Sometimes You Feel Like a Nut...

Connie's Mom has been visiting for a few weeks helping us out tremendously with cooking and taking care of the baby.  But there's also a fair amount of downtime so she's picked up a new hobby.  There are over a hundred avocado trees here and various fruit trees, but just one lonely Macadamia tree.

Well, this tree now has a new caretaker.  Connie's Mom has adopted the tree, and is caring for its nuts.  She sifts through the jumble of leaves, weeds, and who-knows-what at the base of the tree to gather up the hidden treasures.

Since moving into this place, I've never picked up the nuts or tried to make it easy to gather them up.  So it's basically just a mess of stuff with nuts of mysterious vintages buried throughout.  After painstakingly separating the promising nuts from the menagerie, she moves them to the little nut corral she created.

Here the nuts are further categorized as to their future potential.  Connie's Mom has developed a method for determining the readiness of the nut.  She inspects and shakes each nut to see if she can hear the nut jiggling inside.  Jiggle = ready for cracking.  No Jiggle = not ready, needs more drying.  It's backbreaking work, but it has to be done.

The tasty nuts are protected by a very hard shell.  But they're no match for our nutcracker.

Uh, that's a lot of shells...

But here's the reward.  Roast them up, and you have some nice Macadamia's for a not-so-small labor input.  After watching this, buying them at the store is really looking like a bargain  ;^)