To celebrate National Nut Day, here’s a few pictures from our new Hazelnut orchard. Did you know that 99% of the U.S. hazelnuts come from the Willamette Valley in Oregon?

Ashlynn and Sammie Jo are “de-budding” our brand new trees 2 years ago.  “De-budding” trees is used to pull off the lower “buds” before they become limbs. Hazelnut “trees” are actually bushes. When we take off the lower “buds” or “limbs”, the tree uses it’s energy on the remaining higher limbs to grow as trees and therefore will produce more nuts for production.

You can see the difference a year makes! The orchard on the top half of the picture is one year older than the bottom half of the picture. The drip irrigation that you see (the black hose running along the treeline) waters the trees and reduces water waste.

Kyndall and Ashlynn are moving the drip irrigation lines closer to the trees. See on the right side of the picture – in front of Kyndall how the line has moved away from the trees?

This smiling future farmer is George Dettwyler. He’s helping his dad, Karl, pick up pots from the planted trees before they blow away. The Dettwyler’s of Blue Line Farms, are a local farm in the Silverton, Oregon area.

These next three photos are from my Farm Mom photo shoot – hence the fixed hair and cute kids! I’m showing 2 of my daughters – Kyndall and Sammie – and niece Claire, the growing hazelnuts.

Finally it was just announced – timely I may add – that Hershey’s is adding another candy to it’s Hershey Kiss line-up – with the hazelnut! See article here. YUMMY!

As you can see, we love hazelnuts!

Sweet Sammie Jo.

Happy Friday everyone!

Edit: Apparently National Nut Day was October 22, yesterday. Oops!