Harvest of our Italian marroni has not yet started. It is next to impossible to accurately predict harvest dates as this is primarily weather dependent. Warm early springs result in earlier flowering but temperatures that cool down after that or are extremely hot slow down the growth of chestnuts and this year we fluctuated from above average temperatures to periods that were below average. Usually we need to be harvesting 5-10 days before we have enough supply on hand to ...start taking orders (if we start taking orders too soon we can't fill orders as they are received and then would get busy answering emails asking "where's my order?" when we need to remain focused on harvesting chestnuts every day as they drop.

Today we finished the very last of this year's harvest. It's been a good year with nice weather with our first rains coming yesterday (and more tonight). We had a record harvest which was 46% more than in 2015 (2015 was down from 2014 due to drought). And sales are again at a record pace with 64% of the crop already sold.

A higher percentage of this year's crop came into the Medium size category. Sales of these are going at a record pace as well but these will probably be... the last to sell out. We consider these to be a good value, priced $1.25/pound less than the Large size. We were joking that maybe by pricing them this much lower some customer think they're inferior so maybe we should increase the price! ;) Many customers actually prefer this size and place large orders for them every year. If you haven't tried this size before, we suggest you consider including some in your next order.

We are now taking orders with our first shipments to be made on Monday. At the present time, we are only taking orders for the Large size as our inventory of Extra Large and Medium size is not sufficient yet.

Please understand that our top priority is getting the chestnuts harvested every day as they drop so that they can be promptly sorted, washed, and refrigerated. This may mean that some delays in shipping may take place if our harvest activities don't allow enough time ...for shipping all orders as they come in. We'll update the status for any major delays, though that is unlikely.

We will be selling out early this year. It looks like our crop will be about 25% below the record harvest we had in 2014, the first time we've had a decline since our major marroni grafting project in 2007. As of October 18th, our sales were 29% ahead of last year even though we started selling 10 days later than last year since harvest started later. It's been an incredibly busy October for us! We had some outstanding commitments for the Extra Large and Large sizes alrea...dy and are filling those with what we've been able to harvest in the past few days and won't be adding those to our order page. We still highly recommend the medium size. While larger chestnuts are impressive in appearance, the taste and texture of all sizes are the same.

Our annual email notice to subscribers went out this past weekend (the process takes over 24 hours due to limits on the number of emails our host allows us to send each hour). The response has been overwhelming with our sales records literally obliterated! It looks like we probably sold over 25% of our entire crop in less than 48 hours. Trying to handle all of the orders while still in the midst of harvest can leave us weary but we are strengthened by reading comments from... our new and long-time customers on how much they enjoy our farm fresh marroni chestnuts. We'll have a long night tonight getting paperwork and labels ready for all of our orders to be shipped tomorrow.