The pecan tree features a strong trunk and limbs, offers good shade, and produces many pounds of edible nuts. In addition, it is fairly disease resistant.
The pecan, caryl illinoiensis, is native to North America, ranging from Illinois into the northern part of Mexico. The tree is a species of hickory nut, and is closely related to the butternut, mockernut and black walnut. Botanists place all of these trees in the same family as walnuts. It cannot tolerate cold winters and it needs a lot of water. In fact the ideal place for pecans is where the water table is only 6 to 8 feet below the surface, since the mature pecan tree requires about 100 gallons of water per day. Even though it can have a 20’ tap root, 95% of the absorptive roots are found in the top 24” of soil. Thus, one can see why pecans grow best in river bottoms and along the lower gulf coast.
The first European to note the use of the nuts by the natives was Cabeza de Vaca during the early 16th century. There was no Spanish word for the unusual oblong nuts and he used the word for walnuts (nueces) since he noted the similar leaves. In his account of the native gatherers he wrote that, “They grind up some little grains with them (the nuts), two months of the year, without eating anything else, and even this they do not have every year, because one year they bear and the other they do not. They are the size of those of Galicia [1] and the trees are very large and there is (sic) a great number of them.” The pecan groves encountered by the explorer were probably located on the lower San Antonio and Guadalupe Rivers near Goliad. Today it is realized that the nuts, supplying a healthy fat in their oil plus the carbohydrates in the native grains provided an excellent diet for the natives.
Lacking a word for this nut the French writing in the early 1700s borrowed an Indian word used by the Algonquian ‘paccane’ which means ‘to crack with a stone’.
By the late 18th century that name was being widely used. Thomas Jefferson in 1779 received seed stock from New Orleans and planted the pecan at Monticello. By then the nut was known for being a great delicacy and New Orleans became known for the distinctive pecan nut. Even now, when one thinks of New Orleans one thinks of pecan pralines.
Until the early 1900s, the native pecan trees’ smaller nuts were gathered and enjoyed by the owners of the trees. However, no one had yet thought of or tried hybridization and going into production of the nuts. According to the 1912 edition booklet The Paper-Shell Pecan and The Satsuma Orange published by The South Orchard Company Mobile, Alabama and Chicago, Illinois, that honor belongs to Colonel W.R. Stuart. Colonel Stuart, starting with the native trees near Mobile, Alabama spent years trying to grow trees that produced larger nuts with thinner shells,
First he tried planting seedlings from trees that he noticed had larger shells. When after seven years the seedling trees reverted to smaller pecans, he turned to grafting the old stock onto the healthy seedlings. Not long before he died his method proved successful as can be seen in the picture below. And thus began the “paper-shell” pecan industry.
The success of the nuts was reflected in their price. “While wild or seedling pecans retail at from 20 to 30 cents a pound, real paper-shell pecans do not retail at less than $1.00 per pound.” Also the yield progressed from 10 pounds per tree at six years old to 100 pounds in the 10th year.
Stuart and his company bought and platted out 5 acre tracts in South Orchards south of Mobile. Block E belonged to the company, Blocks B and C were already developed by 1912 and Blocks A and D were being sold.
One hundred and six years later South Orchard is still accessible by Google Earth and the Maps app, but there appears to be little or no pecan production.
The Texas state record for the largest pecan tree is in Parker County. It is 91 feet tall and is 258 inches around—that’s about 80 inches in diameter.
Pecans are a big cash crop in Texas where a good year’s crop might be 70 million pounds of unshelled nuts. We find that most growers have sold all of their pecans by the end of the year. This means that if you care to buy current year harvest, better to do it in November and early December. Years ago, pecans were in oversupply, but now, even with new orchards maturing, the supply tends to be short of demand.
Texas got into the pecan research activities on July 1, 1930 when an appropriation was obtained by Congressman J.P. Buchanan of Brenham. A research orchard was located on the “Little Campus” at UT Austin but it proved to be poorly suited for research projects and Dr. Traub, head of the research orchard, found a more desirable site along Pecan Bayou owned by the city of Brownwood and possibly irrigated by Lake Brownwood. By 1933 65 acres were planted in pecans and more were added later.
The Brownwood site was designated as the permanent site for the National Clonal Germplasm Repository for Pecans, Hickories and Chestnuts in 1978. This repository originally consisted of pecan cultivars collected from throughout the U.S. that had been used as parents in the breeding program. Currently, this collection is the largest and most complete in the world, containing over 250 cultivars, from 25 states as well as Mexico.
In 1987, at the invitation of the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station and Texas A&M University, an additional work-site was established at College Station on land owned by the Experiment Station.
