[DenisLevvin]

one thing I was very surprised to see in the deming area were pecan trees! my stepfather was helping out an older retired couple who had a private grove of about 80 trees. the husband had been able to manage and harvest the grove by himself but health issues had impacted his ability to work outside. my stepfather was cleaning up the weeds underneath (dead and detached mostly), sweeping up the august drops (which had a high percentage of good nuts inside), picking up any that had already fallen out of the husk, stripping trees of the pecans using a home-made pole/hook unit and separating husked/unhusked whole pecans. he would also search for nuts where the husk had split but the shell was still loosely inside; each day he would try to fill one bucket with shells (whole unhusked pecans) so that the owner could split them and take out the nut meats to sell to whoever had ordered some from him. he has a hand-made contraption which very quickly can split a pecan shell and allow him to collect halves to sell (I didn't get a picture, was inside his shed which was a bit dark and I didn't think about my flash...). he could split and collect the halves faster than a similarly-sized low-volume machine splitter and with fewer crunched meats

this year, the august monsoons had not come by, so both local and private groves were in a bind because most had not irrigated to compensate for the lack of those rains. because of this, many of the husks around the shell had not swelled and then later split, which would allow for easy removal of the shell from the husk. major pecan handlers would refuse any shipment of pecans if it had one green husk in it, because it would jam their shell-splitting and meat-sorting equipment. since there isn't a lot of ready labor in the area, the husk-covered shells were considered a loss, and the price of pecans locally (and eventually outside of the area) went up quite a bit. even walmart was willing to spend $4 a pound to buy halved pecans, which is quite a bit. Some locally were selling their halved pecans for $10 a pound. my stepfather knew that most of the dropped pecans and those with husks on the on the trees were still good, so made a deal with the owner to keep a percentage of the drops if he harvested the rest. he pointed out that if you drop whole husked pecans in a bin of water for a day, the husk would then split if set to dry on a screen. after that, another day with the shells sitting on a screen would leave the shells just pliable enough so that the hand splitter would work very nicely. the owners were quite pleased to find out that many of the drops and the husked shells still on the trees contained good nuts, and they could sell them if they could just get them out of the husks. I helped a few times for nearly a day; needless to say my stepfather has a winter-long project ahead of him, which suits him just fine!


stepfather stripping pecans from trees using hooked pole. it was very windy the day I was helping out,
and he/we were getting a bit aggravated because when you would reach for a cluster of pecans on a branch tip
(they cluster on tip ends), the wind would blow it around. also since the nuts were not completely developed because
of the drought, some of the clusters had not dehisced properly making it harder to remove
them from the branch. I was having some fun counting how many seconds a pecan would spend up
in the air and how far one would fly from a neighboring cluster when the one being picked disconnected
(think catapult ) from the branch... one was airborne for nearly five seconds (wind-aided) and
another made it nearly 15 yards away from it's parent tree!


pecans on ground after being stripped from tree. the soil rings around the tree are for containing
the irrigation water, as pecans have a long taproot. a drip irrigation system near the trunk would work the best


King Pecan sitting on his throne!


myself sorting some pecans (hey, the wind was blowing over 20mph!)


bucket of brown gold (people will pay alot of money for pecan halves)


a nearby grove on the road to palomas, mexico. these large groves were planted with trees of different ages in different plots. these medium-sized trees still had pecans on them, which meant that they still were in the husk and would not get picked, most likely. most pecan husks would split normally, and if the branches were thrashed or the tree vibrated with a giant shaker, the shells would fall to the ground to be collected. the rest stay there. irrigation timing is very important for the health of the trees and the volume of the nut crop. having grown up and lived in an area where we usually depend on environmental water (rain) for most of a plant's water needs, I was not accustomed to seeing crops that were totally dependent on irrigation. there are pecans in other parts of the state where irrigation water is available, like along the rio grande and other rivers

the asian medicinal market is the largest purchaser of the local pecan crop. pecans are second to almonds in the health benefits of the natural oils and other compounds in the nuts so are prized for their health benefits (and they taste great on top of sticky buns! mmmm )