The Basics of Home Harvest Automation Part 1: Nuts

So you had a huge nut harvest this season and you need to gather and preserve your harvest.  Although you may think there are a number of ways to go about preserving your harvest, truth is there are only two: the wrong way and the right way.

It is important that home harvesters become familiar with the ways to make their home harvesting easier and more efficient.  With the right tools, home harvesters can save time and money and, most importantly, effectively and efficiently preserve their harvest. For instance, I am astonished at the number of home harvesters that still have not heard about the Holt Nut Wizard, a simple, effective and inexpensive tool for conveniently picking up pecans and other nuts.




Holt Nut Wizard

The Holt Nut Wizard allows home harvesters to pick up pecans and a variety of other nuts from the ground, such as English Walnuts, Black Walnuts, Mocker Nuts, Chestnuts, Beechnuts, and Hickory Nuts.  The Nut Wizard is simply a oval shaped basket composed of thin metal wires.  The basket is attached to a handle, which allows you to simply roll the basket over your harvest.  When the basket is rolled over the nuts, the wires open up and capture the nuts inside.  If only more home harvesters knew that they could avoid the arduous, back breaking task of picking up nut one by one, they would gladly get their hands on one of these things.

Make no mistake about the Holt Nut Wizard: it works like a charm.  This is no gimmicky nut picker upper.  It comes in five different sizes so you will need to select the size that is appropriate for the type of nuts you are going to harvest.  Home harvesters that are serious about picking up nuts will need to add the optional Nut Wizard wire dumper, which allows you to easily open the wire basket over a buckets so that the basket will easily and conveniently release the collected nuts.

Once you have gathered your nuts, the next step is doing something with them - either using or selling them as is or cracking them.  For many home harvesters that means selling the nuts.  Because shelled nuts are considerably more valuable than unshelled nuts, it usually makes sense to shell them.  This is where harvest automation comes into play with your nuts.  There are a variety of nut shelling tools that will help the home harvester efficiently and conveniently shell his nuts but the tool that you select will depend on the type of nuts you want to shell.  If, for instance, you are shelling pecans, The Electric Pecan Cracker is the only true option, unless you want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a commercial grade pecan cracker. 




Electric Pecan Cracker/ Kinetic Kracker

The Electric Pecan Cracker, also known as the Kinetic Kracker, has been around for decades but it is now manufactured in Texas by a company known as Southern Gardening Tools.  The Kinetic Kracker is a pecan cracking prodigy; all it does is crack pecans - pecans and nothing but pecans.  The Electric Pecan Cracker features a built in sensor that can sense the amount of pressure to apply to each pecan and a motor that turns at 26 RPM that is capable of cracking  that's 1,560 pecans per hour.  You will not find this kind of pecan cracking mojo anywhere else unless you buy a commercial grade cracker.  So when it comes to harvesting your own pecans, the Kinetic Kracker is the clear and undisputed choice.  But, of course, if you are needing to harvest some other kind of nuts, you will need to consider other nut cracking tools.