The Pecan Crop - 2024

We have husband and wife pecan trees in our yard.  A husband and wife tree is an old custom from New England where a (you guessed it) husband and a wife would plant two identical trees side by side by the entrance of their home, and they would grow together as a testimony of their love and fidelity.  I don't know who planted our husband and wife trees, but they are quite large.  Their boughs have grown together such that their outline is as one large tree instead of two.  

The two trees make great pecans (puh CAHNS), but they are small.  They are, however, good and rich because they're full of oil.  They're just hard to crack, so we generally take them to the feed store in town where they have a pecan cracking machine that cracks them.  We then take them home and sit in front of the fireplace all winter shelling them for pecan pies!

Mom and Dad came over the other day and we laid out a blanket and walked around the trees, filling up a 5 gallon bucket.  From those trees, we've picked 4 1/2 five gallon buckets of pecans.  We also have a wagon filled with pecans as well that Ginger, our cat, has decided is a nice place to lounge throughout the day after hunting all night.

Our neighbors had made a coconut dessert Sunday afternoon and wanted to share a couple of slices with us.  They walked over and we visited.  They are real busy with a construction project.  So busy, in fact, that they don't have time to pick up pecans.  They offered that we could pick up all we could and were going to leave their "pecan-picker-upper" out by the tree.

That contraption is a back-saver.  As you get older, I've learned, you come to appreciate things like this so you don't have to constantly bend over.  This is like the slinky we used to play with as kids,  you roll it and the pecans go inside until its full.

It's so easy, it almost feels like you're cheating.

Tricia was using an older model of the same device.  This one, I think, was my great-grandmother's.  When it's full, you simply pull back the wires and allow the pecans to tumble out.  We began to quickly fill the wagon...

Our neighbor's pecan trees are LARGE pecans.  I'm telling you, we felt kind of funny picking these compared to ours.  Tricia said, "Man, our pecans are about 1/3 the size of theirs!"  It's true.  Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's pecans, came to mind.

The neighbor's pecans on the left.  The largest of our pecans on the right.

We will let the pecans sit for a couple of weeks and after a cold front comes through, we'll begin shelling them.  I enjoy sitting and shelling pecans.  It is an enjoyable pastime in the fall.  Pecans freeze well, so we'll freeze them, but we'll turn many into pies and will roast and salt others.  The neighbors have a recipe with cinnamon and sugar pecans.  Looking forward to all of that!

Spring is Officially Here

Spring is a very, very short window around here.  It moves quickly into summer.  We're already seeing afternoon temps in the mid-80's.  We will enjoy the mornings in the 60's while we still have them, cherish them and relish them.  They will soon be a distant memory as the humidity rolls in.  Enough of that melancholy talk!

The plants are all sporting new growth and the very last tree in our area that puts on leaves are the pecan trees.  Some folks say that is how you can tell that spring has officially arrived.  Well, it is here.  The warmer weather has provoked the pecans to come out of dormancy.  They have quickly put out fresh, green growth and they'll soon be providing shade.  The cows, goats and chickens like to sit underneath them and nap.

The garden is quickly growing as well.  Everything is coming up aside from some Ozark Razorback Peas that I planted.  They were old.  I had saved them in 2012 and planted them this year to rotate my old saved seed inventory.  Well, due to their age, I only achieved about a 50% germination rate.  I'll likely fill in the gaps with a bunch more planted closely to use the old seed up and get a better stand.

The other peas and beans are popping up in every row.  I love to see seedlings popping up in an otherwise barren landscape.

From the cotyledons come fresh first true leaves that soon open in the sunlight.  Spring is an optimistic, hopeful time.  Each new day brings noticeable growth in the garden.

Along with the coming of the new, there is the finishing up of the old.  The fall crop is about gone.  The last of the dinosaur kale will be chopped and fed to the cows.  At this time of year, they get little bugs all over them.  The swiss chard is still producing well.  We have two more kohlrabi plants to harvest.

The last of the fall crop is the bull's blood beets.  You can spot them by their leaves that look like bulls bled all over them.  They are quite colorful in the garden contrasted with the green leaves of the beans growing nearby.

