Hobby OrchardPecans, Fruit Trees, and Other Stuff

It has been about a year since my last post.

2011 was the worst weather I’ve ever seen for my hobby orchard.  The highlights were.

1.   Unusually cool spring.
2. Late spring freeze ruined 2011 crop on pretty much everything.
3. It went from a cool spring to a very hot summer with no transition. This was the hottest summer I’ve ever seen.
4. No appreciable rain from May Through September.  This is the worst drought I’ve ever seen.

The year started out with an unusually cold winter.  We even had 3 snows.  The kids used up all the allocated snow days and then some this year.  I decided

to plant some more fruit trees this year. I found some cherry trees that may actually produce in north Texas (Royal Lee and Minnie Royal) and planted 3 of

them.  We also planted a few more apple trees and some plum trees.  We even planted two Dusten chestnut trees.  One of the one year pecan trees failed to

live through last summer and I transplanted a small tree that was growing in a pot to fill in the “skip”.

I found some bare root grape vines on sale and planted about a dozen new vines around the hobby orchard.

I waited a couple of week later than normal to plant the spring vegetables as the soil temperature was still pretty cold the last week of March.  Even waiting until the 2nd week of April the soil was so cold it hurt your hands to move soil while putting in transplants.

Pretty much everything had leafed out by the first week of April except for a few of the pecan trees.  The third week of April we had a pretty good freeze (normal last frost is the last week of March in our area).  This ruined our chances of any fruit this year but also took out the blackberries, grapes, and much of the pecan production.

The Pecan trees that were not damaged by the freeze set a very heavy crop.  I made one release of trichogramma wasps to help control the pecan nut casebearer but since 9 out of 10 shoots had flowers on them I made the decision to let the casebearer thin the crop some.

But something stranged happened this year.  A weekly survey of the flowers showed a long and continuous infection of the developing nuts.  Infection and nut drop was severe and continued in to June and by then there was virtually no crop left.

In May the weather turned strange.  It suddenly went from highs in the 70′s and low 80′s to the mid and upper 90′s and all rain cease.  May, June, July, August, and September were mostly 10 to 15 degrees above normal for our area.  There were a lot of days well over 100 degrees.  The weather transition was so sudden and drastic that part of my garden wilted on that first hot day in May.  There was not much production in the garden once it turned hot and it required daily watering or the plants would wilt.  The okra and peppers partially wilted almost every day even with daily watering.  This was the worst year

for vegetable gardening I have ever seen.  We could keep plants alive but production was much lower than normal.  Prior to it turning hot production was good and the cool season plants did well.

Most of our pecan trees are not on an irrigation system.  Those trees not on an irrigation system that had a few nuts made pecans about 1/6th normal size but most of them dropped off in July and August in the heat.  The irrigated trees did okay but the high cost of water forced us to stop most of the watering in August.  By August several pecan trees started dying.  We ended up loosing most of the grape vines, all of the blackberries, and most of the trees planted over the winter. Two out of the three cherry trees and both chestnut trees did not make it.  The fruit trees were watered regularly so I blame the survival rate on the heat. The larger more established trees survived but looked pretty bad.  Most of the small pecan trees did not make it.  Out of 200 pecan trees we ended up losing about a dozen.

I put grafts on about 20 pecan trees in the spring with a good success rate.  But that was before the heat and drought took it’s toll.  It appears that grasshoppers prefer the leaves and bark of new grafts over all other parts of the tree by about 10 to 1.  Several of the growing grafts were defoliated and some debarked by grasshoppers.  I couldn’t get too upset by it.  I think even the grasshoppers were starving.   I did manage to get grafts to take on 3 trees that have not taken a graft for the last 3 years straight.

It was so hot and so dry that by August even the weeds were dead.  I looked out over my creek bottom orchard and the only thing green were the trees vines and shrubs.  All grass and weeds looked dead.  I haven’t mowed my lawn since July and never mowed the orchard at all this year.

Our pond started getting pretty low and then one day in August all the fish died.  We had a lot of nice catfish and bluegill in our upper pond. It smelled very bad for a few days.  By September both ponds had pretty much dried up.  We are using this event to clean them out.  I was very suprised to see how much silt was in the upper pond.  We stuck a pipe down and could easily push it in 4 1/2 feet toward the middle of the pond.

