their property they have some 70 almond trees; trees which made it possible to legally build their villa \u201cCasa Emilie\u201d, since housing is permitted on rural land in this part of Spain only if it is associated with some kind of farm.<\/span><\/p>\n

The almonds were especially bountiful this year, and so we began our harvest by picking some of the nuts on some of the loaded lower branches.\u00a0 The alternative method of harvest is to spread a large plastic sheet under a tree and then beat the branches with long sticks to dislodge the nuts and cause them to fall onto the plastic sheet, from which the nuts can then be \u201cpoured\u201d into large collection baskets.\u00a0 When an almond is still \u201cgreen\u201d, the nut is encased in an outer leathery husk.\u00a0 As the nut matures, the outer husk dries up and cracks open and falls off the nut, leaving the hard almond shell with which the reader is no doubt familiar.\u00a0 If one attempts to harvest too soon, many of the nuts will still wear their leathery husks.\u00a0 If one waits too long in an effort to have all of the husks shed from the nuts, many of \u201cnaked\u201d nuts will have fallen to the ground.\u00a0 So the ideal time to harvest is when almost all of the almonds either are \u201cnaked\u201d or are wearing dried husks that can be easily removed but few nuts have fallen to the ground. The advantage of the picking method is that the collected nuts are free from debris and the slightly adhering husks can be easily removed while picking.\u00a0 The advantages of the \u201cbeating with a stick\u201d method is that it is faster and that it dislodges the nuts that are too high to be reached by hand.\u00a0 The disadvantage of the stick method is that it collects on the plastic sheet not only clean nuts and nuts with easily removed husks but also immature nuts with irremovable husks and also leaves and twigs and old husks.\u00a0 So the stick method requires a separate step that we performed by dumping the baskets onto a table and then manually sorting the nuts from the debris.\u00a0 After a day or two of easing into the harvest by picking by hand, we switched to the stick method.<\/span><\/p>\n

As faithful readers already know, in the middle of the harvest we took a break and took Tove to the Malaga airport and then continued on to Gibraltar.\u00a0\u00a0 When we returned, we continued the harvest until about 55 trees had been stripped.\u00a0 Then we took another break and waited for Norwegian friends Rasmus and Kari to arrive and help us with the last 15 trees.\u00a0 When the harvest was complete, we had about 341 kg. of almonds, almost all of which were taken to an almond broker and sold.\u00a0 A few were retained for shelling in the machine that Lars Helge had commissioned several years ago from a technical school in Kristiansand that was looking for a project.\u00a0 The machine is supposed to crack the shells without breaking the inner nuts.\u00a0 The \u201cproblem\u201d is that not all the almonds have the same dimension, and so some smaller nuts pass between the shell-cracking rollers without being shelled, and some larger nuts fall out with not only their shells broken but also their nuts crushed.\u00a0\u00a0 (I wish I could think of another way of saying that which didn\u2019t cause half of our readers to wince.)<\/span><\/p>\n

This was our third almond harvest.\u00a0\u00a0 We enjoy the process.\u00a0 We enjoy the setting.\u00a0 We enjoy working with friends.<\/span><\/p>\n

Stay tuned for the next post when we discuss what we did when we were <\/span>not<\/em> harvesting almonds or visiting Gibraltar.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\t\t