Tag: Filberts

Summer Workers

School is out for the summer, and while we have camps and a few fun outings planned, most of our summer is full of work on the farm.

This week was a juggle of childcare so I got to take the boys out for a few hours to work with me. We checked a few (very tall) tall fescue fields and headed out to a newly planted orchard to count trees. We planted a number of new baby hazelnut trees this past winter, and most are looking great, but there are a few dead ones that will need to be replanted.

So Hoot, Auggie and I headed out to do some tallying. A skill Auggie was very proud to have learned this year in kindergarten.

This spring and moving now into summer has been a struggle with the weather and rising costs. It’s a very uneasy time to be a farmer with all that has hit us this year that is out of our control. But it’s also just really amazing to get to be outside, teaching your kids all about what you love to do and seeing how much they love it also!

Someday these summer workers will be full time around here….probably (as I’m told often) before I know it!

Hazelnut Harvest 2015

  
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!

Hazelnut Harvest…The Rest of the Story

This is our harvester…looks like a very long train!The nuts go into the back of the harvest “train” into a dump cart.

We use wooden boxes to transfer the nuts from the field to the truck.

The boxes are stacked up and wait for the truck.

Using a rotater on the forklift we dump the boxes to be hauled in bulk to the processor.As dad takes the filberts to the processor, I’m smiling because it’s the first year we have a cab on the harvester tractor!!!!!  See how clean I am…INCREDIBLE!!  Below is a picture of last year…quite a difference!

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