We are using this as an opportunity to clean out the ponds.  It is very slow going using a small tractor with a front end loader to scoop out the silt but some progress is being made.  Care has to be taken as the deepest parts of the pond are still wet and the tractor start sinking so we are mostly working on the sides and shallow parts of the pond were the ground is firm. Once I started working on this, you guessed it, it started raining again.  No run-off for 5 months and it rains after one day of working on the pond. We really needed the rain though. I managed to get a second day or pond work in by taking a day off from work.  Depending on how much rain we get that may be the end of the pond work for the drought.  We’ve had a couple of good rains in October.  The soil moisture is back up now and a heavy rain could fill the ponds now.

The weather continues to be wacky.  We had our first light frost in the middle of October (normal first frost is in November here).  Some of the vegetable garden plants were burned but most came through okay.  Another possible frost is forecast for Halloween weekend.  We plan on covering as much as possible.

With the recent rains and cooler weather the garden has really perked up with a lot of peppers and tomato fruit set.

Some good things have come out of the drought/heat of 2011.

1.   Several pecan pests populations were dramatically reduced.  I saw zero hickory shuckworm this year and zero Pecan weevils.
2. There was no powdery mildew or pecan scab in our area.
3.   Squirrel populations are down.
4. Not much mowing was needed.
5. The weaker trees were removed.  I noticed it was always the trees that were the smallest in thier age group that died or the trees in the worst soil.  I have a theory that some trees are runts and will never grow or produce well.  This gives me the oppertunity to replace these trees with something with better growth and production potential.

Lesson’s learned:

1. Pecan trees do not wilt when they go in to water stress.  Some of them may get some die back on the oldest growth from the bottom up and/or loose a lot of leaves.  Once you see wilting leaves on a pecan tree – it is pretty much a goner.
2. Don’t count on pests to thin only part of your crop.
3. It is not economically viable to water pecan trees during a drought using city water.  We really need a well.

It has been a while since my last blog post.  It is now October 2010 and it has been a challenging season for the pecan orchard.

We had a very heavy fruit set this year on most of the pecan trees with some having female flowers on 10 out of 10 shoots.  Most trees had at least 7 out of 10 clusters with female flowers.  This was way too many nuts for our young trees to be able to mature in to good quality pecans.  We made the decision to allow the pecan nut casebearer to thin the crop down to a more manageable size.

The pecan nut casebearer thinned our crop excessively.  By the time we got to June drop we were down to less than 1 out of 10 clusters having any nuts.  On some trees I was hard pressed to find a developing nut.  I’m not sure if it was the casebearer but at the end of April something attacked the leaves and most of the new growth looked pretty ragged.  Large pieces of the leaves were removed.   Growth prior to and after this looked normal.  A survey of other trees in our area showed the same pattern.

Rainfall was below normal for most of the spring and it was unusually hot.  There were some heavy rain events during the summer and many of the native trees lost what few nuts they had left to scab.

Now it is October and there are few if any nuts on my trees.  A survey of the local trees shows the same pattern.  Few if any trees have any significant nuts on them.  The few remaining nuts are smaller than normal.   The squirrels are making short work of any trees that have nuts.  I was able to quickly find two pecan trees at a local park that did produce a small crop by looking for squirrels.  Both trees were actively being worked by the rodents.  No other trees at that park had any significant crop on them.  I was unable to find any pecans at another park in a neighboring town that normally has a moderate to good crop.  The businesses that crack pecans for the locals may not have much work this year.

Webworms are normally considered a nuisance but most trees have had at least one large colony.  Some trees have 8 or 10 colonies and have significant damage.  I have been using a long piece of bambo to tear out the larger colonies that can be reached.  BT sprays have also been used but new colonies continue to appear.  A survey of the trees near Sherman and Denison shows the same pattern of webworm infestation and damage.

We have also started seeing some twig girdler damage.  Last year several of my young trees lost over 10 percent of their shoots due to these beetles that chew a small ring around the shoots and lay eggs in the cut.   The shoots then die and fall to the ground.  Last year I collected a large pile of these shoots and burned them.  Looks like I will be doing this again this year and it may end up being an annual event.

So far I have not seen any signs of pecan weevil this year.  No weevils in any of the harvested nuts and no nuts on the ground or in the trees with small holes in them.  I saw very few weevils last year but became concerned as my adjoining neighbor who also grows pecan trees reported a massive loss due to them.  The heavy crop loss this year might end up being a good thing if it prevents the pecan weevil from taking up residence in my orchard.