Texas, in 2017 at 47,000 lbs. of pecan nutmeats, was the third largest producer behind No. 1 Georgia at 81,000 lbs. No. 2 New Mexico 79,000 lbs. and was followed by Arizona at 28,000 lbs. and Oklahoma at 20,000 lbs.
And looking to the future, the top 5 pecan trees planted in the U.S. in 2017 were: Desirable, Western Schley, Wichita, Pawnee and Kiowa.
You will note that the varieties recommended
Locally, the best place to see pecan harvesting up close is a place on Highway 80 just east of the crossing of Toll road 130. Swift River Pecans operates a large acreage of pecans that are native and hybrids. Natives are small and rather thick shelled, the hybrids are thinner shelled and larger. Pecan harvester’s orchards often consist of hundreds of acres that they lease from landowners who they contract for the harvesting of their crop. Trees drop the nuts over a several week period, thus making the task of picking them up inefficient. To get around this, most harvesters have tree “shakers” that attach to the front end of a tractor, and grip the trunk. The shaker is vibrated so that most of the nuts fall to the ground at one time. The nuts are then picked up with various devices, sometimes just by hand, and washed, graded and put into 50 pound bags.
Managing an orchard of large pecan trees includes another activity for many growers. They often have trees that have died, or are blown down. These trees offer valuable wood for the woodworker or for firewood, but wood for furniture generates much more revenue than does firewood.
Swift River has a large bandsaw that they can take to the blown down trees when the tree is too large to move to their facility. They saw the tree into 2 inch thick slabs, kiln dry it in their large gas fired kiln, then sell the wood to the craftsmen who make such things as fireplace mantles, bar tops and the like. Nothing goes to waste in a pecan orchard.
At this point let’s see what Monte Nesbitt, the pecan expert at Texas A & M’s AgriLife Extension Service had to say on July 6, 2018 about this year’s crop of pecans. He mentioned that by this date growers have passed the natural drop period and have sprayed for the first generation of the pecan nut casebearers. At this date a large crop was still in place on most trees. Next the growers will watch for pecan scab, a rain driven fungal disease and a second round of casebearer spraying late in July or early August. They also check the trees for fullness because if they’re bearing over 80% they will want to lower that to 50%-60%.to relieve stress on the tree and production of less than full kernels.
So, although the casebearer spray thins the crop, it can be beneficial to full trees as the tree shaker won’t have to be used at all or at least less until the final gathering of the nuts. The crop was off to a good start, but the weather remained very hot and dry.
By November when the harvest should have been in full swing, an article by Mike Copeland was published on November 25, 2018 in the Waco Tribune-Herald. “For much of the state, this has been a hard one to crack, swinging from a summer with too little water to an autumn with too much. Barely more than 1 inch of rain fell from June through August, but more than 20 inches have fallen across parts of Central Texas since September 1. Meanwhile the pecan industry has reported a wholesale drop of 40 to 60 cents a pound on the global market, a drop attributed partly to a trade war with China, a major importer of pecans.” As a result of the swing in weather conditions, the current Texas crop looks like it will be about 50 M pounds instead of the earlier projected 70 M pounds.
There were a few growers that reported good yields of good nuts, but there were many others with trees planted mostly in river and creek bottoms that had serious problems with wet nuts.
In fact the owner of Swift River Pecans was shown in the San Marcos Daily Record cleaning mud from some of his harvest. And it looks like the harvest will be very disappointing. But as one determinedly optimistic grower said, “With all the rain 2019 should be a great year.”
SIGHTINGS
During late October, we spotted three bucks with really big racks jousting in the back yard. Many times all three were doing battle, each not sure which of the other two was his adversary. We photographed this episode but the photo did not show adequate detail. All the time this was happening, a doe was standing off the side intently watching and wondering what all the fuss was about.
We discovered a clump of Oldfield Three Awn grass (aristida oligantha) in the field. It is so worthless as a grass that it is called a weed in Gould’s reference book. It has essentially no leaves and the seeds get in the eyes of grazing animals.
The birders are getting geared up for their annual Christmas bird count. Today, Bryan visited the ranch to scope out where to direct his volunteer counters for their work on December 16th. More on that, later.
A couple of months ago we visited with a long time resident of Hugo Road and in answer to one of our questions, he said that he had attended a one-room school on Purgatory Road not far north from the intersection of Hugo and Purgatory. The next time we were over that way we turned right on Purgatory and not too far up the road we saw a red house that could possibly be it, but hasn’t yet been proven. However, this whetted our appetite for more information on the area. So, with just a little research, we learned that somewhere between the Hugo Road intersection with Purgatory Road and Hwy 32 there once was a small settlement named Hugo. It consisted of a school, a church, a cemetery, a general store and a post office. By 1930 the community was abandoned. We found the cemetery and think the red building is the old school. We will continue looking for evidence of the others—later.
R & D Tusch
[1] A maritime region in NW Spain.
