Category: Harvest

Hazelnut Harvest 2019

We are on the homestretch of harvest for filberts, also known as hazelnuts. The weather is changing into fall here on Oregon, and while we have had pretty good weather this harvest, I’m sort of ready for the rain.

Here is a video of me harvesting a younger orchard of Jefferson hazelnuts.

Right now you can buy our hazelnuts in all Wilco Farm Stores, and come November in Albertson/Safeway and Bi-Mart! Oregon orchards is the brand and here are my personal favorite ones!!!

They are soooooooo good!!

This also wraps up harvest for all our crops here on the farm. We have a little more ground to work but other than that we will be starting to put things away for the winter.

It’s always a good feeling to wrap up another year on the farm!

The Beginning of Hazelnut Harvest

One of the most common questions I get asked about our hazelnuts…why don’t we shake our trees to get the hazelnuts down????

Well, the time of year that we harvest, in the fall, we often get nice blustery rain and wind storms. The goal of course is to get the nuts knocked down and out of their husks.

The goal is also for this kind of weather to last a few days and then settle down. Which leaves us with a nice lovely window to make some dust and not mud with our harvesters. This doesn’t always happen, but a girl can dream right??!!

Here are a few photos of the ground beneath the trees after one particularly stormy day.

And here’s to hoping (or praying) that the weather straightens right out next week and we get to do some good dusty (not muddy) harvesting.

****Update: I wrote this post yesterday. Then I woke up last night to pouring buckets of rain. So….now that I’m so happy the nuts fell down I am also praying that they aren’t floating away! For some reason Mother Nature didn’t seem to get my very specific request for the type of weather I was needing (haha!). And that my friends is, how do they say it, oh yeah…”that’s farming for you”!!!

Harvesting our Undies!!

The day finally came to harvest our Undies!!!

If you remember back about two months, the kids and I buried some tighty whities in a tall fescue field by our house. The plan was to dig them up and see how much activity was in the soil that would breakdown the underwear.

If I’m being honest, I was nervous. I mean, what if they looked like perfectly white underwear??!!! What if our soil that had been tilled just this past fall had really killed all the microbes?! What if our efforts to keep our soils healthy didn’t matter?! What if, what if, what if….

But there was nothing left to do but dig….

and dig….

and then we finally started to get a glimpse of the dirty waistband. It was an exciting moment as we pulled them out and saw that there was absolutely nothing left. Like nothing!!!!! Holy smokes!

It was a pretty fun experiment to see how much just 60 days in some healthy soil can destroy a pair of tighty whities!

This isn’t the usual way we check on the health of our soil. But it was a cool way to connect with an item that everyone is familiar with to the soil that we as farmers are familiar with.

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