I've got about 2 minutes "spare" here, and ran into these photos; which I thought I'd stick up here. (Click for bigger versions- recommended)
This is what our "to eat" hazels look like these days; this is actually what we ship. The upper photo is of a loaded sorting tray, just as it is when we're doing the final sort, removing any weeviled or spoiled nuts we can find.
There's been a substantial change in the overall size and quality; as we include more of the 3rd cycle plants- which are now producing, but not tested enough to use for seed. A lot of them have outstanding nuts.
As you know, if you're harvesting your own, the smaller ones frequently have extremely thin shells; paper thin- or thinner. We do discard heavy shelled bushes in the breeding process.
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Yeah, the changes have been pretty substantial in the past couple of years. We're also making advances in grading and storage techniques, which helps me say that nearly all of those will be full, good nuts. We're doing some experimentation with flavor development, too, but results from that haven't definitively affected our production process yet. All of these things do, of course, involve a lot of genetics as well as technique- which is why the third cycle material is making such a big difference in the final product.
ReplyDeleteMan, there's a couple almost the size of the quarter!!
ReplyDeleteMine are not that big. How soon can we get the really big ones?