A WALNUT VACATION
How would you like to have your school close for two weeks, so that you could gather walnuts? Every year many of the boys and girls of Southern California are given a vacation just for this purpose. It is called the "walnut vacation," and occurs in the month of October.
These children do not take their baskets and go off to the woods where they can romp and play, watch the squirrels, and gather beautiful autumn leaves. They gather nuts from the trees which their parents own, for in Southern California there are many walnut ranches or groves. You see the vacation means a vacation for work instead of for play.
Walnut trees are set out in rows just as apple trees are, but their roots and branches extend to such a distance from the trunks that they need to be about twice as far apart.
The walnut harvest, which begins about the first of October, is a busy time. Men, women, boys, and girls may be seen in the groves, shaking the nuts from the trees, picking them up, and putting them into sacks.
Fig. 61.—A Walnut Grove.
The men shake the trees, and there is a shower of nuts to the earth. Do not go under the branches now unless you want to be pelted. A single tree has been known to yield three hundred pounds of nuts in a season.
When the trees have been given a good shaking, there are still some nuts clinging to the branches. These are obtained by shaking the limbs separately, by means of long poles, to the ends of which wire hooks are fastened. As all of the nuts do not ripen at the same time, the trees are sometimes gone over two or three times.
Now the boys, girls, and women go to work filling pails and baskets and emptying them into sacks, for they can do this work as well as men.