Pecan Lane

Welcome to the 2022 Pecan Lane newsletter. We hope your trees are having a productive year. We look forward to helping you with your nuts.

Pecan Lane offers the following services: cracking and shelling of your nuts, sales of nuts from our trees, grafted and ungrafted tree sales, and at times purchase and sales of quality nuts grown by others.

Once you harvest your nuts, we suggest you let them dry in free flowing air for at least a few days if not longer. Be careful of high heat situations inside near a stove or other heat source as the nuts can get too brittle.

In order for us to best help everyone we reserve the right to reject anything you bring to us for processing. We will not accept nuts that have been stored in plastic bags, especially ones that are airtight as the nuts get moldy and can contaminate our equipment. Nuts should be brought to us with sufficient air exposure offered by mesh bags, cardboard boxes, and open top pails. Nuts must be free of debris and dirt, this means they need to be run through some inspection and cleaning process on your end, easiest for many will be rinsing nuts off in a colander. We suggest you do this the day before cracking as it can add a touch of moisture to the nuts and allow them to handle the processing better. Some crackers and shellers boil nuts to clean them and let the nuts shell out nicely, because this also cooks the nuts some we avoid this step. Please do your part to keep everybody’s pecans clean and healthy.

How we clean our nuts:

If we are not here when you drop off nuts they may be dropped off inside the green pecan building. Please label each container with your name and phone number.

We have crackers for small, medium, and large size nuts to improve your pecan yield. If nuts are not put in the right size crackers the crack quality suffers. We then run the nuts through an adjustable sheller that helps separate the nut from the shell and blows lightweight shell pieces out of what we return to you. If you have a preference for pushing your nuts to make hand work easier, please advise. Nuts can also be run gently through but this makes hand cleaning more difficult. We suggest you trust us to make adjustments to our equipment to appropriately handle the nuts you bring us. Cracking and shelling is done for fifty cents a pound.

We do offer a pecan sizer should your nuts be of mixed sizes. This equipment sorts nuts by width, not length, and can improve product quality. This equipment is available for 25 cents a pound. We suggest you keep your nut varieties in different containers.

When your nuts are done we will send you a text along with the amount owed. Nuts can be picked up any time. If a phone call is required the call will generally be made during a break in the cracking or later in the evening.

All of this equipment is very loud. We wear and offer hearing protection to observers. Conversations while equipment is running should be kept to a minimum and take place outside.

We ask that you travel slowly on our driveway so the stones are not disturbed. Speed limit sign is posted. Pets are not allowed. Children must be kept under your control at all times. Please do not wander without permission.

We anticipate cracking and shelling most mornings, taking Wednesday and Sundays off if the season is busy. Saturdays we plan to be available and working all day. We process nuts on a first come, first serve basis and reserve the right to stop working if we are tired.

Once again, we wish you a good pecan year. Pecan Lane looks forward to helping you with your pecan needs.

Walk around tour and showing some of the above:

So last year I grafted what to me was a lot of trees, mostly from scion wood I collected here, but also using scion wood I purchased. Most of these grafts failed, here are my observations as to why:

1. I was excited and grafted too early for the weather. As soon as the bark slipped I got to work. Then we had cold weather and I think this ruined any fragile growth. I've since learned how to get grafts done earlier but the production system would add too much work for my one man operation.

2. I was excited to buy fancy grafting gadgets that would put fancy shapes in scion and rootstock. This made some of the precise knife work easier, seemed to have a good match of cambium layers. None of these styles of grafts survived!

What did work? Well I was very disappointed in how late the scion material came from one source last year, but it arrived well after any frost chances. More of this scion material lived through to this year than any other trees. By the time I got these scions I'd given up on fancy gadgets and was only doing three or four flap banana grafts. So this year I waited until much later to get started. Some of the early trees already have bud break, so exciting to see. Some of the root stock trees are larger so I am trying some bark grafts having had some success with those on my first Kanza trees.