That's Just Nuts!

We have three pecan trees on our property that we pick from.  There's a couple more in the back that the squirrels claim.  We don't get a single pecan off of those.  Then our neighbors directly east of us have three pecan trees.  Those pecans are huge!  Ours are very small.  In fact, most people wouldn't bother shelling them.  The thing about our pecans is this: although they are small, they are oily and very rich.  This makes them delicious!  So in our brief winters here in South Louisiana, I spend nice relaxing times in front of the fireplace shelling pecans.  It is a satisfying pastime while listening to music or visiting with family.  The only downside is the mess I make.  I keep the vacuum cleaner close and try to clean up after myself when I'm done.

Pecans freeze very well.  So we pack them in gallon-sized zip loc bags and put them in the freezer once shelled.  Some years the trees produce lots and some years, they make absolutely nothing.  That's why it's a good idea to store some in the freezer during the "fat" years to be prepared for the "lean" years.  I think that's what ol' Joseph did back in the Book of Genesis.  Here are 9 gallons of pecans in our deep freeze in the house:

And here are four more on the door of the stand-up freezer out in the garage.

And six more gallons on the shelves in the same freezer.

If my math is right, that's 19 gallons of shelled pecans this year.  I think we gave some away, so it's more like 20 or 21 gallons.  For the bigger pecans from our neighbor's tree, we crack them ourselves with our "Reed's Rocket" pecan cracker.  For the smaller pecans?  Forget about it!  We bring onion sacks of whole pecans to our local feed store.

They have a pecan cracking machine.  They pour the pecans in the machine and it cracks them.  You can hear the noise in the warehouse with the machine going, "Crack, Crack, Crack."  They charge $0.33 per pound before the government takes their share of it in taxes.  The machine is ancient and I figure they've probably paid for it many times over.  I think it is worth it for our small pecans.  The paperwork below shows that we brought them 109 pounds of pecans and paid $39.77 for the cracking.

We like to eat them to snack on.  Tricia will oven roast them in butter and Worcestershire sauce.  That's pretty addictive.  My favorite way to eat pecans, though, is in pecan pies.  I love pecan pies.  We like this Recipe right here that uses Steen's Pure Cane Syrup.  What can be better than a slice of homemade pecan pie and a cup of coffee?

A Bumper Crop of Pecans!

We lit our first fire of the season in the fireplace this week.  We put off turning on the heat for as long as we can and enjoy sitting in front of the fireplace in the evenings, enjoying the warmth and the mesmerizing fire.  There are so many memories associated with fireplaces.  The andirons come from my mom's great aunt and uncle's fireplace.  The bellows hanging was my maternal grandmother's (Bumby) and the fireplace tools were from my paternal grandparents' home.

We've watched a TV show set in Canada called 'Heartland.'  The grandfather (Jack) in that program has a fireplace in his home and has special stones set in the fireplace that are named after people.  They are special and have a place in the hearts and minds of those who gather around the hearth to enjoy the fire.  I wish we would've done that.  In the home I grew up in, Mom & Dad have bricks in their fireplace that were from other buildings that were special to my parents.  They can point them out and there are stories to go along with them.  I think that's neat.

As 'fireplace season' progresses, this is a place at night where I spend a lot of time, sitting around, shelling pecans.  We have SO many pecans this year.  We'll take the small ones from our trees to the feed store we patronize.  They have a pecan shelling machine.  You can hear it pop as the pecans are fed into it.  The pecans are cracked (for a fee, of course, and you're charged by the pound).  I'll sit here and separate the shells from the nut.  It's mind-numbing, but pleasant work on a cold winter's evening.

Our neighbors let us know that they are so busy working on their house that they won't be picking up any pecans from their trees this year.  They didn't want to see them go to waste, so they told us to pick up all we wanted.  Wow!  How generous.  Their pecans are almost as big as golf balls.  On a beautiful afternoon last week, I set up my pecan cracking operation on the back patio while listening to an audiobook.  How relaxing!

