pickin' and shellin'

(Oops!  Forgot to change the font.)

Wharton County is pecan country.  Everyone has pecan trees in their yard and there are pecan groves all around.

Last Friday morning I picked up 31 pounds of pecans.  A storm had blown through earlier in the week while we were in the city and the ground was literally littered with them.  That 31 pounds was from only 2 of the 3 pecan trees in our back yard.  I had decided last week not to pick up the nuts from the third, most prolific tree.  They were small, light and every one I cracked open was dried up inside.  That 31 pounds doesn’t include the approximately 45 pounds of nuts I have already collected over the last two weeks.

When we bought this place, our 80+ year old neighbor told us that our trees were the ‘good’ pecans, not natives.  The nuts on the native pecan trees are small, tiny even, only about an inch or so long.  For all their smallness, they are the best tasting, prized by bakers and confectioners.  You can read more about pecans and Texas native pecans here.

I took my 31 pounds down the road to one of the pecan buyers/sellers in the area to get them cracked.  They’ll run them through their crackers for 30¢ a pound. 

The lady put my nuts in a hopper that fed into the ‘lift’ which picked up the pecans one at a time and carried them over to get thwacked with a bolt and then dump them into a bin.  The drawback to the cracker is that sometimes it will pulverize your nut.  Other times it can bruise the meat.  (Stop that!  I know you’re thinking all kinds of nasty things.)

While I was waiting, this man was bagging up pecans that people brought in to sell.  I’ve been seeing people on the sides of the roads picking up pecans lately.  This outfit here pays 40¢ a pound.  The nuts in the red mesh bags are of a certain variety.  They were selling two different kinds, Cheyenne and Pawnee.  The nuts in the burlap bags are natives and whatever else in the mix that people bring in to sell.  The lady told me that the little natives are the heaviest of the pecans.  I asked her what she does with all those native pecans.  “Ship ‘em out.” she says.  I hope whoever gets them has a shelling machine as well as a cracker.

This is less than half of my 31 pounds of cracked nuts.  Left uncracked, they can be stored a long time.  Now that they are cracked, they have to be shelled.  It’s a lot of work but then they are ready to eat and use. 

Four nights of shelling and I haven’t even emptied one bag yet and man are my fingertips sore.

Obviously, there is no way I’m going to eat all these nuts so I’m going to do a giveaway.  The winner will receive a pound of shelled pecans, the runner-up will get 2 pounds of cracked (but unshelled) pecans.  Let me know in a comment if you want in the drawing.