Home Grown Almonds Blog

Spring is here in California, and the almond trees have already blossomed and the nuts are starting to develop. I’m always amazed at how quickly it happens. For weeks, even months, we watch the buds slowly develop, then begin to swell in January and the first part of February, then POP! Out [...]

The past few months have been pretty quiet on the farm. Leaves slowly dropped from the trees as the temperature dropped through November and December. December was especially cold for us here in the Sacramento Valley. We had many nights drop into the 20s, which is unusually cold for this area.
Most of [...]

Wow, it has been a busy week and a half!  Since my last post, when we knocked the almond trees, we’ve been working like mad in the orchard getting ready to actually harvest, pick up the nuts off the ground!
After knocking the nuts off the Nonpareil trees (every other row), the first thing I needed [...]

It’s finally here!  Today we “knocked” the first variety of almond trees.

The process of shaking the almond trees is still referred to as knocking because before the days of big machines, the trees were literally knocked by hand with rubber mauls.
The actually knocking/shaking of the trees goes pretty quickly.  Each tree is shaken for only [...]

We’re just a couple days away from “knocking” the first variety of trees.  The nonpareil almonds are dried enough so we can shake them off the trees.  They will finish drying on the ground before we sweep them up and harvest them.
My boys have been helping me get the orchard ready for the shakers and [...]