Last week I took a road trip to the Boot-heel of Missouri to visit a pecan cultivar trial established on the farm of Rick and Cindy Faulkner. The grove is located just north of New Madrid, Missouri and is planted on a deep sandy soil that is irrigated regularly. The trees are doing great and all are producing a nice crop of pecans (photo above).
Cindy started her pecan orchard by obtaining some trees locally. The cultivars she found were Choctaw, Desirable, and Stuart; common cultivars in the south but not the best choices for SE Missouri. All three cultivars developed moderate scab infections and all three are late ripening (photo at right). Note the limited amount of kernel development at the time this photo was taken (Sept. 12). Because these 3 cultivars are so late to fill their kernels, the quality of the nut meats at harvest will be effected. During most years, the kernels will be hollow and lack the moist, oily flavor most pecan lovers appreciate.
The good news for the Boot-heel is that we now have several early-ripening cultivars that will produce high quality kernels. Faith, Pawnee, and Gardner will ripen in early October and we have all three cultivars in the trial (photo at left). When the photo was taken (Sept. 12), kernel filling had progressed nicely but was not yet complete. These pecan cultivars are susceptible to scab at our location in Kansas and we need to spray them regularly with a fungicide. However, nuts growing at the Faulkner farm were not sprayed in 2017 and I did not notice any signs of scab on Faith, Pawnee, or Gardner.
I made sure to include several scab resistant cultivars in the trial at New Madrid. Greenriver, Kanza, and Oswego have performed well in the Boot-heel. In fact, Kanza has become Cindy's favorite pecan to fill her freezer for personal use.
We also established some other early ripening cultivars in the trial. Surecrop, Yates 68, and City Park have performed well but their nuts do not stand out from any of the other cultivars in the trial (photo at left). I did note that the shell of Surecrop was starting to color by early September indicating that this pecan will shuck-split by the end of the month.
The final set of cultivars in the SE Missouri cultivar trial all originate with the USDA pecan breeding program (photo at right). Oconee and Lakota have proven scab resistance. Oconee was will ripen in late October while Lakota will split shuck in mid-October. I included USDA 75-8-5 and 75-8-9 in this trial because they are supposed to ripen early. USDA 75-8-5 looks well on its way to early ripening but 75-8-9 does not. Neither of these USDA numbered selections looks worthy of propagation at this point.
