Lessons from the Orchard

Back in 1992 or so, after we got our house dried in and we had plumbing and interior walls and a real door on the bathroom, Mo and I started a papershell pecan/fruit orchard. His mom, Louise, and her sister Rose both brought lawn chairs up the hill and blessed the first few trees we planted, watching as we dug the holes and drinking iced tea and chatting in the way of loving old sisters everywhere. And over the years trees have died (the winter of 92/93 was a cruel one) and come back from the roots as natives — or maybe, as Mo suspects, we were just sold native pecan trees for the price of papershells. We planted three peach trees in it, too, and Parker County peaches are famous all over the state. Back in 2004 the Loring peach tree produced heavenly tasting, gorgeous peaches that weighed a good pound apiece and probably held a cup of juice, but since then the plum curculio and some kind of little boring asshole insect have ravaged them.

Unlike the past two years, this one is a good year for pecans. I have learned some nifty things this year, from trees that (all of a sudden, it seems!) are now anywhere from 7 to 35 feet tall. I've converted my looseleaf notebook to a computer file with a drawing and photo, even though I'm sure there are orchard tracking programs out there. It’s a small orchard, only maybe an acre wide; we only have some 40 tree positions, and some of those trees have died permanently and will not be replaced.

➺ Ten pounds of mixed pecans, unshelled, fills a #10 bucket to the brim.
➺ Bad pecans feel lighter, may have a piece of hull that won't come off, and float high in the water.
➺ Shelled papershell pecans sell for about $12 a pound in the store; the farmer's market in Weatherford buys unshelled pecans for from 60 cents up to $2.50 a pound, if they like the taste, and sells them for up to $7 per package (no mention of how much a package weighs).
➺ If you drain the gray water from the washer on a papershell pecan (and don't use bleach), that sumbitch will grow fast and tall and produce 3-inch-long pecan husks. The nuts themselves, shelled, are very nearly 2 inches long, and they're delicious. That's important because papershells usually are bigger than natives but they're almost always blander tasting; it's as if the flavor of a small native nut has been spread throughout a nut two or three times its size.
➺ Pecan trees need 50 feet between them, not 30.
➺ Peach trees give up after about 15 years, no matter how good they were.
➺ Even if you plant a native nut tree over the septic system, it will not turn into a papershell. Any seedling you find is going to be native, because papershells are all grafts.

Mo was harvesting pecans the other day and something fell on him: a four-inch-long green cutworm-looking critter with brown spots all down his sides. A similar-looking bug family ate my whole fuschia plant this year, but no tomato worms attacked my tomato plants (they both died of fusarium or verticillium wilt instead). Mo brought this one in the house and put it in a brandy snifter with some pecan leaves and a small twig, and it promptly turned a darker red-brown, made itself a leaf cocoon and went to sleep within one day. It never hatched.

But: The image at top is what a similar critter turned into: a gorgeous Luna moth, the first I had ever seen.