We have started harvesting them and Tricia cuts them up and roasts them in the oven.  A very tasty side dish, that's for sure.  We had pickled beets in a salad today and they were delicious!

Perhaps Sunday I'll post an update on the garden and show you what's growing and give a progress report on the spring garden.

Enjoying Fall Colors

It was a very nice day last week.  I came home for lunch and we decided to have coffee outside on the front porch in the rocking chairs.  We sipped our coffee, waved at people as they passed by on the road.  I wish that I could have captured the event on video and zoomed in on it, but I didn't.  So, you'll have to use your imagination.  In the photo below, I captured "Fall" in our neck of the woods.

If you had an eagle eye, you could see that leaves were falling out of the pecan trees.  Lots of leaves.  As the wind continued to blow, a lazy stream of leaves fell slowly, but steadily toward the ground.  Those leaves did their duty all spring, photosynthesizing, providing shade, and now their work was done - almost.

I suggested to the wifey that we walk out and check the mail.  I walked out barefooted.  It was nice to feel the cool earth beneath my feet and feel the crunch of fall leaves under me.  I don't know what it is about Fall, but it is as if you can just look out and tell that there is not as much humidity in the air.  The air is crisp.  The sky is blue.  The sunshine is brilliant.  Life is good.

The leaves were beginning to gather on the ground beneath the trees.  Tricia reminded me of when the kids were little and I'd rake up the leaves in great big piles and the kids would run and jump in them.  It was great fun for them.  Simple things like a pile of leaves or an empty cardboard box can sometimes provide more entertainment that costly gifts.

These leaves won't be raked and bagged up.  Instead, I just mow them.  They compost into the lawn.  That's why I said their work was almost done.  The leaves will fertilize the St. Augustine grass under the trees and hopefully provide some fertility that will yield a good pecan crop again next year.

Right outside the back door is another pecan tree.  It yields bigger pecans than the ones in the front and they are easy to shell.  We used to call pecans like this, "paper shell pecans."  While the trees in the front yard have brown leaves that are falling or mostly fallen, this tree has leaves that are still hanging on the tree and are yellow.

I think it is a beautiful color.  We have friends that just got back from a trip to New England for two months.  They went as far north as Maine and said that they hit the Fall colors at their peak in North Carolina.  This pecan tree right here in south Louisiana ain't so bad, though.

I liked the way the sunlight filtered through the leaves, highlighting the yellow against the blue sky.

But alas, my coffee cup was empty and it was time to go back to work.  Glad I got a chance to see Fall take place, because it doesn't take long.  If you aren't paying attention, this is what the tree will look like in just a skinny minute:

Barren and sad until spring.

15 Calves on the Ground

Last year the cows at the farm in Oberlin decided that they didn't like fences.  They liked wide open spaces.  That created problems and they got an all expenses paid trip to the Sale Barn.  Fast forward to the end of the year and Dad and I decided, "Let's buy some more cows!"  We did.  We purchased 16 bred heifers and put them back at the old home place at the farm.

They had more grass than they could ever eat.  They remained fat throughout the winter and just recently began to bag up.  Calves began hitting the ground.  One after the other.  Before you knew it, we had 16 calves.  Let me correct that - 15.  One of the calves was born but the sac never burst and it suffocated and died.  Well, as someone smarter than me one said, "You can't lose 'em if you don't have 'em."

We decided to get out on Saturday.  We drove to Oberlin and opened the gate and drove in the pasture.  Right inside the gate is an enormous live oak tree like you might see in a painting.  I would think that if it could talk, it would tell you many stories.  My grandfather was raised in a house right on this property.  Now the house is no longer there, but the tree remains.  And the cows and calves do too.  We gave them a holler and they began walking toward us.

The Old Live Oak

The simplicity and serenity of the place is astounding.  It is easy to forget when you are sitting beneath the tree watching the cows that there is a pandemic.  Being out in the country is plenty of social distancing!  The cows curiously began to walk toward us and check us out.  I was quick to notice that they weren't following the "6 foot rule."  For shame!

The calves all bunched toward the front.  The momma cows and the calves are all healthy and butterball fat.  They look like they enjoy life in the country.  As we sat there watching the cows checking us out, we observed yellow flowers blooming across the pasture.  The wind gently blew and the flowers from the thistles growing in the distance floated in the air like little white parachutes.