My pecan cracking operation doesn't involve mechanized equipment.  I use elbow grease.  I use a Reed's Rocket, circa 1950 manufactured by the Arthur W. Reed Manufacturing Company out of Little Rock, Arkansas.  I'll show you how the process works.  It is wonderfully simple.  There is no rush to the process.  It doesn't require any deep thinking or ciphering.  You just settle in to a rhythmic, efficient repetitive motion.  The nuts go in a bowl and the shells go in a bucket to be either burned in the fireplace (they make cherry-red coals) or composted in the garden.

The Reed's Rocket is adjustable and thus allows you to crack any size pecan, walnut, etc. in it.  You can adjust the threads to accommodate a larger or smaller nut.  Once you get is set just right, you slip the pecan in and use leverage to pull the 'piston' down.

You hear a loud crack and little pieces of pecan shell fly across the patio, revealing the treasured pecan inside.

While the pecans from our trees are only about half this size, they are full of oil, rich and fat.  These pecans from the neighbor's trees are larger and just about perfect, from my vantage point.

About 1 in 10 are bad, and I just throw them away.  Let me correct that.  Nothing goes to waste.  As it turns out, Belle eats them, even those that have bad spots.  A pecan-eating dog, can you imagine?  In just a short time, I filled a blue plastic 'pea-shellin' bowl with shelled pecans.  The contents filled two 1 gallon sized zip loc bags.  We'll put them in the deep freeze for later use.

This just scratches the surface of the pecans we'll have on hand.  We'll be shelling pecans all winter long, both on the patio and in front of the fireplace.  It's a good thing that we love pecan pies!  If you drop by to visit, we'll send you home with some shelled pecans.  Maybe Tricia will share her oven roasted pecan recipe with you.  It's got Worcestershire Sauce in it.  They are so addictive that you might have to attend a 12 step program once you've indulged.  

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!

2021 Pecan Harvest - By the Numbers

As we've discussed in previous posts, we have three pecan trees on the property that bear pecans.  Trouble is, they don't produce every year.  This is the first year in the past two or three years that they've produced.  In this PECAN BLOG POST from mid-December 2021 we talked about the harvest a little bit and then how we brought them to our local feed store for cracking.  In total, we brought 122 pounds of whole pecans for shelling.  As discussed, it costs $0.33 per pound to crack them.  In other words, we paid $40.26 for the feed store to crack the pecans.

Once cracked, we take them home, and shell them.  It is really easy and quick to do this!  You simply separate the shell from the "meat."  In the past, I'd save the $40 and crack and shell them myself, but I've found that the time cracking can be better used in other areas.

It is a very relaxing task to do while sitting in front of a fireplace, especially if the weather is cold and wet outside.  I'll take all the pecan shells and throw into the compost pile.

An added bonus in allowing the machine at the feed store to crack them is that you generally get mostly whole pecans - not a lot of brokens.  We'll generally get gallon-sized freezer bags, label them, fill them and then put them in the deep freeze.  Pecans freeze well and then you just don't know, we may not have another pecan crop for a couple of years.  We'd do well to stock up.

And, stock up, we did!  We filled a number of gallon-sized ziploc bags.  Before I loaded into the deep freeze, I decided to count and weigh the bags.

In all, we filled 13 gallon bags and 5 quart bags.  The total weight of pecan "meat" was 39 pounds!  The total weight of pecans cracked was 122 pounds.  So that means that 83 pounds of the total weight was NOT the edible pecan.  Seems like a lot of shrinkage for the shells, but as I think about it, roughly 1/8th of the pecans were bad (rotten, dry, inedible).  

So, not counting my time, we spent $40.26 in total for Parsley's Feed to crack the pecans.  That yielded 39 pounds of pecans and that equates to $1.03 per pound.  I just pulled up the price of a pound of pecan halves at Wal Mart.com and the Great Value Brand is $9.48 per pound.  Looking at the bottom line, we saved $8.45 per pound on pecans.  With all this talk of pecans, I'm getting hungry for a slice of pecan pie right about now!

