What a cool thing it is to be here during harvest. If you missed the tree shaking video, refer to the blog called "Getting There is Half the Fun" for a link to the South Valley Farms video. Watching the tree shaking is one of the harvest highlights. But first, some interesting facts about pistachio and almond trees.
A pistachio tree is created by grafting a bud from a current pistachio tree into an entirely different host sapling when it is about 2 feet tall. That tiny bud grows into an adult pistachio tree, after the top of the host is cut off. That is significant when you consider that tens of thousands of these trees have to be budded by hand, in the fields, by workers who are bending over to bud them and are moving so fast that you have to trot beside them to keep up. The same thing is true of almond trees, but they are grafted when the hosts are just sticks, before being planted in the ground.
When the tree shaking is done and the almonds are on the ground drying, sweepers go into the fields and sweep the nuts into tidy rows to be sucked up by machines that put them in the semi-trucks.
The sweepers have to sweep under the branches, so the machines are about as tall as I am, and workers are stuffed into tiny cabs to drive them. It's a dusty affair and we wonder how the drivers can even see what they are doing.
But the trees aren't done yet...to ensure that EVERY NUT is off the trees, workers attack each tree one last time with a pole to knock off any remaining nuts. With over a million trees, that's a lot of smacking!
Large semi-trucks bring the nuts to the processing plant to be weighed, sorted, cleaned and bagged. Before unloading, the trucks weigh in and the block of trees that produced those particular nuts is noted on the computer system. Literally every nut can be traced back to it's field of origin, because through the whole process the nuts are taken care of with the batch they started with.
The trucks roll in and out continuously all day, six days a week. The nuts are either dumped on the ground, using a conveyer belt to turn them into a mountain of nuts, or unloaded directly into grates in the ground that take them right into the building, depending on what batch they belong to.
The piles in the picture were created by 10:30 am and more trucks were coming in. By the next morning, these nuts are all gone, the yard is swept and ready for a new batch.
The overhead conveyers are creating mountains of hulls and a separate mountain of shells behind this one. This is sold to cattle ranchers for feed, and they make a pretty profit on it.
Now let's talk about what Elder Fillmore has been up to. He has been pouring over plans for the 2 garages that he and Elder Smith will build as soon as the building permits are issued. In the meantime, he has been fixing sliding glass doors, installing doorbells, patching a large hole in a wall (a resident was trying to hang a picture but punctured a water line), replacing weather stripping around doors and replacing batteries in smoke and carbon monoxide detectors.
What you see here is a larger water line that got broken in front of some old homes that are coming down. The foreman on the demolition team called Elder Fillmore who came to the rescue and capped off the pipe in the middle of the mess. He put down a front door off of the house (in picture above you can recognize the doorknob still on the door), so he could kneel on it and not have to slosh through the mud. Another happy customer was satisfied with his work.
Let me explain my projects. The missionary elders are maintenance men who have 3 shops or storage areas to work out of. Tools of all sorts are stored in two of them and the third one had old furniture, mattresses, and household goods stored there in boxes (which the mice had a "hay day" with). Of the 20 homes that the missionaries maintain, 5 are completely furnished....formerly 6 houses. Over the years a sizable stockpile of household furniture, vacuums, irons, ironing boards, blenders, microwaves, sheets, blankets, pillows, plates, pots, pans, toasters, and anything you would find in kitchen drawers has accumulated. Elders Fillmore and Smith made the excess furniture available for field workers, and the rest of the usable stuff was delivered to my door to be laundered, cleaned up, and stored.
I did multiple loads of laundry and had my dishwasher running full time for a couple of days. What you see here does not account for the stuff already in the closet in our 3rd bedroom, which is used as a study. All the sheets, comforters and pillows were stored in the closet in bedroom #2. The final picture shows the room cleaned up, with mattress and box springs on the left, as well as the extra vacuums.
With that project done, I attacked one of the other storage areas and organized all the hand tools, paints, screws, nails, electrical and plumbing supplies. Between the mouse poop found in the household boxes and the massive amounts of mouse poop (including one mouse corpse) found in that storage area, I was totally grossed out. I wore a face mask and gloves as I worked through the dust and mouse poop. So....two storage areas down and one remaining for another week.
One last incident to report on. Elder Smith was on our neighbor's roof replacing a part on a non-working air conditioner. The dad and 3 boys were out back, or so they thought. The 2-year old made his way around front to the ladder and climbed onto the roof. Elder Smith saw him as he was teetering a bit and called him over to him, then he secured him in his arms.
The story had a happy ending but could have been a real mission-spoiler for us and devastating for the family.
Join us next time when we tell you about our trip to Sequoia National Park:)
