Though we're going on our 8th year of living so near this "Almond Capitol of the World", we actually knew relatively little about almond harvest. Thanks to some almond-growing church friends and their teenage daughter, Denise (a favorite of my girls!), today we got a little tour. We wandered around their orchards a bit, got tons of questions answered and even saw the impressive shaking machine in action. Our hosts showed us how they used to whack the almonds out of the trees with heavy mallets until they bought the shaker machine with its lever-operated tree-hugging arm 15 years ago. After our friends clamp the machine's arm onto each trunk and make it rain almonds, they let the almonds lie on the ground for about a week to dry out. What comes off the tree is kind of a fuzzy green pod with a hard shell inside. The almond is inside the shell. Next comes the sweeper machine that puts the scattered almonds into piles. They are then scooped up, put onto the elevated conveyor belt, dumped into a big truck and taken off to be hulled and shelled. The whole process was super interesting! (I didn't take any pictures, so I just "borrowed" this picture from the Wickers' blog. Thanks Heidi! :)
Though it was the girls who expressed the first interest in learning about this, Delia with lessons on almond harvest at preschool and Ella with questions I couldn't answer whenever we'd see one the big trucks in action in an orchard, today they were much more into Tilly the kitty, Denise's guinea pig and stuffed animals and a fancy bear bench!
We shared a video of Ella singing this same almond jingle 2 years ago, here's Delia's version. It's even more fun now that the line "I shook the almond tree as hard as I can, down came the almonds..." has been seen and experienced up close!
1 comment:
Oh my goodness, this is precious. Has it really been two years already since Ella was the almond shaker? Can't believe it!
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