Friday, September 26, 2008

It works! It works!

Hello? Tap. Tap. Tap. Anyone out there? Oh, there you are! I've missed you! Seems I've been running in ten different directions and just haven't made the time for you. I am so sorry!

It appears harvest has arrived. It'll be a bitter sweet harvest this year. We have some nuts. On some trees. And the quality will be Great to fair. It's always hard to work so hard to grow something only to have some on half. But as I keep telling Grandma, some nuts are better than no nuts!

This year for harvest, we are trying to streamline the process a little. Historically, we shook, swept, harvested, and shoveled. That's right. We shoveled all the pecans in to great big bags to take to the Great Pecan Man to be cleaned. Shoveling is a pain. A pain in the back. A pain in the legs. And a time waster. It takes a long time to shovel. And no one likes doing it.

This year, after many restless nights, dreaming of shoveling... (I have restless sleepless nights thinking about things like shoveling, laundry, the economy, what color I'd like to paint my living room... rest assured, the Nutty Papa doesn't have restless nights)... Anyway, we decided to try something new. This year, instead of hiring someone, we are going to rent a forklift and see if we can harvest the pecans straight into the great big bags, lift them out of one trailer and into another.

We found a neighbor who has a bobcat with forks. He has agreed to rent it to us for a week. We decided to give it a test run to see if it'd work yesterday. And it did. Kinda.


We harvested into the bag. We lifted the bag off the trailer. And put it on the cleaning trailer to go to the Great Pecan Man.

And this process was all carefully supervised by the Future Farmer of Pecans.

This morning, however, we hit a snag in the plan. Seems the bags swell with all those pecans in them and we're having a hard time getting as many bags on the cleaning trailer as we'd like. Oh, boy. Might be back to shoveling.

In the meantime, I'm off to harvest! TTFN!

4 comments:

Aloha Ya'll! said...

Glad you are back! I've missed you!

Anonymous said...

Hey Tera-figured y'all were smack dab in the middle of harvest! You're so ingenious with the forklift...hopefully it will work out for you. Hope y'all are well. Busy, busy around here, too!

Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work!

Chera said...

Glad to see you're back...missed ya!!