Pecan harvesting

For the first time since 1997, I’m gonna make a pecan crop.  In the last two weeks, I’ve been raking the yard almost continuously, working to keep the leaf-fall out of the way so I can find the nuts as they fall.  The yard-raking makes the neighbors happy because my lawn looks good (or as good as such a collection of mixed grasses and weeds can, at any rate), but that’s strictly incidental to the primary goal.

There are four pecan trees on the lot—a paper-shell Mahan, a native Bridges, a Burkett (an older cultivar, out of favor among nurserymen now but still a good-producing variety), and another unidentified variety (probably a Comanche).

I gather fallen nuts almost daily unless the weather’s too bad, trying to capture as much of the harvest as I can; harvesting has turned into a six-way battle between the crows, the grackles, the blue jays, the mourning doves, the squirrels, and me.  If I don’t keep on top of things, I lose in a big way.  My strategy seems to be paying off, because as of this morning, I’ve gathered 71 pounds of nuts from the four trees.  I managed to gather the fall from the Mahan and the Bridges in the front yard between thunderstorms, and haven’t done the Burkett and the other tree in the back yard yet (it’s raining hard again, with flash flood and tornado warnings posted).  If things keep up this way, I’ll get a better crop than ’97, when I gathered more than eighty pounds of nuts, and ended up with 27 pounds of shelled nutmeats, which lasted me all the way to this year, which was a Good Thing, because between ’98 and 2000, the crop failed every year and I got absolutely jack.

Roky Erickson thought about some candied cotton bolls.  Fnord.