Almond harvest starts in late August and lasts until late September. It is a fun and interesting process as it is preformed with a variety of machines. Here you can see almonds waiting to be harvested. One interesting fact about almonds is that they are related to peaches. They are so closely related that many almond trees are grafted onto a strong peach stock. Sometimes l find an almond tree with over grown suckers (limbs growing from the stump) that produce small peaches.

The first machine used in the harvesting process is the Shaker, also known as the Knocker. This machine drives right up to the stump of the tree, squeezes the stump with large rubber pillows, and shakes the tree until the nuts come flying off to the ground. These machines can shake trees so hard that they will rattle the windows in a nearby house when they're at work. Here you can see my brother Henry shaking our orchard.

After the almonds are shook to the ground they sit for about 2 or 3 days to dry a little in the sun. Then a Sweeper, also known as a Windrower, rakes the nuts into long rows in between the trees.

The reason nuts are raked to the middle is so the Harvester, also known as the Pick-Up-Machine, can drive over the top of them and pick them up. The harvester separates the nuts from the leaves and dirt, and puts them into a cart that is pulled behind. You can see the white cart that is being filled with almonds.

This cart does a number of things. It has a mechanism to remove sticks from the nuts as they are filling the cart but the best part about this cart is that it can empty itself into another cart to save time. Because of the cart, the harvester doesn't have to wait to attach to another empty cart or drive away to unload at the conveyor. It can empty itself at the end of the row and keep harvesting. Here Henry is back driving the tractor and pulling a shuttle cart that takes the nuts from the harvester's cart over to the truck.

The shuttle cart is dumped onto a conveyor that loads the nuts into trucks. The trucks then take the almonds to a huller facility where the hulls are removed from the shells and the shells are removed from the nuts, leaving nothing but the meat of the almond. The shells can then be used in a bedding for cattle and the hulls are mixed into cattle feed for nutrients.

I hope you enjoyed the tour of our Almond Harvest. Michael Colombo