Mrs ERJ has been getting great joy from the nut cracker I assembled around New Years.
Mrs ERJ's mother came from southwestern Louisiana. A regular part of her childhood involved large boxes of unshelled pecans showing up around Christmas and her mother and father cracking and sharing them.
Mrs ERJ's sister now lives in Texas and the boxes of pecans keep coming.
One of the first things I did after we moved to Eaton Rapids was to plant pecan trees along the driveway. They are now 50' tall and producing pecans but they are itty-bitty, wild-type northern pecans. They are nothing like the huge, papershelled pecans from the South.
Recently domesticated plants
There is a huge difference between orchard-type trees and wild-type trees.
In the wild, the tree must outgrow its neighbors and siblings. Survival comes first and reproduction comes second. Wild-type trees tend to be fast growing and produce nuts in an incidental kind of way.
Orchard-type trees tend to be short and squatty and produce abundantly. Their annual shoot extension is measured in inches rather than in feet like the wild-type trees.
Species that have been cultivated for thousands of years are almost a different species from the "wild-types". You can plant a peach pit and almost assuredly get an orchard-type tree and abundant fruit.
More recently domesticated species still have many "wild-type" genes floating in them. That, and actual wild trees might be in the vicinity pollinating the nuts/fruit making pip-planting a less-than-sure-thing.
Pecans are very recently domesticated species with nearly all cultivars (cultivated-varieties) selected after the War of Northern Aggression. That would make the oldest cultivars only 150 years old. By comparison, apples, apricots, Asian Persimmons, figs and grapes have been cultivated for 2000-to-4000 years.
Spicy times
High-quality pecans are easily grown in a significant swath of the United States. Sadly, Michigan is not in that swath.
Supposing a person had claim on a parcel in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi ---perhaps because of family ties--- and that they wanted to make that parcel a viable landing place should we find ourselves in spicy times, they could do far worse than to plant a seedling pecan orchard.
But not just ANY seedling orchard. They should focus on seed-nuts from cultivars that are both precocious (come into bearing early in life) and disease resistant. Wild-type pecans might take 15 years to produce their first pecan even under the best care. The most precocious seedlings might only take five years.
Good enough and plenty of it
Seedlings have the wonderful trait of being inexpensive. A grafted pecan tree might run $60, retail. Pecans run about ten cents each.
The basic game-plan is to mimic what God does. Plant heavily and cull heavily. If a row of mature pecan trees in a fence row are happy and productive at one tree every 20', plant them in hills four feet apart, five nuts to the hill. Then cull the hills to leave the seedling with the best vigor (and incidentally the best leaf health), then start culling the trees based on production and nut quality.
The downside of this method is that you will inadvertently be selecting for OVER production or biennial bearing. A huge crop one year, no crop the next. The good news is that won't become a problem for another fifteen years. That hardly seems like a problem since lackadaisical selection of seed source would mean your first nuts might be showing up in fifteen years.
Don't know what pecan cultivars are "precocious"? You can go to the University of Georgia's Pecan Breeding website type "precocious" into the search box and hit enter.
- Byrd
- Lakota
- Caddo
- Cape Fear
- Candy
- Kiowa
- Cheyenne
- Treadwell
- McMillan
- Apalachee
- Excel
- Nacono
- Morrill
At 50 nuts to the pound and a nut-per-foot planting rate you will need about 30 pounds of nuts to plant a quarter-mile of fence row. Double amount that if you wife enjoys eating pecans.
For what it is worth, a mature Caddo pecan tree is capable of producing 60 pounds of pecans a year, year-after-year. A quarter-mile of fence-row with a tree every 20 feet would have 67 trees in it.
This is not a guarantee. It is a sketch of what is possible.
Funny. I planted 3different pecans from a lical big-box country supply store, and some buck had a field day with them 3 weeks later! Broken to hell, scraped all up, don't know if they'll make it now.
ReplyDeleteNever saw the buck...
We have a lot of Pawnee cultivars down here.
ReplyDeletePawnee is a great pecan.
DeleteThere is no such thing as the perfect pecan, yet. But Pawnee is darned good. Oddly, at least to me, is that one of the main factors that breeders select for is to have light colored nut meats that do not darken with age.