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.

Purple Hull Pea Pickin'

Purple hulls and pintos I've shelled more than my share

Cause lighting bugs and crickets danced in the evening air

And like a beacon that ol' yellow bulb it always led me home

Some how mama always knew just when to leave it on

If the world had a front porch like we did back then

We'd still have our problems but we'd all be friends

Treatin' your neighbor like he's your next of kin

Wouldn't be gone with the wind

If the world had a front porch like we did back then 

                                                                      -Tracy Lawrence

The purple hull peas that I planted in the side yard after harvested the Irish Potatoes are starting to come in now.  Every afternoon we go out and pick a "mess" of them.  You can tell why they are named purple hull peas:

Shelling peas is a nice, relaxing thing to do.  I really enjoy just sitting down, getting a bowl for the peas and a bucket for the pods, and getting busy.  Russ likes to shell them, too.

Fresh-shelled peas are a beautiful thing to look at, but a more beautiful thing to see simmering on the stove-top with some smoked sausage for a little extra flavor.  We like to eat them over rice with some cornbread.

We've eaten a big pot of them already and have already started shelling another batch of them!

Although the purple hull peas are still flowering and will continue to produce for a while, I've staged the planting so that when the purple hulls peter out, the Ozark Razorback peas and Blackeyed Peas will begin.  We'll likely put a bunch in the freezer for quick suppers later.

Purple Hull Peas, If You Please

The rains we've received in the past couple of weeks has really made the grass start to grow.  It was high time.  The cows and goats and chickens had the pasture eaten down so much the remaining grass resembled felt on a pool table.  The rains also kicked the weeds in the garden into overdrive.  But let's look at the positive, shall we?  The purple hull peas have been a beneficiary of the rain, too!  Green immature pods cover the garden rows, accompanied by white blooms and the ripened purple hulls of the peas that gave the pea its name.

It has been very hot and humid the past few days, but I made the most of an opportunity yesterday between rain showers to go outside and pick peas. 

I went down one side of the row and then back up the other side, picking ripe peas and pulling weeds.  I threw the weeds over the fence where the goats and chickens quickly gobbled them up.  I had to be real careful where walking as watermelon vines, cantaloupe vines, and sweet potato vines compete for real estate.  I spotted more than a few melons growing.  They look like they'll be ripe just in time for July 4th.

I picked a pretty good "mess" of peas and brought them inside.  Bending over and picking peas is a task, a chore, to be sure.  There are mosquitoes.  It is hot.  It makes your back hurt.  It is nice when you come to the end of the row.

But the work isn't done.  Those peas aren't going to shell themselves, no sirree.  Shelling peas, however, is an enjoyable task.  I sat down at the island in the kitchen while Tricia cooked down fresh picked okra and tomatoes for supper and I began shelling peas into a tupperware container.  Plop, plop, plop.  The fat peas made a pleasant noise as they plopped into the container.

We ate supper and then I moved the pea-shelling endeavor into the den.  In no time flat the pea shelling was done.  I had a full container of fresh-shelled peas and a full bucket of empty pea pods to compost back into the garden.

I dropped a hint to my wife that purple hull peas over rice with smoked sausage or tasso would be real good.  Also added that some homemade cornbread to accompany that meal would make me happy.  The simple things in life are the best!

Processing the 2016 Pecan Crop

We have a few pecan trees in the yard and each year we pick what we can from underneath the trees crack and shell them.  Our pecans are really small, but they are rich - loaded with oil and very flavorful.

I like to sit in front of the fireplace while shelling pecans.  It is a relaxing, yet rewarding task. Depending on how many pecans we pick, it can be a long process to get them cracked, shelled and in the freezer.  We compost all the pecan shells into the garden.  This year we took our pecans to our local feed store to have the pecans cracked.  In the past, I'd crack them myself, but for a small investment, having them cracked mechanically, saves a lot of time.  There was a problem, though.  The mechanical cracker at our local feed store was broken and they weren't fixing it until next season.

