332 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Just that thing happened this year to my nearest neighbor, and 

 to several neighbors ; while the nuts on this ranch opened better 

 and husked easier than ever before in the whole course of its 

 thirty years of almond-growing. The result was, that our pickers 

 earned a dollar and a half a day picking at half the cost per pound 

 incurred by our neighbors, whose men earned a dollar and a quar- 

 ter a day. 



The nuts are knocked off the trees with long poles. Where they 

 have opened nicely they are allowed to drop on the bare ground, 

 and are husked as they are picked up. The picker's delight, 

 if he is working by the bushel or box, is to see the ground cov- 

 ered with nuts that the stroke of the pole and the impact against 

 the clods have completely husked, so that he has nothing to do 

 but throw them into his basket. He is lucky indeed if half of 

 them come out that way. Those that do not are husked with the 

 fingers. The new paper-shell above described is one of the freest, 

 and its drupe often falls off spontaneously before the picking sea- 

 son, leaving the naked nut hanging to the tree. But the nut so 

 free from its drupe clings tightest of all to its tree, and is often 

 quite hard to knock down without injury to the branches. Other- 

 wise the saving in its harvest expense would be quite an impor- 

 tant point in its favor. 



In the best of seasons there will be a large part of the crop so 

 badly opened as to require a different process. A canvas is 

 spread under the tree for the nuts to fall on. When all are 

 knocked down, the canvas is rolled up and with its load of nuts 

 carried to any spot near by where it is convenient to heap to- 

 gether the harvest of several trees. A simple table of loose 

 boards is made, and around it gather the pickers. One of the 

 party rubs the nuts to loosen the drupes, and the others husk. 

 The rubber is an extremely simple machine, exactly like a wash- 

 ing machine in principle. Practically it is two old-fashioned 

 wash-boards rubbed together. In appearance it is a flat-bottomed 

 pig-trough, six or eight feet long and open at one end. Across 

 the bottom inside, pieces of lath are tacked an inch apart, and 

 thus the lower wash-board is formed. The nuts are scooped into 

 it, a few pounds at a time, and a shorter board, likewise ribbed 

 crosswise with lath, handled like a flatiron or a plasterer's trowel, 

 is rubbed over them by hand, loosening their husks and pushing 

 them along to the open end of the trough, where they fall into a 

 box and are heaped on the table, to be now easily husked. It is a 

 cheerful thing to see the assembled pickers seated under the shade 

 of a tree, making their fingers fly and heaping up their boxes with 

 the precious harvest. The damper on the meeting is the fact that 

 almost invariably the pickers are Chinamen. Their gay chatter 

 might as well be that of monkeys, for all the sense you get of it. 



