I got some good tractor time this week, driving as straight as I possibly could and enjoying some nice fresh fall air here in Oregon.
We cultivate 1-2 times a year when the plants are small. It helps us knock down weeds, conserve moisture in the soil and the plants seem to enjoy the looser dirt around them. 
As you can see in the photo above, a few weeds slip through. Those will have to be taken care of down the road.
Happy Friday everyone!!
I did fairly good this year taking some videos while harvesting. I still haven’t gotten any photos of the whole sweeping process yet, I think the biggest reason is that I’m driving the harvester whenever he’s sweeping so it’s a bit difficult to run over there. I’ll try during our second picking though in the next week or so. Until then here are a few videos from this year.
Video 1: Video taken while I was harvesting. You can see the rows of nuts that have been swept up into windrows between the trees. I’m driving over those with the tractor, while the harvester behind me is picking the nuts off the ground, putting them over some chains to let the dirt drop back to the ground and then through a large fan that blows out all the lighter material. You can see the nuts bouncing back on the furthest chain where they will be dropped into a cart for unloading.
Video 2: This video was taken from the back of the harvester. You can see the nuts coming over the last chain and landing in the cart. Once this cart is full we unload the nuts into totes to remove them from the orchard.
Video 3: Once the totes are out of the orchard they are stacked in line to be dumped into a truck. Some farmers haul the tote to the processor, but we haul in bulk. Because of that we use a forklift with a rotater to dump the nuts from the tote into the truck. Our truck can haul about 18 totes at a time to the processor.
We have reached the final crop to harvest on our farm for 2015!!! Hazelnuts (filberts) have been falling from the trees for weeks now and we have headed out to pick them up off the ground.
Unlike some other nuts, filberts fall naturally from the trees, no shaking needed. We then use a sweeper machine to put them into rows, a harvester to pick up the rows and totes to move them to the truck to transport them to the processor.
We grow a lot of crops for seed on our farm, so it’s always fun to have a crop you can harvest and have a snack or two while you’re driving through the field!
I have some good videos of harvest that I will post next week and explain the actual process a bit more. Until then keep eating those hazelnuts, we have more coming down the line!
NuttyGrass 