Thursday, March 12, 2020

Kanza holds on all winter

Kanza 7 March 2020
    The 2019 pecan harvest season was a wet one. On my farm, I could never harvest the nuts from two Kanza trees because the ground around them never had a chance to dry out. I use a Savage pecan harvester to harvest my crop and I've learned over the years that you can plug up a harvester with mud trying to pick pecans on wet ground. So, in the end, I had to leave two Kanza trees unharvested due to wet soil conditions around the trees.
    Last weekend,the sun was shinning and the soils in my pecan grove just beginning to dry out enough to allow me to work in the orchard. I walked over to the unharvested Kanza trees to see if I could grab a snack and was surprised to see that much of the crop was still hanging in the tree (photo at right). In my view, holding on to the nut crop is a positive attribute. My orchard as already been swept clean by 2 flash floods during this winter and early spring yet most of the remaining Kanza nuts were still hanging in the tree, safe from flood waters or simply rotting on wet ground.
  With the forecast for more rain next week, I'll probably never get to harvest the nuts from these two Kanza trees. However, it good to know that Kanza will hold on to its crop until I get ready to shake nuts from the tree.