Harvesting

We are all used to the brown shells that pecans come in, but did you know that they actually grow with another outter green shell?

This green shell bursts open when the pecans start to mature.

It actually starts to peel back from the nut allowing the nut to drop.  This is when you know that the pecans are ready for harvesting.  For the first part of the season (or when it's too wet for the tractor), you mostly hand pick the nuts off the trees and ground until the majority are all ready.  The outfit for picking pecans consists of gum boots, as the grass is always wet, a hat to shade from the sun, and gloves so the pecans don't die your hands brown.

Once most of the nuts are ready, the boys get to get out the big toys. (It's a John Deer Grandpa!)

They take the tree shaker tractor out to shake the trees.  Each tree gets shaken twice, 2-3 weeks apart.   You start by laying out this massive tarp around the tree.

Then the tractor comes in and shakes the tree so the nuts fall off.

Here are some video's. Blake likes to sit under the tree with a bucket on his head while the nuts are dropping.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti2-pIHXrmc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg-P82sYxFQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zRi0zm8WLA

Then you gather all the nuts into buckets and take them back to the sorting shed.

Depending on the maturity of the tree you can get 1-3 buckets of nuts off each one.  Pecans alternate years, having one good year followed by a rest year and then another good year.  Last year was their rest year and they got about 1 ton of pecans total.  This year they guess we will get close to 3 tons which averages to about 1.5 buckets off each tree.

As you might have guessed, this is only the beginning of the work.  There is more to come.