Among the many good things we have at Dream View Estate are several almond trees. Not the trees producing those big Californian almonds, but a local kind, producing smaller, thinner almonds. But as tasty, and as healthy, as the American ones. We eat them raw or toasted, and they’re absolutely delicious.

They’re also a lot more environment-friendly than Californian almonds. Cultivated almond trees need a lot of water so they’re irrigated quite heavily, whereas water is becoming increasingly scarce in the main regions of production in California. No such problem here, the trees just grow in the middle of the many other trees we have here at Dream View Estate.

After blooming and fruit formation the trees shed their leaves which first take on a beautiful red autumn color (as you can see if you look closely at the picture) and start forming new ones (take an even better look at the upper branches and you’ll see the buds).

This is the first year we actually do something with our almonds: in previous years we let them go to waste. Terrible thing, in hindsight! The problem was processing: it’s a tough job to get the almonds out of the nuts, with their rock hard shells. But our man Junior has found some ladies in our village, Sabana del Corozo (of which Junior is the mayor) who do the job. It does not come cheap, but it is hard work, and they can use the money and we the almonds so we all benefit.

We’ll be eating our almonds for quite some time, hopefully until the next harvest!