chuck:

That's a beautiful collection of nuts!! I like your wild nuts a lot better than our prickly pear!

Turns out I have at least ten wild pecans on my little acreage that produced nuts this year. I didn't know I had that many pecans hiding in the fence rows and property line woods. The nuts vary in shape and in when they were ready to harvest, but all taste very rich and sweet. I can't collect many nuts from them because most are crowded into the treelines and drop their nuts in rough areas

I don't know if it is because I am so cheap or what, but I really like finding "free" stuff like these nuts. I waited over ten years for my tame varieties to produce.

Chuck

Know what you mean. I planted a Pawnee here 10 yrs ago. So far about 10 nuts. Worse yet by far my tree is probably 5% the size of your planted pecans. Severe freezes, hail, and not enough water and fertilizer, too cheap, have stunted growth. I've watered that tree at least 300 times in 10 yrs but not enough.

I have a native pecan tree at my place in the country that is loaded every year unfortunately it has small pecans. The flavor is great but it is a lot of work to crack them for what you get out of them. I wish it had bigger pecans because the tree is about 75 years old. The tree is at least 2' in diameter. I have another that has large pecans unfortunately the crows seem to love them and it is a fight to get any after the crows are finished. I'm planning on planting a lot of the pecans and then grafting them later. I figure I might not ever see them produce but someone will benefit from them.

chuck,
Believe you got the IDs switched on the Pawnee & Peruque - the 3 at 12 o'clock look like Peruque, to me; smaller than Pawnee at 3 o'clock, almost 'square' in cross-section.
If you get into semantics...Colby and Peruque are both 'wild' - just chance seedlings that were selected due to being 'better than average' in one or more criteria.

Peruque is a really nice little nut - great kernel quality, very thin shell - but, also takes a huge hit from pecan weevil infestation, and the crows/jays take most of the nuts that the weevils don't get. Hard for me to get very many of them.

This post was edited by lucky_p on Tue, Oct 14, 14 at 7:32

Lucky,

If I have the Pawnee and Peruque switched the labels were switched on the trees. I have two of each and have gotten nuts off both Peruques and one Pawnee, and the Peruques are the same larger nut size. The trees were from Forest Keeling Nursey by way of a commercial pecan orchard that orders for retail sale. I was fairly careful to maintain the IDs as I wanted to know which was which when they finally produced. The Colby was also from Forrest Keeling, but I got it at a Chestnut (and other) festival run by the University of Missouri. Forrest Keeling had a booth and sold pecans there. I wanted a Kanza, but Colby was all they had by the time I got there. I am willing to believe the labels were wrong.

My wild pecans are all small, though they work with my Duke pecan cracker OK, so I'll be shelling them for SWMBO to make goodies with.

A few years ago the Missouri Conservation Department sold pecan trees that were seedlings of named varieties, like Colby, Posey, Hardy Giant and another I can't recall. I planted several of those but didn't go to any great lengths to protect them. There are about six or seven still hanging on, and some are doing pretty well, so who knows? Maybe I'll have a nice nut producer I can call Big Chuck in a few more years!

Chuck

Chuck:

I'd say the nuts at 12 o'clock have more the Pawnee shape than those at 3 o'clock. Pawnee is pointed at one end and rounded at the other. I could be wrong and the shape of those two isn't that much different. But I'd go by shape more than size. They can all be small if the tree is overloaded or growing conditions poor.

Definitely switched. Peruque is one of the smallest pecans I have in my collection - run about 80/lb; Pawnee much larger @ 44/lb.
Shape is very characteristic for some nuts...Peruque & Posey are both so distinctive that I can pick them out right off the bat...

USDA Pecan Breeding program website has descriptions and nut photos of most of the named pecan varieties. Have a look.

Here is a link that might be useful: USDA pecan breeding - cultivar list

I guess I would tend to agree that my Pawnee and Peruque may be switched, though my "Pawnee" seem to be a bit bigger than the Peruque in the USDA pictures. I made notes at the time of planting and also made aluminum labels which are probably buried near the trees. I'll see if I can still find those labels. This would matter more to me if I planned to plant more bought pecan trees. At 65, I think I may let whoever inherits my place decide if more trees, and which ones, are needed! I may try moving some of the wild pecan seedlings that are coming up all over the place to better homes, but I'm probably not buying any more.

Chuck

chuck,
I sometimes see a wide range of nut sizes from the same tree some years - perhaps more pronounced with Peruque and GreenRiver than other varieties; Major and Posey are very consistent.
Some of the Peruque nuts are really small...I usually pick the bigger ones to grow out seedlings to be outplanted or used as rootstocks for named varieties - though I mostly use seedlings of Major, Peruque seedlings have been fairly vigorous for me.

This post was edited by lucky_p on Wed, Oct 15, 14 at 15:50

Lucky, you were correct. I dug around and found my original markers in the ground by the trees. I made them from some half inch aluminum bar stock I had and stamped the names/root stock/source and date in them. So my Peruque is Pawnee and vice versa. Somewhere down the line I transposed the names in my notes. Here are some of the nut meats I shelled out yesterday when I got my Texas nut sheller. The sheller works great for both those nuts because they are wide enough that they crack easily in the sheller after clipping off the ends. The Pawnee are almost too long to fit in the sheller for cracking! The Colby are too small around to work like that so I have to use the teeth to crack the shell. I bought a Duke nut cracker as well, one of the piston types, but I'm thinking it will mainly be used for the hazelnuts I should eventually get. It tends to crush the nut meats in cracking, though it might be OK with the wild types. I may have found a new hobby....collecting nut crackers.

Chuck

I KNEW I was right. lol. But...they're both good pecans.
Glad I could help ;>)

I've got several incarnations of the Duke nutcracker - it works fine on most pecans - but will damage kernels on some cultivars. Still, way faster than cracking 'em with the little two-legged Quackenbush types - though it's handy to have a few of those on hand.
Also have Kenkel & Mr. Hickory crackers for hard-shelled nuts like hickory and black walnut.
Don't have one, but Gerald Gardner (Sarcoxie, MO) sells a good one, too.

Also have accumulated, over the years, a number of 'ornamental' type nutcrackers - but they're not functional; broke one just the other day, trying to crack something with one of 'em. Should have known better...

The Texas sheller works pretty well, but the darn Colbys are too thin in cross section to break after nipping off the ends unless I grab them with the cutting teeth. The little plastic shield fell off, too, and I found that the screw hole was stripped. Put it back in secured with JB Weld. If I can't fix something with duct tape, baling wire or JB Weld I figure it is truly junk.

Chuck