Hobby OrchardPecans, Fruit Trees, and Other Stuff

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.