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| Mark next to his Hazelnut dryer |
Our Garry Oak (
Quercus
garryana) and English Oak (
Quercus
robur) acorns had been drying for several weeks on baking sheets and the
time was finally right for cracking them.
I called up Mark, a Filbert (
Corylus
avellana) farmer based in Everson to see if I could use his Davebilt hand
crank nut cracker to remove the shells from all of our acorns. He welcomed us over and we went down to his shop
to get the nutcracker. He showed me an
extremely heavy duty, stainless steel, 1.5 hp, electric nutcracker that he has
just finished fabricating to keep up with the growing production of his
orchard.
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| The Davebilt gobbling our acorns |
Many of his tools would easily translate over to acorn
harvesting. He is working on some padded
hooks for shaking the nuts out of the tree branches; he has sieves to sort the
nuts into different sizes; and a large forced air nut drying box to dehydrate
the nuts to 9 percent; and of course, he has those dandy nutcrackers.
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| Smoked Chum Salmon |
Using the Davebilt, we cracked our 28 lbs of dried Garry Oak
acorns and 12 lbs of dried English Oak acorns in about an hour. It was difficult to say for sure how long the
process took because I kept on picking Mark’s brain for more information about
his orchard. We left with a 10 lbs bag
of his Barcelona variety Hazelnuts that only cost $30! As a token of gratitude for letting us use his Davebilt, I gave him some of the Chum that I just finished smoking.
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