Macadamia sorting and olive harvest
This morning Tom and I tidied up the nursery. A lot of seedlings had weeds in them, so we had to pull the weeds out. Some seedlings needed to be re-potted, and other pots were only full of weeds, a bit upsetting that a lot of my precious seedlings were overruled!
After morning tea Tom did the cream separating while I started sorting the macadamias. They come in one of three ways: full outer shell, broken outer shell or just inner shell. I leave the full outer shell to ripen a bit longer, as the outer shell is too hard to break away from the inner shell at that point. Once they go black they burst open by themselves and it is easier to pull the inner shell out. The broken outer shells I pulled off the inner shell and put the inner shell (with nut inside) into a separate box. I sorted out a couple of boxes, two more to go. The next step after that is shaking the inner shell, if it rattles the nut is ready to come out and we need to crack it with our manual nutcracker… Most macadamias are not ready to come out yet, but we may have a couple tomorrow to eat!
Tom and I then went down to the food forest to harvest the olives that Tom found on the trees last week. Very exciting as this is our very first olive harvest! We had some ladders, but ended up using the tree as ladders as well (especially Tom, he was pretending to be a monkey 😉 We had a nice first harvest, they will need at least 3 months of processing now before we can eat them though…
©2016 Zaia; permeco.org, incorporating Permaculture Research Institute Sunshine Coast, simplicity, permaculture, self reliance, food, health and homesteading, tidying the nursery, sorting macadamias and climbing trees to harvest olives