My wife’s parents are rural residents in Changhua, which is famed for a center of hickory nuts production and for bloodstone, a kind of gem often carved into sculptures or made into seals. 

In early September last year, my wife and I, her parents, and my father got up at five o’clock in the morning, ready to take in the hickory nuts from hickory trees in the hilly land allotted for private use. We followed a trail into the mountain carrying long bamboo poles and lunch. We planned to work for long hours. It took us about 40 minutes to climb all the way up to the hickory woods owned by my wife’s family. 

The hickory trees towered on a steep slope, which I thought was about 45 degrees. I raised my head hard to look up and saw the thick shape of the trees. My father-in-law clambered nimbly up a tree carrying a bamboo pole. Pretty soon I couldn’t see him. I only heard the sound of the pole he was using to strike branches and nuts in a light rhythm. His use of the pole was masterful. Who says a rural farmer knows nothing about aesthetics? Pretty soon, hickory fruits rained down. My wife urged me to put on the straw hat. It wouldn’t be fun to be hit by the falling fruits. 

My father was eager to try his hand. My father-in-law asked him to strike lower tree branches so that he didn’t need to climb up a tree. My father jumped up and down excitedly, waving the pole hectically and imitating the rhythmic sound which didn’t come from the striking. Few nuts fell for his effort. We all laughed. He joked that he was practicing Wushu.

“Your move isn’t right,” my father shouted from up the tree. We looked up at him. He began to demonstrate the method and we watched closely. He hit a branch with the middle part of the pole first and using the recoil of the pole, he stroke target nuts with the tip of the pole. He explained this method minimized any possible damage to the tree and maximized the number of nuts. He went on to explain the strategy he was using: he stayed safe at one spot and targeted the nuts close before he moved on to handle nuts a little bit far away. He said it was important to protect leaves and twigs from any damage in the process of nut harvesting. It occurred to me that this method represents the wisdom of rural life.

So my mother-in-law, my wife, and I were left to do the low-tech work: we gathered the fallen fruits. Though it didn’t require any special skill to pick, it did need a sharp eye to see where all these fruits were. After all, some fruits looked green in a color similar to the color of grass. At first, I picked hickory fruits with bare hands. But pretty soon my hands were dyed black. After learning that the dye would stick to my hand for a week, I changed my mind and put on a pair of gloves. We gathered the fruits into large sacks. My mother-in-law said she gathered eight sacks of fruits a day, that is, about 250 kilograms in total. For the woods of this size, the family needs to work two weeks to gather all the fruits. The cash earned is good enough for the whole year. 

Lunch must be had in the mountain. My wife’s parents had prepared the food. The father-in-law got down a tree and set up a simple fire pit. Dry wood was gathered and a fire was lit. The food was heated. Smoke rose and went through the hickory woods. The smell of the dry wood was nice.

After lunch, I took a nap in the warm sunshine. We worked faster in the afternoon. We covered the whole area. After my mother-in-law checked the whole area again, we gathered together. Altogether, we had nine sacks packed full. My mother-in-law put her hands together and bowed to the tallest hickory tree. After that brief ceremony, we began to get down.

The last task we performed in the afternoon was to husk the harvest through a husking machine, which my father-in-law had carried to a convenient spot with an electric cart in the morning. The electric husking machine roared like a monster. The fruits we had gathered in the mountain were fed into the funnel of the machine. Nuts came out through one hole and the green husks came out through another hole. I used a hole to remove the husks away from the outlet. The green color soon became brown. 

The father-in-law put three sacks of husked nuts onto the cart and we followed the trail down the mountain.

It was already dark when we reached home. The father-in-law performed the last task of the day: the husked nuts were put into water. Bad ones were picked out. Good nuts remained. The day’s work ended up in three baskets.

Multi-step processing will start after these nuts are dried and before they appear onto the market.