Harvest Season and Writing

It was my turn to blog on Romance Books 4 Us Blog.

http://romancebooks4us.blogspot.com/2014/08/harvest-season-and-writing-by-janice.html

Harvest Season

It's official, we're right in the middle of Harvest Season. 

(photos by Janice Seagraves)

The tree shaking has already happened and all the yummy goodness of almonds are laying on the dirt, waiting until they're dry enough for the sweeper to sweep up. This is all done by a machine driven by one man. It blows the nuts over until he has them lined up into one long neat row. Later he'll show up again to sweep up the almonds, which will then be loaded up into the back of a semi truck trailer to be taken off to the processing plant.

At the plant, they'll be taken out of their shell and the almonds cleaned and then roasted before they'll dust with salt or seasonings and boxed up for sale.

Across the street the raisin harvest is underway. Again what used to take a work crew of ten to twenty takes only three men to pull off. Long lengths of paper are laid out down the rows of grapes, then the huge picker pulls off the grape bunches off and lays them down in a flat even row. Later workers will come to cut off length of the paper and turn them over onto fresh paper so the grapes can dry on the other side. After drying they'll be gathered up and dumped into either gondolas or the semi truck trailers and taken away to a processing plant where the rains will be cleaned, destemmed, dried again before being boxed up for shipment.

My husband works at a local winery. It's the biggest plant in my home town and hubby works there as graveyard foreman. He's a industrial maintenance mechanic and keeps the plant running.

The crush season is underway: The grapes are harvest like the raisin grapes but instead of being laid out to dry are then loaded up into gondolas or the trailers of semi-trucks, then they are brought to where my husband works. Weighed, the sugar content checked before being off loaded into the crush area, where they are turned into juice and the steams, seeds and grape skins are removed. Wine grapes almost always have seeds. The juice is put into great big silos some six stories tall, where later a yeast culture is added. Yeast eats the sugar in the grape juice producing alcohol, which in turn changes grape juice into wine.

A lot has changed in the last twenty years in how produce reaches the market, and less and less people are needed. One of the reasons that the work has become so mechanized is that the workers are getting harder to come by because of the tougher migrant laws since 911.

In my home town, the farmers have gotten together and decided to share the same work crew. They rotate the work and keep the migrant workers busy all year long, so they'll stay and be available when they are needed.

Thursday's Thirteen: Harvest Season

We live in the middle of a almond orchard and it's Harvest Season which means...

*All photos were taken by me or my daughter

1. All these lovely almond blooms

2. That opened in the early spring time...Fell off.

 3. The nut has matured during the long hot summer.

 4. And the almonds have dried and the outer shell popped open

 5. Dried Almond

6. Almond cracked open and ready to eat.

The Harvest begins on Thursday Aug. 30, 2012, which means I get woken up bright and early by the machines shaken the bejessus out of the trees and hear the hiss of almonds hitting the ground.

7.  In my home garden, we're also grown tomatoes

8. Green peppers

9. Which turned finally to red peppers

My daughter cooked them with chicken and pasta, yummy.

10. There's several orange trees on the property, which makes an awesome orange Julius.

11. My husband and daughter's favorite, grapefruit. 

12. We have a few strawberry plants

13. Which keeps us in strawberries, yum!

Do you do anything special during harvest season?

Harvest season

It's harvest season once again, and this is the first year that my landlord is harvesting the almonds on the baby almond trees.

So I guess there not babies any more?

Last weekend at five in the am I heard; varoom, varoom, click-click-click, grr-rrr, varoom, varoom, click-click-click, grr-rrr.

It was the machine that attached to the trunk of the almond tree, and shook the bajesus out of the tree and all the nuts fell out.

They did it to each and every tree on our 80 acre parcel that we live on.

Oy vey.

Then yesterday, my husband came home about six thirty am. He gets into bed with me and whispers in my ear, "Their harvesting," and I hear; varoom, varoom, swish-swish-swish, varoom, varoom, swish-swish-swish, varoom, varoom, swish-swish-swish.

It was the machine that puts the nuts in neat line down the center of the rows, and the machine that picks them up.

Great.

We both tossed and turned.

Then my hubby said, "I can't sleep."

Me, "I can't either."

"Let's go to Fresno and I'll buy that MP3 player for you."

"Okay, just give enough time to take a quick shower."

"Alright, then I'll wake the daughter."

He grabbed up a pillow and threw it over his back like it was a bag. "Ooh, Sarah," he said going into her room, "time to wake up."

Whack, whack, whack.

I think my daughter got him real good.

Quick finish; we went and had a terrible meal out at Carl's jr. Went to Fresno and hubby bought me a Zen, and spent way too much on manga at Bounders for our daughter, bought anime at Best buy and then came home.

Then when we were about a mile or so from our house we saw this huge plume of smoke.

Guess what?

It wasn't smoke, it was the dust that the harvest machines were kicking up.

Today I went outside there is dust was every where, on the trees bushes, on everything in my garden, and my car is looks like it hasn't been driven in a year.

But the good news is they're done.

Phew!