Walnut Harvest

This post was written before the tragic and terrible events in Paris on Friday November 13th. In the light of what happened, writing about our mundane life here somehow seems irrelevant. Yet maybe it is by continuing with just the mundane things in life that we can best stand up to the perpetrators of the massacre in Paris. Gérard said to me this morning that we are reaping what we have sown in the Middle East over the last 75 years, he's right of course but looking back doesn't help going forward. 

So, I'll continue to post more ironic and mundane observations on life here. And avoid politics.

And religion.

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Walking Monday: 3.8km

Cycling Tuesday: 9.2km

Swimming Tuesday: 1.25km

Walking Wednesday: 3.8km

Cycling Thursday: 9.2km

Walking Friday: 3.8km

Swimming Friday: 1.10km

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Moles this week: Pip 0, Tim 1 (a particularly difficult one at last who kept digging under the traps)

Moles Year to Date: Pip 7, Tim 5 

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So, after the great fruit and vegetable glut of 2015 the weather has provided perfect weather for the walnut harvest - another record breaker. Our tree has a huge gash in the bark of the main trunk where a branch split away many years ago and leans over at about 15 degrees but it is huge and still growing well. The walnuts mature during September and fall over a period of about four weeks, over time we've learnt to ignore the first 10-15% of the nuts that fall - the tree naturally sheds the small, damaged and defective ones first. This year we concentrated on collecting only the large ones but still ended up with a huge crop, so for three weeks at every opportunity with warm weather the accumulated crop gets spread out in the sun to dry. 

We haven't weighed the crop but each box contains about 8 kilos and we have 6 boxes so that's around 50 kilos.

After open-air drying we are finishing off this year's crop on the heated floor: 

The crop will need another month or so to fully ripen, conveniently that will be just before Christmas. In the meantime we have about four kilos left from the 2014 crop to finish.