Harvesting early maturing pecans

    One of my prime objectives in breeding pecans is to discover new early maturing pecan cultivars that will ripen in northern pecan growing areas. Because most of the clones in my pecan breeding block split shuck a month ago, I decided today was a good day to shake some trees and harvest pecans. For the most part, the nuts fell freely from the trees and I could use my new Savage pecan harvester to pick up the crop (photo at right).
    Harvesting pecans today was just as exciting as it had been for the past 37 years when I was working at K-State's Pecan Experiment Field. However, today's harvest was different. I was harvesting my own crop and I was handling every portion of the harvest process by myself.
    Today was my first day of harvest. I wanted to make sure all my equipment was working correctly and I wanted to get a feel for how many trees I can harvest in a day's time. I began the day by shaking 3 rows in the pecan breeding block. I then walked these rows picking up any large stick that had fallen during the shaking process. Once the orchard floor was clean, I used the harvester to pick up the nuts. This was a new harvester to me so it took a little while to find the proper ground speed and PTO rpm to pick up nuts cleanly.

   One drawback to harvesting early is that I ended up picking a large number of nuts with green husks still firmly attached (photo at left). After a hard freeze these green stick-tights would have turned black and dried hard. However, harvesting pecans before a hard fall freeze means that green stick-tights become mixed in with dry, ready-to- crack nuts. If green-hulled nuts are allowed stay mixed in with good pecans they will increase the moisture content of the good nuts and can even cause the entire batch of nuts to start heating up.
  So, in harvesting nuts today, I also made sure to leave enough time at the end of the day to run my crop through the pecan cleaner to remove all the green nuts. This way my good pecans would not pick up any unwanted moisture. As it turned out, the number of green stick-tights I removed from the cleaning table was far less that I had first thought. I bet some of those green hulls got scrubbed off by the scuffing wheel inside my pecan cleaner.
  Tomorrow's weather forecast is warm and sunny. As soon as the morning dew dries up I'll be back to harvesting.