Making Macnuts into Mulch
Click to watch the chipper in action. (15MB)
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In addition to coffee, we have about 200 macadamia nut trees. Our
macadamia nut orchard has been in need of a good pruning for several
years now. Unfortunately it's never quite made it to the top of
my to-do list. Then last week my neighbor offered to come over
with his giant chipper. It was perfect timing because I had been
doing taxes all morning. I prefer hard manual labor over taxes
any day.
My neighbor's chipper is not a standard garden chipper/shredder, it's a
large commercial chippers that can eat entire tree trunks without a
hiccup. It's large capacity also makes it quite heavy. My
neighbor's truck hitch was broken so he had the chipper chained to the
bucket of his tractor. The tractor worked fine on level ground but
once we got to rougher terrain, the tractor just didn't quite have enough
control and traction for the heavy chipper.
After wrestling with the tractor for an hour or so it finally dawned on
me that "Duh! My truck has a hitch and four wheel drive, why don't
we just use that?" The chipper requires a military style hitch instead
of the more typical ball hitch but my neighbor had the hitch itself, it was
the hitch receiver on his truck that was broken. So we attached his
hitch to my truck, put the truck in 4x4 low gear, and headed off to my
back field. It turned out that my truck was the perfect compromise
between powerful enough to pull the trailer yet small enough to fit in the
orchard. I'm also happy to announce that I made up for my previous
knuckle headedness by proving to be an excellent backer-upper, maneuvering
the chipper around the orchard like a pro. It helps that I have had
previous experience with the steeper
locations and I was careful to avoid them this time.
I had figured pruning the entire orchard was going to take me a week or
more. With the help of my neighbor Manny and his three workers
(Martin, Carmelo and Owoldo), we managed to finish off the entire
orchard in two days. I had planned to do most of the cutting
myself until I realized that Manny had previously been a logger.
He really knew what he was doing and he was much, much faster than I
am. A skilled person with a chainsaw is fun to watch.
Sometimes he was so fast that I'm amazed he still has all his fingers.
I relegated myself to part of the pick-up crew. Our job was easy:
drag all the branches and feed them into the chipper. At least it
sounds easy. I've gotten used to the fact that I can't keep up with
seasoned laborers but I didn't do too bad. The best news is that I
kept my injuries limited to a few minor scrapes and bruises, no big wounds
or missing digits.
The trees didn't fair so well. Did you know that macadamia tree
sap is red? It makes them looks like they're bleeding. The
trees will be healthier in the long run. And with all the mulch
we generated, the coffee trees will benefit too. There are some
rocky spots in the coffee fields that could really use some mulch.
That's a job for my tractor and another day. I really should get
back to my taxes first.
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