Pistachio harvest yields good quality nuts this year

NEWBERRY SPRINGS • Pistachios by the hundreds rained down on the heads of Dayana Garcia, Yaneth Romero, Ramon Camacho and Pablo Garcia at Big Al’s Pistachio Farms in Newberry Springs on Thursday.

The four pickers dislodged the nuts from the treetops, gathered them up in big blue tarps and poured them in wooden boxes designed to hold about 600 pounds of pistachios.

“Last time (the nuts) were sometimes green, and all green pistachios stay on the trees,” said Pablo Garcia, who has worked at Big Al’s for two years and was referring to last season’s crop. “Now everything is ready.”

Even though many pistachio growers in Newberry Springs harvested their crop last month, the recent warm weather prompted Dean Van Bastelaar, whose family owns Big Al’s, to leave his nuts on the tree a little while longer. The Van Bastelaars have 7,000 trees at their farm, 6,500 of which produce nuts. But this year has been somewhat of an off year for the farm, Van Bastelaar said, and the extra time on the trees will allow the unpicked nuts extra time to ripen.

Van Bastelaar, who will take the nuts that were already picked and processed to the pistachio festival at the Newberry Springs Community Center on Saturday, said even though many of the pistachios at his family’s farm have turned up hollow — a shell with no meat — the nuts that are good have been excellent.

“For the majority of farms in the area it’s an on year, but it’s an off year for us,” Van Bastelaar said, adding that a good harvest would yield between 60,000 and 150,000 pounds of nuts. A bad harvest would yield less than 30,000, he said. “Right now I’m looking at probably 8,000 pounds on the tree. We harvested and sold between 15,000 and 20,000 pounds.”

For Ellen Johnson, president of the Newberry Springs Pistachio Association, it’s too soon to tell what kind of year it’s been, yield-wise, but her pistachios have been largely free of insect damage. Johnson, whose orchard contains 650 producing trees, said a good harvest would yield about 10 to 20 pounds of nuts per tree. This year she estimates that her harvest yielded between 11 and 12 pounds of nuts per tree.

Johnson usually ships most of her nuts to a processing plant in Terra Bella, which pays her for the pistachios and distributes them, but she usually saves about 1,000 pounds for the festival, taking them to Van Bastelaar’s processing plant.

“This year we got 700 pounds,” she said. “This year we did Christmas bags to be festive. It’s open to anybody who wants to come.”

About six pistachio growers, large and small, will be at the Pistachio Festival, said Wayne Weirebach, secretary of the Newberry Springs Community Services District. The festival is Newberry’s largest event and draws an average of 2,000 people. There will also be kid’s games, a color guard demonstration from the Newberry Springs Volunteer Fire Department and fire truck rides for the kids.

Contact the writer:
(760) 256-4123 or jcejnar@desertdispatch.com

IF YOU GO
What: Pistachio Festival
Cost: Free
When: 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: Newberry Community Park at 30884 Newberry Road