Macnuts In Bloom

Heading out the driveway today, I noticed that the macadamia nut trees are in bloom. I didn't first discover this with my eyes, but rather, with my nose. The blooms put out a nice scent. Well at least I like it. Don't ask hubby what he thinks. He'd be happy without macnut trees on the farm. But since he can't get away from them (we live next door to 5 acres of macnut trees), he not tempted to chop down ours in the middle of the night. It wouldn't eliminate the scent.

Sweet smelling flowers. 

With all the recent rain and with the ground being saturated, we should have a good blooming season this year.

If you look carefully, you can see a yellowjacket visiting the fliers. 

I know that I've written about macnuts blooming in the past, but I wanted to document when they started blooming again this season. This blog helps me keep track of things on the farm. Far better than a journal. 

Cracking Open the Macnuts

The last post about macnuts left us with dehusked macnuts still in their shell. So what's the next step? Setting the nuts aside for 4-6 weeks to dry down in their shells. You see, when they're fresh, the nut meat tends to adhere to the shell lining. That makes it very difficult to get the nut out. But allowing the entire nut to dry down some pulls the nut meat away from the shell lining. I suppose the commercial places have huge drying units of some sort, but on a small scale like this farm, the simplest way is to lay out the nuts some place dry and airy. Currently I use a greenhouse floor. But before I had greenhouses, I laid out the nuts in a single layer in boxes or trays, then stashed them under the house for several weeks. It worked. 

Next step....I wash the nuts before cracking. No sense in adding unnecessary dirt. 

Now for the business of cracking those nuts. It's not as simple as it sounds. These nuts are tough, and being round, they have structural strength. So any old nutcracker isn't going to work. You need one that can handle a macnut. There are several types out there, but this one works really well even if it is only one nut at a time. 

Above, this is the cracker commonly seen in my area. It's easy to use. Durable. Gets the job done. The particular cracker was purchased on 2005 and has been extensively used ever since. It's never let me down. 

The jaws have little teeth that grasp the nut. The jaw on the right is moveable and driven by a cam attached to the handle. Move the handle from right to left, and the jaws close. 

Pretty simple. Pretty powerful. 

Add a nut. Close the jaws.........

CRACK. 

If the nuts are dried down enough, and with a bit of practice, I can get a lot of whole macnuts. The less dry the nuts, the more pieces I seem to get, as opposed to whole nuts. 

Over the years I've done a lot of macnut cracking. I figure that for every hour of nut cracking, I end up with a pound of end product.....that is, the weight of nuts after they are dehydrated. You see, once the nuts are cracked, the nut meat is perishable. It needs to be either refrigerated, frozen, roasted, dehydrated, or used. I prefer to dehydrate them. Once dehydrated, I can either sell or trade them, or process them into cooking oil. 

Yes, strictly looking at the money side of this, I'm surely not getting rich processing macnuts. But it's just another small part of being self sufficient. We could eat the nuts ourselves (whole, in baking, as macnut butter, etc), trade or sell them in order to acquire some food that we don't produce ourselves, or process them into our own cooking oil. They also make nice gifts. 

Harvesting Macnuts

The farm now has 6 trees producing nuts. That's up one from the last time I mentioned macnuts. The smallest tree is now producing. 

Above, a cluster of nuts hanging from a tree branch. One doesn't pick them. They're not ready yet if they are still on the tree. 

Just about every day I pick up the fallen nuts. As I've said, you don't pick the nuts as you would an apple or peach, but rather, you wait for them to fall naturally. I really haven't noticed but I'd venture to say that nuts fall about 8-9 months of the year. So it's pretty much a slow, year around harvest. Right now I'm gathering about 100 nuts a day. 

Having only a few trees, it's not a big deal to simply handpick the nuts and flick them into a bucket. From there, I wash them by hosing them off. This gets the obvious soil, leaves, and insects off. 

Next, the nuts are placed someplace warm, sunny, and airy to dry. I use the floor of one of the greenhouses. 

Above, freshly picked up nuts, brightly green. 

Above, a few days in the greenhouse (sometimes only 24 hours) and the husks start to split. Once the husks split, I'll immediately attempt to pop it off the nut by using my hands. While the husk is still fresh and pliable I get get the husks off of about 80% of the nuts. The rest require a different approach....either a pliers or a dehusking machine. There are small machines that can dehusk the macnuts, but when I'm only doing a few nuts, I don't bother dragging it out. I have to keep it in storage so that it doesn't get ruined in the acidic air around here, so it's a hassle if I only have a hundred or less nuts to deal with. 

Once the nut is out of the husk, it needs to dry out some before cracking. Why? The nut meat tends to stick to the inside of the shell. Drying the nuts until they loosen from the shell makes shelling easier and more complete. I dry my  nuts in the greenhouse for 4-5 weeks, give or take depending upon the weather. I can tell they are ready for shelling if I pick up a handful, give them a shake, and can hear or feel nuts loose in their shells.

I'll show you how I crack nuts next......

Macnuts on the Farm

The farm hosts five macadamia nut trees, enough to keep us rolling in nuts. Not enough to rely upon solely for income, but since I have access to hundreds of macnut trees and their nuts (many people around here have a few trees and have no interest in harvesting the nuts), I don't need more trees. My trees are still quite young, but they're producing quite nicely. 

Harvesting macnuts are easy. Simply pick them up off the ground. Mature nuts drop of the tree, especially after a rain. But since it's raining almost every day here, I'm seeing a steady nut drop rather than surges of nuts after a rain shower. In order to make finding the nuts will be easier. I keep the grass weedwacked really short under the trees. 

This year is going to be a bumper crop. The clusters have lots of nuts. As you can see, the nuts vary in size in the cluster because some are more mature than others. The nuts mature and drop over several months, with the majority dropping during the summer and fall. 

The nut is encased in a green husk. That husk is really tough, but nothing compared to the shell that holds the actual nut. That shell is so hard that one needs a special cracker to get it open.......or a vise grip and a strong hand.......or a hammer and something other than one's fingers to hold the nut in place. Ouch! But I'll talk about macnut processing in another post.