Americans are very visual in our buying preferences.
If I had 40 acres and was counting on living off what it provided, I think the color of the nut meats would be much lower on the list of selection criteria than it is in modern breeding programs.
ERJ, my understanding is that Pecans are rather greedy for water which makes them more difficult in drouthy areas?
ReplyDeletePawnee is a nice nut, but that cultivar has fallen out of favor for planting in home/low input settings due to increasing susceptibility to pecan scab disease (a fungal leaf/nut infection) issues.
ReplyDeleteGrowers who do not have the ability, or inclination, to so multiple fungicidal sprays need to concentrate on varieties with proven resistance to pecan scab disease.
Much of the difference in stature - upright vs short/squatty - between seedlings and grafted orchard-type trees is due to "loss of apical dominance" seen in mature trees of most species. When we graft proven cultivars - whether pecans, apples, or oranges, we're using 'old budline' wood... material from trees that have grown through their vigorous juvenile growth phase and have entered their sexually-mature, fruiting phase.
Even though we may be grafting "1 or 2-yr old wood" onto a seedling or clonally-reproduced rootstock, as far as that scion is concerned, it is as old as the original tree of that variety, and is not inclined to put on rapid, upright growth... and may, as in the case of pears and citrus... have less tendency to display the thorns that are prevalent in juveniles of their species.
Dr. Bill Reid, who was for many years, the pecan specialist for Kansas & Missouri, has a nice 'Northern Pecan Blogspot', with much information for growers in the Northern/Midwestern pecan belt. His fairly extensive list of Northern pecan cultivars details important features of the named varieties, with regard to scab resistance/susceptibility, nut kernel quality, nut size/kernel %, etc.
ReplyDeletehttp://northernpecans.blogspot.com/p/blog-page.html
For my purposes here in KY, the best cultivars are Major, Kanza, Hark, Oswego, Greenriver, Posey, Lakota, as all have proven scab-resistance.
'Major', which originated here in KY in the Green River delta region, has been used extensively by USDA in its pecan breeding program, as a source of genetic resistance to scab - and excellent kernel quality. Interestingly (at least to me), genetic analysis suggests that Major has both shagbark and bitternut hickory ancestors fairly close up in its pedigree.
In 2000, my kids and I planted ~ 400 2yr old seedlings of Major, Posey and Greenriver pecans in a 100 ft wide CRP riparian bufferstrip bordering the creek that forms the eastern boundary of our farm. 20 ft spacings in-row, with rows 30 ft apart; almost a mile long, and about 7 acres total.
ReplyDeleteMy plan was to graft every-other tree over to a named cultivar and remove ungrafted trees as they reached sufficient size for canopies to crowd... but life got in the way, and 90+% went ungrafted.
These seedlings are quite variable in character, and 20+ years out, few have come into nut production. They're in a good bottomland creekbottom location with superb soil type but they've had virtually no care other than once or twice yearly bush-hogging around them. Maybe if I'd applied some fertilizer along the way, they'd have come into production sooner. IDK. The genetic potential is there for some to be producers of better than average nuts... but I'm likely to have a hard time beating the squirrels, crows/bluejays/woodpeckers, and deer to them!
If you grow pecans around here, you better be prepared to eradicate the squirrel population with vigor. Neighbor across the street can kill a dozen or more as they are raiding his trees and not make a dent. He never gets any nuts and has all but stopped trying. Little grey so-and-sos also killed of his strawberry beds.
ReplyDeleteI love pecans, and I planted a "Cape Fear" and an "Elliott" in my front pasture for livestock shade and (hopefully) nuts. I didn't plant more than two due to hearing that some trees need a bunch of babying (sprays) to bear successfully. I'm not big on babying trees like that, so it's more of a hopeful experiment. I did plant 10 Dunstan Chestnut trees in the same pasture for shade and nuts. They are supposed to be a hardy and blight-resistant cross between some Chinese variety and an American Chestnut that produces good quality and nutritious nuts. With appropriate forethought, you can create silvopasture to provide shade for livestock, fruit/nuts, and still grow grass beneath for forage.
ReplyDelete