Sphere of Failure

Nuts!

Macadamia nuts to be exact. Once my favorite, they now haunt me.

I can’t see a can of them without thinking of the seven years I spent as a sore-thumbed, vermin-hunting, allergy-ridden, back-aching macadamia rancher.

Having a macadamia tree in the backyard is like having a monkey for a pet: sounds like a good idea when you’re looking at the cute little fella, but oh what a headache comes with the reality.

My memories of macadamias start with our purchase, in 1987, of a Mediterranean Revival home in Orange. There was a big tree in the backyard, with thick glossy green foliage and some kind of round green pod hanging from the branches in thick clusters.

The seller said he had no idea what the tree was. He said he just tossed the pods into the trash when they fell to the ground.

This was a home built in 1926 and it looked to me as if the tree had been there about as long as the house had. It was a good 25 feet tall and easily that wide. It had been planted behind the garage, and some previous homeowner had laid concrete on the ground beneath it--concrete that was now all broken and heaved by upward pressure from the tree’s roots.

My first clue as to the tree’s identity came a few weeks after we moved in, when I picked one of the big green pods from the ground and saw that inside it was a hard brown shell. I beat on the shell for an hour or so with a hammer and finally cracked it apart, to find inside a round, white nutmeat that smelled vaguely of coconut.

One bite and I knew, it was a raw macadamia! We’d struck gold! A whole tree--a big tree--full of the most expensive and tastiest nuts on earth. What could be better?

A few weeks later, I noticed that a lot of the nuts had been gnawed open by something. And a few months after moving in, while peeling some rotted siding from the workshop behind the garage, I found that the hollow space between the exterior siding and interior wallboard was filled, solid, with empty nut shells to a height of about 3 feet. There were thousands of ‘em.

That should have been a clue too.

Rodents and marsupials love macadamias as much as we do. The tree was a magnet for every possum and roof rat in town. We put up with them for seven years, and Jon and Michelle Lindfors, who bought the house from us in 1994, say they lasted another 4 1/2 years before calling a tree-removal firm and clearing out that space behind the garage for a vegetable garden.

Here are the benefits and the drawbacks of macadamia trees:

* Macadamias are easy to grow.

Ours was older than dirt when we got it, so I cannot attest to the ease with which youngsters grow. Suffice it to say a 50-year-old macadamia also grows well. It grows so well it needs constant thinning if you’d like to get a little light through the foliage.

We removed the cracked concrete under the tree shortly after moving in, and over the years planted flowers, ryegrass, Kentucky bluegrass, Scotts shady area lawn mix, dichondra and several kinds of ground covers. Each lasted about half a year before succumbing to darkness and suffocation under macadamia tree debris.

* Macadamias have an attractive flower.

Attractive to bees, hornets, moths and the people who make nasal sprays, nose wipes and allergy pills. The long silky bracts of macadamia flowers (ours were yellow) also pile up in a thick, lawn-choking carpet that demands constant raking for about two months each year.

* Macadamia nuts taste great.

Yes, they do taste great. But have you ever tried to harvest one?

Macadamias, like most nuts, conceal the meat inside a shell inside a thick outer husk.

Growers (nefarious people who want you to buy a tree because they make money selling them) will tell you harvesting is easy, but my experience is that it takes about five minutes of hard work to shell a single macadamia--and that’s after picking the nuts up from the ground, spreading them on a drying rack, waiting a couple of weeks for them to cure and stirring them up every so often so they dry evenly.

The process goes something like this: the nut, encased in a big green husk, falls to the ground, along with a few (or few hundred if the tree is big enough) of its siblings. It takes several months for a big tree to rid itself of all of its nuts, even with a few rodents nibbling away loudly most nights.

You break out the rake and pull them into a pile (the nuts--the rodents are gone by then). Then you spend an hour or so separating the nuts from the leaves, twigs and other debris you’ve raked up.

And since nothing much grows under a macadamia tree, you’re working in a nice patch of often muddy ground. Then you get the shovel and move the nuts to the drying rack (we made our frame from 2-by-4s and fine-mesh wire screen, then attached folding legs so it would stand proudly beneath the tree during harvest season and hang in the garage the rest of the year).

Because the tree dropped its nuts from early winter though spring, which just happens to coincide with Southern California’s rain and wind seasons, we also had to build an elevated cover for the drying rack to keep it dry (you cannot believe how incredibly moldy a big pile of uncured macadamias can become after only a day or so of rain). And we had to secure the legs in concrete to keep it from blowing away. The nice portable rack became a permanent backyard fixture.

As the nuts dry, the green husk does too--to the consistency of old leather. In the best of all worlds, it splits and falls off as it dries, but in my world that only happened about 1% of the time. So for the other 10,000 or so nuts each harvest, the process involved inserting thumbs into the split in the husk and applying increasing outward pressure until either the husk split or the skin on our thumbs became lacerated.

After unhusking (I’m sure the macadamicians out there have a nice, harmless-sounding, cute and gardeny term for it), we’d pick through the debris for the nuts--beautiful, golden brown spheres, smooth as silk and somewhat harder than the tamper-proof casing on a nuclear warhead.

Walnut shells have seams, almond shells have seams, all nuts, it seems, have either seams or irregular shapes, both of which make it pretty easy to crack.

But macadamias are spherical and seamless. That makes them among the toughest things in the world to break open--don’t take my word for it, ask a physicist.

The daughter of a neighbor used to come over and whack on the nuts with a ball peen hammer to break them open. She only smashed her fingers a couple of times and cracked our sidewalk once.

We tried hammers, pliers and the vise in the garage before finding a supplier who sold us a macadamia nutcracker (still have it if anyone needs one) for about $30.

The first Christmas in our house, my wife suggested surprising and delighting the new neighbors and our old friends by giving them jars of fresh, home-grown macadamias.

I bought a case of 10-ounce fluted jelly jars with plastic snap-on lids and set about cracking nuts.

It took seven hours to get enough shelled macadamias to fill one jar.

So we baked a lot of brownies and topped each with fresh macadamias. And we use the ornate jars for gelatin molds these days.

I was popular at work for a while after that--I kept bringing 10-pound bags of dehusked but unshelled macadamias in, free for the taking. But after a few years, I couldn’t get anyone to take them. Veterans would ward off new employees with a sharp warning that they weren’t worth the trouble.

Ah well, at least I no longer wonder why macadamias cost so much.

*”Been There, Done That” is a recurring feature in Saturday’s Home Design section that highlights how our readers accomplish their home and garden projects. If you wish to share your experiences--or, even to brag a little--call (714) 966-7883. Or send photographs along with your name and phone number to Home Design, The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626 or ocsocalliv@latimes.com.