Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Learning to drive a tractor & other farm vehicles

LOOK OUT! There's a tree in my way!!. We lost 2 trees learning how to navigate a tractor in the orchard. Everytime I get on the tractor I keep hearing a little jingle in my head from the old TV show "Green Acres". When we rescued a dog from the animal shelter I was tempted to name him Arnold.

Actually, the first time I got on the tractor was to steer it out of the mud while Rick towed it with another tractor. Just one of those little things you learn the hard way. But since then, I have learned how to operate the tractor. I can now say that I can pick up yard waste, drive it to the burn pile and dump it. Rick is trying to get me to use the sweeper and harvester... but I've held my ground!! There are some things this lady won't do. (sigh) I'll probably learn how to do both this harvest time.

I learned how to drive an ATV...now that's fun. I did get some "air" time.. but that was quite by accident, but quite exhilarating. I'll probably never try that stunt again!

I had to tow the longest thing ever for over 10 miles on a fairly busy roadway. I was towing a conveyor from the hullers to our house. Sooo, if you ever shake your fist at a slow moving truck towing a conveyor, it's probably me.

Sunday, June 1, 2008

It's harvest time for the almonds and olives

There are literally more than a hundred different varieties of almonds. We have 3 varieties of almonds: nonpareil, carmel and peerless. The trees bloom in February and are just beautiful. One day, Rick and I were walking in the field admiring the beauty of the trees in full bloom when I held on to a limb and shook it while yelling at Rick "Honey, look it's snowing"! I thought it was a stunning sight, Rick gasped, dazed and said "STOP"! It was then that he told me the blooms were actually almonds. Ooops.

We use various sprays to keep the orchard healthy. The ground needs fertilizer and the trees need stuff to keep the blooms on before it rains, stuff to keep the blooms on after it rains and more stuff to keep the bugs off. The sprays have a technical name, but stuff works for me.

With the help of our neighbor Sam, we found a beekeeper to pollinate the trees. Once the boxes are set and the bees start doing their thing, you can actually hear the buzzing throughout the field. Bees can travel up to a 2 mile radius pollinating trees. As you walk towards my backdoor, there is a Valencia orange tree and hundreds of bees were all into that tree. It was scary for me the first time I heard them buzzing and swarming around, I was afraid of getting stung. But they pretty much leave you alone while they work.

When and if the frost comes, you pray for the best. The temperature dipped below 32 degrees a few times. Those are the days you pray a lot! Some farmers say to turn on the watering system to stave off the frost. Lucky for us, the frost didn't hurt the olive or almond trees. Unfortunately, the orange trees got hit pretty bad.

Rick and I spent a few months getting the field prepared for harvesting by pulling weeds, mowing the grass in between the rows, filling up rabbit holes, squirrel holes and any other hole we see. The work was hard and tedious but satisfying once it was done. Our two daughters their boyfriends and my sweet granddaughter came up a few times to help us get the field in order. Rick and his two brothers came up to help too. It's great having a family that pitches in whenever help is needed.

The actual harvesting begins in August. Prior to our first experience harvesting, we kept hearing stories from people about the "good old" days when they had to use a huge padded stick to whack the trees to get the nuts to drop. Thank goodness for modernization! We hired someone to come out and shake the trees with a specialized piece of equipment.

Since we don't sell our almonds as a mixed variety, we have them shaken at different times. Once the almonds are on the ground they need to be gathered. I use a rake to get the nuts away from the tree and onto the grassy area between the rows of trees then Rick comes by with a sweeper and gathers all the nuts into a neat row. We let the almonds sit for a few days to them dry out. Once they dry up, he uses a harvester to put the almonds into huge bins. Once that is done, then we load them onto a conveyer belt that loads them onto a dump truck. Then off we go to the hullers.

We get to do that 3 times...once for each variety.

Out of hundreds varieties of olives, our farm yields 2 kinds of olives: Manzanillo and Sevillano. Both make excellent table olives. The first year, we just sold them straight up. Sounds sorta silly, but once the fruits of our labors were gone, it felt as if we were missing something. We wanted to do more with the olives so after a lot of researching and asking a lot of questions, we decided to blend our olives to make an oil with the following harvest.

And that's what we did our second harvest.

It doesn't take much to care for the olive trees; a lot of water, sunny days, some prunning and spraying for the dreaded fruit fly and the trees pretty much take care of themselves. However, harvesting olives is extremely labor intensive. We have a work crew come and do that. It takes them a few days to pluck the olives from the trees and load them into huge bins that we take to the facility that will do the cold pressing and bottling. Timing is everything. The olives can't stay in the bins for more than a day or they begin to shrivel up and go to waste. We can produce about 4 tons of olives per acre.

I've heard that other farmers are increasing their production and decreasing the labor costs with a new way planting. The trees are planted very close together and they don't get much taller than 5 feet. When it's time to harvest, they use equipment that is similar to that used to harvest grapes.

Not all our almonds are sold to the hullers. We keep a lot of them and have them flavored to sell in the farmer's markets along with our olive oil. Plus they make excellent gifts for family, friends and donations for various fundraising events for local committees in Orland. Another by product that we have is raw honey. Our beekeeper was kind enough to give us a couple of gallons of honey. Yummy!

After our first harvest, Rick and I made a decision to remove an older almond orchard. We figured that we spent more money trying to harvest the nuts then we took in. But I'll go into that later.