Northern Pecans: Early ripening pecan cultivars begin shuck split

Canton, 22 Sept 2015

   This morning I checked our cultivar trials for nuts with opened shucks. I found several of our early ripening cultivars had split shucks including; Canton, Norton, Osage, Faith, Shepherd and Surecrop (photos at right and below).
    Several years ago we grafted a selection from our breeding project, KT143, into a new field trial. Several young KT143 trees had good nut crops with roughly 50% shuck split (photo below). KT143 is a cross between Pawnee and Major but the shuck of KT143 behaves like its Major parent. The shuck separates along the sutures but remains fairly close around the nut. It will take a killing frost to fully open the shuck and free the nut inside. This "Major" habit of shuck opening is common among several Major progeny including Kanza and Hark.
   I found three USDA selections with split shucks (photos below). USDA 75-8-5 resulted from a cross of Osage and Creek. USDA 61-1-X and 61-1-15 share the same parents, Barton and Staking Hardy Giant.
    In looking over these nut cluster photos you will also notice that Canton, Faith, USDA 61-1-X, and USDA 61-1-15 all have light scab infections. We sprayed these trees three times for scab and had fair success in keeping the disease from impacting nut production.
     KT143 nuts were infected with powdery mildew but showed no signs of scab. The powdery mildew did not effect shuck opening and the nuts inside were fully packed with kernel. KT143 received only one early-season fungicide application in 2015.