Outdoors - Pecan farming

   Twenty-nine years ago, I decided to plant a bunch of pecan trees. They would not only provide cover and food for wildlife, but they might also grow a cash crop in my old age. I bought two hundred, one-foot-tall bare root trees and set about making my pecan forest. With great care, the little trees were carefully planted in rows in an area protected from livestock. I was told, it would take three to five years before they would start producing nuts.

   At the same time, I picked up a bucket of walnuts that had fallen off a tree in our yard. When the soil was moist in the fall, I walked randomly about the pasture, dropping walnuts, and driving them into the ground with a quick smack from a hammer. I thought a few of them might grow. Knowing there is not much of a market for walnuts, I was planting them mostly for food for deer and turkeys.

   As the years rolled by, I watched my nut forest grow. On the first year, more than half of the pecans lived and started to grow. I think every walnut I hammered into the ground sprouted, took root, and flourished. As the pecan trees grew a little larger, deer would stop by and eat the top leaves and the bucks would rub their antlers on them. If the bark is rubbed off a tree all the way around, it will kill it. Bucks prefer to rub their antlers on trees that have been purchased and planted rather than the native trees that cost nothing. Though I planted northern pecans, which are supposed to be winter hardy, one especially cold winter killed many of the trees. I have yet to see a deer browse on a walnut tree or rub its antlers on one to the point of destroying it. An occasional drought year has further diminished our numbers of trees planted on the more marginal soil.

   A few weeks ago, my wife and I were driving through the pecan forest, which is now down to seven trees. For the first time ever, we saw nuts growing on one of the bigger pecan trees. We counted five nuts. Yesterday, checking on their progress, we found that we are down to three pecan nuts among our seven surviving pecan trees. I have since learned, almost everything likes to eat pecans, either before or after they dry and fall from the tree. Wood ducks, raccoons, deer, turkey, and squirrels are just some of the animals that will go out of their way to eat my pecans. I will feel fortunate if my wife and I have one nut left to split by the end of the season.

   The walnut trees though, have been doing remarkably well. There are towering trees at random places all over the farm. They all seem to be producing walnuts as though they are a cash crop. Though there is little market for walnuts, wildlife will enjoy them and in another twenty or thirty years, I can harvest the lumber.

   As for the pecan venture, I would call it pretty much a failure. I think I will be lucky to live long enough to see any of the trees realize full production, if the trees themselves live that long. I do not think becoming a pecan farmer in my old age is a realistic goal at this point.