We looked around and found that there is a place in nearby Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, called the Fruit Stand that has a pecan cracker that will crack our small pecans.  They charge by the weight and when they weighed the pecans that we brought to them, the total was 62 pounds.  They charge $0.35 per pound to crack them, so the total was $23.

Tricia dropped them off and drove to Lafayette and had lunch with me.  An hour later when she went to pick them up, they were ready.  She shopped around at the Fruit Stand and bought some good french bread while she was there.  She also looked at what they were selling shelled pecans for.  $10 a pound!  Wow.  She brought the big molasses tub full of 62 pounds of cracked pecans home and I got busy.  Since the pecans had sat on our back patio for a few months, we experienced some loss.  Some of the pecans were bad, but many were good.  In no time at all I had the big tub empty.  Out of 62 pounds of cracked pecans, we yielded five one gallon sized Zip Loc bags holding 18 pounds of shelled pecans.  I was hoping for better, but that's okay.  Now we have a baseline of 29% return on pecan "meat" to whole pecan, we'll shoot for better next year.

Four bags - with one already in the freezer

Although we snacked on some, we like to preserve them by soaking them and then freezing them. We use a recipe from Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions cookbook. It is called Crispy Pecans. We love this recipe.  It is very easy.  It calls for:
4 cups pecans
2 teaspoons sea salt
filtered water

Mix the three ingredients and allow it to soak overnight.  In the morning, drain in a colander.

Then spread the soaked pecans on a tray and place in an oven, or in our case, a warmer, and let it get to 150 degrees for 12 to 24 hours, turning until they are dry and crispy.

When dry, we pour them back into a Zip Loc bag and snack on them or freeze them for snacking or using for baking recipes like pies and brownies pancakes.

Gotta Love Those Butter Beans

When Russ was a newborn, he had some very serious, life-threatening injuries that required a long hospital stay after being life-flighted to New Orleans Children's Hospital.  Thank the Good Lord that he is fine now.  Russ was one day old when he was life-flighted and a nurse on the transport team nicknamed him "Butterbean." I've never had a nickname, but I always thought the nickname, "Butterbean," for Russ was a good one.

Guess what? I like butter beans, too!  I have an entire row of them growing in the garden.  They grew like crazy all throughout the spring and summer.  They are loaded up with nice pods and on Saturday, I figured it was a good day to get a bowl and pick a 'mess' of them.

Trellised butterbeans

If you take a peak beneath all the foliage, you can see numerous pods hanging from the vines.  To determine the ones that are ready to pick, I just run my fingers over the pod, looking for the bulge telling you that the pods are full of mature butter beans.

Ready to pick

After a few minutes, I picked a nice bowl of them.  Picking the pods off of the vines is a satisfying thing.  You can't really call it work.

But the thing that is more satisfying than picking them is shelling them.  In order to shell them, it is important to find yourself a comfortable spot to sit.  The first choice would be to sit down in a rocking chair on the front porch.  I opted for the second best choice as it was nearer - a swing under a shady live oak tree.  Of course you can shell them anywhere.

A nice spot to shell butter beans

The pods are large.  The beans within are huge, fat and bulging.

I planted several different varieties.  Here is a cool-looking speckled pink and maroon one.  If I remember correctly, this is the Dixie Speckled Butterpea.

They are big beans, easily wider than my ring finger.

Here's a nice contrast between the two varieties I was picking.

The beans are large, so it didn't take many beans to start filling up the bowl.  Those are some nice looking beans, right there.

But here is the nicest shot - the real money shot.  As pretty as they are in the bowl, they are even prettier when they are cooked up and plated on top of rice with some cut up sausage, garnished with some fresh green onions with a side of sauteed bok choy and some homemade cornbread.

Wow!  That's a good southern meal.  Gotta love those butter beans!