Now we are looking forward to next year.  Most of our trees are less than seven years old and we continue to learn.  One of the lessons learned this year is to try to preserve your crop as pests and disease can take your entire crop even in years of heavy fruit set.  Another lesson learned is variety selection.  I’m seeing a pattern in the creek bottom where Desirable, Pawnee, and Choctaw have been unable to produce a well filled nut – mostly due to scab but also due to powdery mildew and squirrels.  As you move higher up out of the creek bottom where there is better air circulation (and fewer squirrels), these varieties do much better.  We are strongly considering grafting all of these varieties in our creek bottom over to Caddo, Jenkins, or some other native variety that performs well in our area.  We are also going to be forced to do something about the squirrels.

Eric bringing fertilizer down to the orchard.

Our pecan orchard is located in north Texas about an hour north of Dallas.

From all appearances, the trees are just sitting there.  This past weekend we had some temperatures in the upper 20’s and about 3 inches of snow.  It has been a relatively cold and wet winter here.  It has snowed 5 or 6 times along with enough rain to saturate the soil.

Below ground I’m pretty sure the roots are becoming active.  There is some minor bud swell on the trees but bud break does not appear to be imminent. The cool season grasses are growing rapidly.  I think orchards look the best for the next few weeks.  There is short green grass and the entire orchard looks like a park.

Graftwood was collected back near Christmas.  I had a hard time finding good graft wood this season.  My trees are getting a little older now and growth has slowed down a little(most of my trees are 5 years old now).  There were a lot of shoots and most of them grew 12 to 18 inches but they have a diameter smaller than a pencil. The best graft wood usually comes from young rapidly growing trees.  I’ve became more impressed with two of the varieties planted in my orchard.  The two varieties are Prilop and Jenkins.  These are considered low input varieties.  These two varieties were just about the only trees that produced any nuts last year.  As much graft wood as possible was collected from these trees.  My other varieties are Pawnee, Choctaw, Desirable, Caddo, and Oconee.

One of the biggest problems for 2009 was the weather.  We had a very late April hard freeze.  Most of the trees had broken bud and were growing rapidly.  All the growth on the trees was killed or severely damaged.  The few trees that hadn’t broken bud yet went on to produce a small crop.  The trees that were freeze damaged produced very little.  Then we had the month of almost daily rains starting from the middle of June through the middle of July.  Most of the trees that managed to set a crop scabbed up something terrible.  I’m planning to graft all of my Pawnee to Jenkins or Prilop due to this.  My Pawnee have had severe scab for the last two years.   I expected my Desirable to get scab in wet years but not Pawnee.  It looks like my creek bottom has poor air circulation and I may need to change over to very scab resistant varieties.   There was no scab on Prilop or Jenkins at our orchard.  Scab on other varieties varied by how far they were from the lowest part of the creek bottom.  Most of the natives on my place also lost most of the nuts to scab the last two years.  We do have one massive native that produced a small crop of very small nuts.

Now is a good time for picking up the limbs that always seem to fall from pecan trees.  They are always dropping something it seems but the bigger limbs can cause some damage to mowers.  I usually put them in piles and burn them.  This wood is normally too old to use in a fireplace or a smoker but occasionally you may find a big limb that is worth cutting up.  If you wait another month or so the grass can become tall enough to make it hard to see the fallen limbs.

Now is also a good time to fertilize.  Finding inexpensive fertilizer these days can be a real challenge.  I ended up using a mixture of cotton seed meal, Gardenville soil food,
And some “winterizer” (21-0-4).  The winterizer was on sale at Lowes for $8 per 50 lb. bag.  About 1400 pounds was put around the trees starting at the drip line outward for several feet.  I put out extra fertilizer under and around a couple of my big native trees.  These two trees have produced nuts every year but they are too small to be worth picking up or shelling.  I’m going to see if the size of the nuts can be increase a little with some good fertilization.

I’ve tried several methods to get the fertilizer to the trees including using a 5 gallon bucket, a wheel barrow, pulling a garden cart, hauling the fertilizer to each tree in the back of my truck, and using the front end loader of my tractor.  The fastest and easiest method that I’ve found is to use a garden cart pulled by my riding mower.  My 10 year old son gets a kick out of driving the lawnmower (but for some reason doesn’t want to mow?).  He just now has grown tall enough to reach the clutch on the riding mower (He can’t reach the clutch on the tractor yet) I walk beside the cart and throw out the fertilizer as we slowly pass by or stop at each tree.  The truck and tractor method work okay but you spend a lot of time getting in and out of the truck or climbing up and down the tractor.  I can get on and off a riding mower much easier than getting in and out of a truck or climbing the tractor when fertilizing alone as well.

