Harvest 2009
It’s pretty quiet right now on the farm. We completed the 2009 harvest back in October and we won’t do too much until pruning in January, which is fine with me as the harvest is always a tremendously busy time. The pistachio nuts have to be shaken from the trees, loaded into trucks and taken to the processors where they are cleaned, have their hulls removed and super dried to seal in the flavor.
Shaking the Trees
This all happens within 24 hours. When you consider that this year’s harvest in California was over 350 million pounds, that’s a lot of activity. Actually, we had expected almost 450 million pounds, so it was a bit less than we thought it might be. San Luis Obispo Farm was right on target to what we expected, however. One theory is that there were quite a few undeveloped nuts on the trees down south. These nuts are selected out at the processor when they float instead of sinking and are skimmed off and discarded. We didn’t seem to have too many of these “floaters” so our crop was about what we thought it would be.
After every harvest I manage to fit in a fishing trip. This time I went to Alaska. Caught some really nice fish up there.
2009 Pistachios
We will be pruning in a few weeks and I’ll let you know how that goes.