Another great day for harvest

    Today was another absolutely beautiful day for harvesting pecans. We broke out the old Lockwood pecan picker to harvest one of our cultivar trails (photo at right). This Lockwood machine may be over 40 years old but it still the best machine for harvesting the small, two-tree plots in this trial. Each cultivar is painted with a different color code to make identifying plots easy from the seat of the shaking tractor or harvester. Trees with yellow paint are Greenriver. Red and green paint on the same tree indicates a Chetopa while blue and white means Giles. There are 9 cultivars in this trial with each cultivar having a different color code. It definitely makes for a colorful orchard.

       When the Lockwood picker was designed back in the late 1960's, pecans were handled in burlap bags. Once the hopper gets full of nuts, we pause the machine, drop the out-feed gate, and the nuts come pouring out (photo at left). This system was originally designed to pour nuts into a burlap bag but we have refitted our Lockwood with a longer out-feed chute capable of  dropping the nuts into an portable elevator.

    The elevator lifts the nuts up and drops them into a waiting super sack (photo at right). This way, we can use a tractor for all the heavy lifting instead of getting a sore backs.
   We mounted the elevator on an axle and wheels to allow us to move it around the pecan grove.  A gas-powered,  electric generator provides the electricity needed to power the elevator.

The rush to harvest pecans is on!

   On this day after Thanksgiving, many Americans spent the day rushing about in huge crowds of people at the local shopping mall. But on this warm and sunny day, we spent the day rushing around the pecan grove harvesting nuts. In fact,  the entire river bottom was humming with the sounds of pecan harvest as growers throughout the area worked to harvest the 2014 crop.

   At the Pecan Experiment Field, we use a stick rake (photo above) to remove fallen limbs knocked to the ground by the tree shaker. Once the sticks are raked off the orchard floor, we use a pull-type harvester to sweep pecans up off the ground (photo at left).
   After putting in a long day of harvest today, I gained two impressions of this year's native pecan crop. Yields are below average and we are shaking out a lot of dead wood. These outcomes  are probably related to the several years of drought we've experienced recently and the late spring freeze of 2014.

Mid-November cold injury

Osage, 24 Nov. 2014

   Last week we experienced extremely cold temperatures for mid November. On November 18th, we recorded a low temperature of 6 F (the -14 C). So this week, I decided to check the condition of some of our mature, nut-bearing trees.
    Each photo that accompanies this post shows the bark peeled back on a fruiting shoot (on the left) and a vegetative shoot (on the right). The caption below each photo identifies the cultivar.
  

Kanza, 24 Nov. 2014

Chetopa, 24 Nov. 2014

Maramec, 24 Nov 2014

    In peeling back the bark of several cultivars, I found a range of cold
injury. Osage, which produced a light crop this year, had a healthy green color inside the bark. Kanza and Chetopa showed signs on internal browning while Maramec was severely injured by the cold.
     In looking at the Kanza shoots you will note that the fruiting shoot appears to have more internal browning than the vegetative shoot.  I noticed this same relationship between fruiting stress and cold injury with Pawnee last year. In contrast, Chetopa shoots seemed to have the same amount of cold injury regardless of shoot type.
    Both Maramec shoots displayed severe internal browning. However, the fruiting shoot appeared to have suffered greater cellular freezing.
    In years past, I have seen cold injured trees break bud normally in spring and set a good crop of nuts. Pawnee trees injured last winter produced a good crop this fall. It will be interesting to watch how cold injury in mid-November impacts flowering and fruiting next spring. I have the feeling that Kanza and Chetopa will overcome the damage they suffered and produce nuts next year. Maramec may be in trouble for 2015.

Kanza performance 2014

2014 Kanza crop

   If you have been following this blog for some time, you know that I have been documenting the yield and performance of a three acre block of Kanza trees. This year we harvested a good crop of nuts, averaging 1268 lbs/acre (see table below).  
     In looking over the records for this block of trees, it is interesting to see the impact of below-average rainfall on tree performance. During the years 2011, 2012, and the first half of 2013 the trees suffered from serious water shortages. Drought conditions impacted tree grow rate, nut weight, and yield. In 2013, mid-summer rains helped to increase nut size but yield had already been impacted by the previous season's drought. You see, each spring's pistillate flower production is largely determined by growing conditions during the nut filling period the previous summer. 

   

Cracked Kanza nuts, 2014

    In 2014 tree grow rate responded to better soil moisture conditions and total pecan yield increased. However, the dry spell we experienced in mid- summer decreased nut size and increased the number harvested stick-tights.    
    Over the years, we have progressively thinned this Kanza block as trees begin to crowd. The thinning plan for this orchard and our tree removal progress has been posted to this blog. When planted, this block of trees contained 144 trees spaced 30 feet by 30 feet. So far we have removed 17 trees but the thinning plan calls for the eventual removal of 72 trees in total (resulting in a 42 ft. x 42 ft. spacing). However, by taking a thin as needed approach to tree thinning,  we have maintained total block yield despite experiencing problems with drought.