When doing my daily walkabout in the backyard today, I noticed that the almonds are ready to be harvested. This is the first time any have appeared on our tree, which is a self-fertile semi-dwarf All in One cultivar. They look like shriveled dried up peaches, which isn't particularly surprising since they are in the same Prunus family. The outer hulls start splitting when they are ripe, as you can see in this picture. Peel off the splitting hull and you will find something that looks like a peach pit; the almond kernel is inside that. The tree was planted in 2010, so it's still young. It looks like we should get two or three dozen almonds from it.
The label description reads, "Hot summers required to ripen; 500 chilling hours". It must surely have been in its happy place this year as we had an exceptionally cold spell this winter, followed by an inferno of a summer that broke temperature records on several days.I literally fried an egg on a table on the patio the day the official high was 120 and my backyard thermometer read 125.
Don't believe me? Here's a picture of the egg after about 20 minutes in the midafternoon sun. Gardening is a definite challenge in the summer here!
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