Many people consider almonds nut. But if to ask them to tell, how exactly it grows, they, most likely, will become puzzled. This tasty fruit on trees or bushes ripens and it is biological most closer to plum.
Family relations
Almonds together with sweet cherry, cherry, a peach and some other plants belong to the sort Plum and family Pink. It also blossoms very probably on the fellows: in gentle white and pink single colors with a diameter up to 2.5 cm. In the Mediterranean, China, the Crimea, Central Asia, in the Caucasus and other regions with similar mild climate where almonds grow, quite often the period of its blossoming is noted as a holiday.
Depending on a look, almonds can be both a tree, and a bush, but it is obligatory with abundance of numerous thin escapes and branches. Usually plants take root small groups at distance of 5-7 meters from each other. They reach height to ten meters, but complete growth on 4-6 meters more often. The average term of life of almonds - from 40 to 70 years, and it is capable to bear the first fruits for the fourth year of life.
Make multiple copies almonds seeds, saplings, shanks and root division of a bush. At the same time surely impart plants. As an experiment — not only other grades of almonds, but also related fruit plants.
The curious feature of almonds — it always blossoms before other trees and bushes. Flowers by insects therefore for receiving a harvest in an almond garden or nearby it is desirable to place beehives are pollinated.
Stone, but not nut
Almonds release leaves after flowers and dump them very much early. Thanks to it all forces of a plant leave on maturing of a fruit. Biologists call it one-stone fruit. It is a type of fruits at which inside layers are accurately divided. The stone can be stony or leathery, a mezhplodnik always a myasyst, and the vneplodnik — is thin. Similar one-stone fruit are a cherry, plum, a coco, etc. At almonds, unlike them, the mezhplodnik is inedible. In a form the fruit of almonds is similar to a stone which people use in cookery, medicine and perfumery subsequently. By sight almond fruit dry and velvety trimmed. At the end of maturing the fruits begin to burst, and the stone can be taken out easily from an okoloplodnik. At this time under trees spread fabric and force down ready fruits sticks. Collected almonds are sorted: easily peeled put separately, and send the rest to shelling devices. Extent of sticking of a cover to a stone is influenced by weather during the summer: the more rains, the peel inflated and shrank more often — the it is more difficult to separate it.
It was easier to reap a crop, too high branches cut prior to gemmation. It is as a result convenient to reach sticks the top of a tree.
The cleaned stones dry up in the sun and in the dryer. They can be eaten crude or to use for preparation of delicacies.