Mom & Dad drove up and we pulled lawn chairs out of the trunk and we sat in the shade and talked for the longest time.  It was a pleasant afternoon.  The boys climbed up in the huge limbs of the live oak like I did as a boy.  The limbs are laden with Resurrection vine (appropriate for the day before Resurrection Day!)  Resurrection fern looks like it is brown and dead, but as soon as it rains, it greens up beautifully and completely covers the limbs with its lush foliage.

In the background of the above photo, you can see an old pecan orchard planted by my great-grandfather.  One of the old pecan trees has broken in half.  We'll cut up the wood for firewood.  It is a reminder to me that some things like the pecan trees succumb while other things like the live oak perseveres.  It is nice in a world of rot and decay that there are things that live on - like the live oak, like the memories.  And it is encouraging to know that new calves are on the ground and new memories can be made while enjoying those of the past.

Husband and Wife Trees

In our side yard we have two mature pecan trees that provide nice a nice, shady spot over some St. Augustine grass that spreads over the ground like a comfortable quilt.  Sometimes on those perfect days in October or in Spring when the weather is so magnificent that you can't help but whistle, we'll go outside and picnic right underneath those trees.  The pecans they produce are small and hard to crack, but you will be rewarded if you persevere, because the small pecans inside are so rich and oily and delicious.  Tricia made a homemade pecan pie last night using some of them and the secret ingredient (Steen's syrup).  Blog post and Recipe HERE  So doggone good!

The trees were planted long ago by a previous owner of the homesite we acquired in 2001.  While our home was being built, we'd come and sit underneath these trees and dream about what the future would hold for our family.  One of the pecan trees has a large, protruding knot, and I remember lifting our kids up into the tree so that they would sit on the knot to look out over the landscape. Can you remember climbing a tree as a child and marveling at the way that the view from way up there gave you a whole new vantage point?

The trees look like twins, don't they?  I mean, they are the same size, and if you were to scoot them together, they would fit together perfectly and the result would be one perfect tree.  Can you see that? I did some reading and found that there is actually a name for this occurrence.  The trees are called Husband and Wife Trees.

Our Husband and Wife Trees

According to Wikipedia, Eric Sloane was an American landscape painter and writer of illustrative works about cultural history and folklore.  He wrote the following in his book, Once Upon a Time: The Way America Was:

Trees were even involved in early American marriages: it was a New England custom to plant two trees at the entrance of a new home, known as "husband and wife trees."  When land was cleared and surrounding forests in New England were almost denuded by the need of charcoal to feed iron furnaces, there were some places in Connecticut where only husband and wife trees remained on the landscape.  Those trees still mark the location of many old farmhouses.

I think that is very, very interesting.  I like things that stand the test of time - things intentionally done - projects embarked on with a purpose.  In researching more about the subject of Husband & Wife Trees, I stumbled across something that is written so beautifully, it flows like honey and I want to share it with you.  This comes from an Agrarian blog called Granny Miller in This Post:

Husband and Wife trees.  Old timers called them that and you hardly ever hear the term any more. It has gone out of fashion: like marrying for life and farming.  Of course the expression is a folk term and an analogy taken from the material and natural world that was used long ago to describe a married couple’s relationship.

A married man and woman are like two separate trees planted in different holes at the same time. They are a permanent fixture in the landscape and together they watch the years and the seasons pass.

The trees are the same size and one does not hinder the growth of the other.

Because the trees stand so close together they are not as subject to wind or ice damage as a single tree is. The two together are more likely to survive adversity.

The trees grow very close to one another, but they are truly separate and there is space enough between them for the wind and air to pass. Their roots are entangled from beneath and how they are joined is hidden from the world. The trees derive their sustenance from the same Source and one cannot be separated from the other without risking them both.

Another angle of our Husband & Wife Trees

What an absolutely profound sentiment!  Husband and Wife Trees.  Now there's a tradition we need to revive.  Speaking of that, The Plain Garden Planting Cycle Found HERE says that from mid-October through November is the very best season for planting trees and shrubs.  Time to get busy.  I always like the old quote, "The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago.  The next best time is TODAY!"