As you may have noticed driving around Chico or the surrounding areas, everything is a’bloom! It’s our favorite time of year. Almond blossoms come from the deciduous tree in the rose family known as Prunus dulcis. They are relatives of the apricot, cherry, peach and plum families. Our trees will keep producing blossoms until about mid-end […]
You may not know this, but almond trees only blossom in California about three weeks of the year in the month of February. Guess what? It’s almost February! We thought we’d take a moment to share with you why this short time frame would be impossible without the help of our friends, the bees. […]
00 What happens when the almonds leave the orchard? We talked about the shaking and drying process in our last blog post, but what happens now that the nuts are all toasty from the sun? Our almonds have been drying for 1-2 weeks in their windrows and are now ready to be taken to our […]
It’s happy harvest season here at Maisie Jane’s orchards…and there’s a whole lot o’ shakin’ goin’ on. Check out these Instagram videos of what’s happening right now. No, that’s not a tornado…it’s a shaker! We use two kinds: one is a mono boom shaker, which shakes one tree at a time from the front, as […]
What you’ve heard on the news this week is true: California is burning again. Historically high temperatures along with lightning strikes (rare for us in NorCal) have created chaotic conditions. Thankfully, the 34 Butte County Lightning Complex fires are being contained as of this writing and pose no threat to the community. So we at […]
Once upon a time, I was a youngster growing up in Brooklyn, New York, in a neighborhood dominated by apartment houses, asphalt and concrete. As such, I never thought about how we got food (other than going to the supermarket), or what food looked like in its natural state. As far as I knew, […]
Look at these sweet little nut-buds. The openings, called hull splits, ensure that these will become actual edible almonds very soon. Hull splits are the opening of the almond husks that allow the nut meats to finish developing and dry. Specifically, for all you nut nerds (we resemble that remark): according to The Almond Doctor, […]
At my home, we have—well, I won’t call it an infestation of squirrels, but many uninvited furry guests. They’re cute and entertaining, but they don’t clean up after themselves, and my potted deck garden is where they like to live it up. Which got me wondering about why squirrels are as nutty for nuts as […]
Family farms are so important! In fact, according to the National Institute of Food and Agriculture of the USDA, more than 90% of farms in the U.S. are classified as small family farms. That’s a lot of family love grown into our food supply. But due to factors that include climate change, giant agribusiness and […]
Meet one of our biggest business partners: the honeybees! The importance of bees for almonds is so valuable that the relationships between almond growers and the beekeepers we work with go back for years. Almonds, like many crops, are not self-pollinating. So between January and March we depend on bees coming into our orchards to do […]
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