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.
Hazelnut harvest is always a harvest that is either super muddy or super dusty…there is no middle ground, usually. Except when we started last week, it has rained a little and there was just enough moisture in the soil to keep the dust down but not make anything muddy.
Here is the difference, this photo is the start of the day when the moisture was perfect…
And here is later in the day when the ground was all dried out again…
Trusts me, dust is always better than mud during nut harvest, but wow it was sure nice to enjoy some “perfect” harvesting conditions of only for a few hours!
Happy Friday! Stay tuned for some harvest videos and photos on Monday!
NuttyGrass 