Rot

Therefore, as a tongue of fire consumes stubble And dry grass collapses into the flame, So their root will become like rot and their blossom blow away as dust; For they have rejected the law of the Lord of hosts  And despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.  Isaiah 5:24

A little over a week ago, we had strong a strong storm that blew through from the west, bringing with it 80 mph straight-line winds that caused lots of damage and blew down a pretty decent sized pecan tree in our pasture next to the barn that provided nice shade in the sweltering heat of the summer.  The animals would sit under its shade in the heat of the day, chewing their cud.  Those days are gone.  The cows and goats are going to miss that tree.  We will miss that tree.

The funny thing is, the pecan tree, being the last tree to bud out in the spring, didn't have many leaves yet.  There wasn't a lot of resistance to cause it to topple over.  It seems like the wind would blow right past it with no leaves to buffet against.  It was a mystery to me how it could have fallen.

And then I took a closer look.  Although the outside of the tree looked fine, the inside of the tree was rotten.  It was dying from the inside out.  Just by looking at the exterior of the tree, you would have never known that it had a terminal illness.  Probably an arborist could have identified symptoms, but to anyone else, the rottenness inside was hidden from sight.  But it was only a matter of time.  The clock was ticking.  On April 10th, as strong winds blew, the pecan tree's last grain of sand dropped through the hour glass.  Crash!

Overly dramatic, I know, but this malady isn't only restricted to trees, it is present and prevalent in nations and in people.  Our country, that once stood strong, is rotting from within.  We can stick our heads in the sand or we can face it.  Our Judeo-Christian heritage and values that once set us apart and put our feet on a strong foundation, has been under attack.  The family structure is falling.  Church attendance dropping precipitously.  We're deconstructing every norm, questioning every standard of truth, incentivizing all that's immoral and punishing all that's good, and right, and pure.  We've left God behind and if Jesus is mentioned, it is in a swear word.  Meanwhile, we're steadily rotting from within.

As people, we may look good from the outside.  We can put up a nice façade and put a new coat of paint on our barn that makes bystanders think all is well, but within, things aren't what they seem.  It's sinister and nefarious.  We can hide it for a little bit, whistling past the graveyard, but there are storm clouds brewing.  When the metaphorical strong winds begin to blow, the rot hidden inside our nation and inside the heart of man will have weakened us so that we cannot stand.  Try as we might with all our strength, we will not be able to withstand by human force or will.  We will topple and oh, what great destruction will occur.

The rotten pecan tree fell on another tree seen in the photo below, snapping it in half.  See, that's the thing.  There will be people who are faithful and virtuous, but they'll be caught in the wind, too, and won't be immune to the cataclysmic fall when the rottenness around them negatively affects them too, snapping them in half.  The Bible tells us that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

As I was looking at the rotten tree, something caught my eye that was imbedded in the dirt in the very center of the tree.  In the place that it was, it had to have been there for, I'm guessing 50 years or more.  It was a stick of welder's chalk, still pointed!  

Welder's chalk is made of soapstone and welders use it to mark steel plate that they've measured for cutting.  We live at the border of what used to be a rice field, and I assume that half a century ago, a farmer's implement broke down.  He pulled his implement to the edge of the field, got some metal plate perhaps to weld reinforcement on the tongue of a plow.  He measured and marked it for cutting with his welder's chalk and, when the repairs were done, threw the chalk next to a little pecan tree sapling that was growing on the fence line.

Fifty years later, here we are.  Oh, that we as a nation might repent and turn to Jesus.  Oh that we'd get some welder's chalk and mark the reinforcement of God's Word to apply to our weakened core and fix what's broken.  I used that half a century old chalk to commemorate the strong winds that knocked down the pecan tree on the wall of our hen house.

There's more strong winds coming.  Will we be able to stand?

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.  1 Corinthians 15:58

Shelling Pecans after a Three Year Draught

For whatever reason, nutrition I'm guessing, our trees haven't made pecans in three years.  This year, however, they made up for lost time.  As discussed in previous posts, we picked up six five gallon buckets of pecans.  We could have picked up more, but realized we had enough.  We decided that we needed to get started cracking and shelling them.  Five years or so, I'd crack them all myself using an old timey cracker.  In recent years, we've taken them to a place in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana that cracks them or to our local feed store.

Don't you love going into old feed stores or hardware stores?  It's like walking back in time.  There's a screen door to enter.  The merchants are always friendly and talk to you about the weather and other happenings.  You can pick up feed, or medicine, halters, buckets, boots, seed, seed potatoes and Farmer's Almanacs.  They load the feed in the back of you truck for you.  Old feed stores are the best!

Our local feed store also has a pecan cracking machine.  It is an odd looking contraption.  When you walk in, you can hear the "pop, pop, pop" of pecans being cracked.  You pour your buckets of pecans in the hopper and they go through the machine.

The cracked pecan drops out of the chute below and back into the bucket that you brought them in.

Then, the shopkeeper puts them on a scale and weighs them.  This year's charge for cracking them is $0.33 per pound.  That might sound like a lot; however, it saves you a lot of time!