Last year the spring freeze not only damaged our pecan trees but also froze our garden to the ground and severely damaged the production of walnuts, grapes, blackberries, peaches, and apples.  We have high hopes for some good growth and production this year and we are ready for some warm sunny weather!

Our pecan orchard is located in north Texas about and hour north of Dallas.

Shuck split began at the first of the month on some of the native pecans.  This usually happens on the smaller nuts first but not always.  The Pawnee and Caddo varieties split earlier than some of the natives.

Since most of out native are too small to be worth picking up, me and the kids went to a local park that has some native trees.  We picked several 5 gallon buckets of pecans right off the trees shucks and all.  We found out this may not be the best harvesting method as you have to peel the shucks and dispose of them.  We also discovered you need to wear gloves as the juice of the shucks will permanently stain your fingers and nails.  A 5 gallon bucket of pecans in the shuck yields about a gallon of pecans.

On another “pecaning” trip we used a 10 foot piece of 1 inch PVC water pipe to thrash another couple of buckets of nuts to the ground.  We’ve had so much rain in north Texas in October the normal spring type tools used to pick up pecans would only push the nuts in to the ground without picking them up.

Due to a late freeze this year only a few of the improved variety trees at our place have any nuts on them.  So far only Pawnee and Caddo have shuck split on them.  The Choctaw and Oconee have not split shuck yet.  The few Desirable and Choctaw that did produce were pretty much stripped by the squirrels well before they were ripe (at least ripe enough for humans).  There were a lot of nuts on the ground with one end bitten out of them.

We do have one large native pecan tree on our place about 4 feet in diameter that we have been harvesting nuts from.  It produces a very small tear drop shaped nut with a very thick shell.  I have been experimenting with fertilizing it to see of the nuts get any bigger.  The leaves are very small on the massive tree with only a couple of inches of new growth every year.

The first year the nuts were a little bigger but still too small to be worth picking up.  This year they are a little bigger yet and the leaves and shoots are starting to get a little bigger.  This makes me wonder what my other natives would do if they were fertilized?  I may try a healthy does of fertilizer and zinc to this one and a couple of others next year.

About half of the natives on my place lose all their nuts to scab and powdery mildew every year.  2/3rds of our orchard is in a creek bottom that stays humid and hosts every pecan pest and disease known to pecans.

This year the web worms and twig girdlers have been particularly bad.  We have several 5 year old improved trees that have lost over 10 percent of shoots to twig girdlers.   This is caused by a large black beetle looking bug that chews a complete circle around the shoots and lays her eggs in the chewed ends.  Many times the shoots don’t break or fall until there are some winds.  Scab and powdery mildew were bad this year on the trees in the bottom.   The higher in the tree and the areas with  better air circulation had much less problems with these leaf and nut diseases.

There may also be some problems with the pecan weevil in my orchard.  I think some of these were brought in by the free mulch I got from a recycling center.  Being in a creek bottom with lots of native didn’t help either.  I have found a few adult weevils on some of my trees.  There is also the tale tale damage on some of the shucks.  It looks like a bulls eye where the weevil stuck it’s snout through the shuck and walked around in circles to literally drill a hole in the shell of the nut and lay eggs in the developing pecan.

I’m going to try to remove every nut from every one of my young trees in an attempt to break the reproductive cycle of this pest.  I haven’t cracked enough nuts yet to see how bad a problem they are going to be but I fear the worst.  So far I haven’t seen any of the small exit holes in the nuts where the “red head”

It seems like pecan trees are always dropping something all year.  In the spring it is the male flowers.  Then later it is small nuts normally called June drop.

During the summer the urine and mold from aphids can coat the leaves and anything under the tree in honeydew.  The nuts that abort, have disease or pest problems continue to turn black and fall of the tree through the fall.  Twig girdlers damage and shading can cause small and large branches alike to fall during storms or strong winds.

Of course in the fall the nuts, shucks and leaves fall.  The nuts can continue to fall all winter.  Winter ice storms can cause light damage to total destruction of pecan trees in our area of the country.