Posted on : July 14th, 2020
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 I am…and a bunch of other questions about our favorite topic here at Maisie Jane’s: nuts!
In a word, protein. (We agree. No snack satisfies quite as thoroughly as a handful of Maisie Jane’s oven-roasted almonds, honey-glazed cashews, sinfully delicious Organic Chocolate Toffee Pistachios or a few teaspoons of our amazing, acclaimed nut butters.
And if you’ve ever wondered about their nut-burying behavior, other than storing food for the winter, it’s actually quite brilliant. Squirrels crack the nuts open before burying them, so that they can’t germinate and grow into plants. I’m still mad at them, though.
Almonds grow on flowering trees, which require bees to pollinate them. And that’s why, every winter, thousands and thousands of hives are brought to California, just to pollinate the almond trees. (Almonds are super-nutritious for honey bees too. Win-win!) Of course, as much as 70% of food crops rely on bees, which is a great reason to support bee-friendly farming practices.
Nuts have been part of the human diet for many thousands of years. Almonds, one of the earliest cultivated foods, have been of one our staple foods from at least the beginning of recorded history and have been found at excavation sites in Greece and Cyprus. They are mentioned in Greek mythology and in the Hebrew Bible, and fed travelers along the Silk Road from the Middle East all the way to China. In California, we’ve been enjoying them since the 1700s, when the Franciscan friars first brought them here from Spain. Today, California is the largest producer and exporter of almonds in the world!
Sources: NRDC.org; Almonds.com; JustFunFacts.com
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Maisie Jane’s California Sunshine Products, Inc. was founded on strong beliefs and passion for offering unique, flavorful, top-quality nut products. We embrace earth-friendly practices that start on our family-owned and operated orchards. We use organic farming practices and continue in the process by using all-natural ingredients with no preservatives or GMOs. We believe in honest, friendly and helpful customer relations at all levels. We take pride in every task, every day, with every person.
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