Once we get them home, I grab several handfuls of cracked pecans and put them in a box.  I shell them over the box so that all the shells and dust don't get all over the place.  I use a special tool to clean the shell out from the ridges in the pecan.  If you don't get that piece of shell out and you eat it, it will instantly make your mouth very dry.  It's not very appealing.  If you deal with home-grown pecans and are a pecan-eater, you know what I'm talking about.  Anyway, here's what they look like right out of the machine.  As you can tell, the machine has done most of the work for you.  All you need to do is remove the cracked shells and sort out any bad ones.  Most of them even come out whole and not broken.

In three shakes of a billy goat's tail, you have a pot-full of shelled pecans.  Nice ones, too!

So far, we've shelled two of the 6 five gallon buckets and have put FIVE one gallon zip lock bags of fresh pecans in the deep freeze.  By the time we've finished the other 4 buckets, we'll have quite an inventory of pecans.  Pecans freeze well, and it is a good thing.  You never know, we may have another 3 year spell where we don't get any.  It'll be good to have some squirreled away.

Before we go further, let me tell you about our pecans.  It is hard to get perspective from the photos.  Our pecans are a 'wild' variety, I think.  They are small and a little difficult to crack manually.  But what they sacrifice in size, they make up for it in taste.  They are rich.  Full of pecan oil.  If you cut them up, your fingers feel kind of oily.

For comparison, the photo below shows on the left, a pecan from a local Pecan Company that has orchards.  Our pecan is on the right.  Quite a difference, huh?

But that's okay.  We like our pecans and look forward to once again, having pecans grown in the yard to eat.

Pickin' Up Pecans

We were happy to find that we had pecans this year.  We pronounce them puh CAHNS.   Our trees haven't produced in a couple of years.  We were out!  We don't know if it was a fertilization issue or something else that caused them not to produce.  Tricia's theory is that the hard freeze did something.  Who knows?  

Normally, we pick up a whole lot and then shell them and freeze them in quart sized freezer bags.  We'll snack on them, use them in baked goods, making pesto and then we soak some and ferment them.  Pecans are delicious.  We have seven pecan trees on our property.  The ones up front make small pecans that are kind of hard to shell.  Although they are small, they are "fat."  By that, I mean they are full of oil.  The trees in the back either don't produce or the darned squirrels eat them all.  The tree by the garage makes larger pecans, but they aren't quite as good as the ones in front.

Last weekend was a beautiful weekend.  Tricia and I each grabbed a bucket and went into the front to pick.  There were pecans everywhere!

Tricia likes to just pick them up with her hands.  I have a contraption I use that collects the pecans in lazy fashion, where I don't have to bend over.  You just walk, press the device over the pecan and the wires separate and allow the pecan to enter.  Then the wire closes behind it, capturing the pecan.  Rinse. Wash. Repeat.

In no time at all, the pecan-picker-upper is full and ready to be poured into a bucket.

So far, we've filled a couple of big landscape buckets along with two five gallon buckets.  We have more to pick, too!  As you look in the bucket below, you'll see some pecans with the green 'hull' still on them.  Tricia made a grievous mistake and tried to peel off the green hull.  It stained her hands!  It won't wash off.  It has to wear off!

I do have a different mode 'pecan-picker-upper.'  I have a photo of it below.  It operates on the same principle as the one above, except this one is like a Slinky.  Instead of pressing down over the pecan, you roll this one over it.  I don't use this one any more.  It is from my childhood and was from my great-grandmother.

We still have some more pecan picking to do.  Once we've finished, we'll weigh them and shell them.  Then we'll weigh the shelled pecans, so we'll know gross and tare weights.

Keep Holding On!

Sometimes the simplest things speak volumes to me.  (Maybe they have to be simple for me to grasp them!) This afternoon was one of those gloomy, grey, wet, nasty, cold days of winter.  I was outside working around the barn and happened to look up at one of our pecan trees.

Barren Pecan Tree

The leaves have done their little dance to the ground and lay in crumple heaps on the ground beneath what used to be the canopy of the pecan tree - lifeless, dull, and brown.  If you step on them, they crunch under your feet and shatter into many pieces.  This is a normal cycle we call Fall, for obvious reasons.  All the leaves fall to the ground and eventually turn into soil in a marvelous cycle that enables the leaves to nourish the tree that once nourished it.

Dead leaves beneath the Pecan Tree

As a sharp north wind began to blow, I looked back up into the tree.  All the leaves have fallen to the ground...  Wait.  Check that.  What is that I see?

A lone GREEN leaf hangs on for dear life, long after all of his comrades decided to leave (pardon the pun). Every single leaf that once fluttered alongside it has given up and let go and fallen down, except for this one. This made me scratch my head.  There's a lesson to be learned here.  I want to be like this leaf.  Not content in following the pack, this leaf is holding on.  He's persevering.  He's fighting the good fight.  He's resolute, steadfast.   He perseveres.

Everyone else has deserted him and it looks bleak and hopeless.  He's at the end of his rope and he's tied a knot at the end and is holding on for dear life.  That's what I want to be like - a fighter, an over-comer, someone who never quits.

It's not easy being green.

You may feel some solidarity with the leaf in the old pecan tree. If so, don't conform! Even though things don't look good, against all odds, Live to Fight Another Day! Keep Holding On!