A few hundred
trees.
The orchard sits in a quiet bend of the Willamette Valley, in Oregon, on a slope that drops west toward the coast range. The soil is wet clay over basalt. The air smells like mowed grass for nine months a year and like roasted nuts for three.
Planet Earth, lower-left quadrant.
The Willamette Valley grows about ninety-nine percent of the country’s hazelnuts. Most of the rest comes from Türkiye and Italy. Almost none from Mars. The valley has the right combination of mild winters, long springs, deep soil, and bored agronomists with old grants from the seventies.
The Astronuts orchard was planted in 1925 by Jon’s great-great-grandfather, on ten acres of clay he traded a truck for. The trees took eight years to bear. The truck didn’t. The Astronuts have been farming this corner of the Willamette Valley for seven generations and counting.
What hazelnut farming actually looks like.
Hazelnuts fall to the ground when they’re ripe. There is no ladder, no crew, no shaking. The trees drop them, the floor of the orchard turns brown with husks, and a low machine drives between the rows and sweeps them into windrows. Another machine picks the windrows up. They go to a drying shed for a week.
That’s the whole harvest. It happens in October. It is loud for about six days a year and silent for the other three hundred and fifty-nine.
Origin myth Why “Astronuts.”
The name came out of an argument with a teenager. Jon was trying to put a label on the first crate of nuts he ever sold at a farmstand. The teenager said the label looked like an astronaut. Jon said it was a hazelnut. The teenager said it could be both.
The badge on the side of the bag — the rocket-launching hazelnut — came later, from a friend who designed concert posters and owed Jon a favor.
None of this means anything. We grow hazelnuts. The mythology is a bonus.
The nuts are also for sale.
Four products. Raw, shelled, roasted, and a gift box.
See the nuts →