Picking pecans...

If you want to know when the pecans on your trees are ready to be picked, just listen for the crows. And we've had crows here for over a week, so I really should have known why.  Those birds will take a ripe pecan right out of the husk, fly it over to the road, and use the hard surface of that road to help crack open the pecan shell.  By the time the crows have filled up their bird-bellies, there is quite a pile of pecan shells in the road.

We have two huge pecan trees in the side yard, and half a dozen smaller pecan trees in the backyard. Funny thing is that the smaller trees have the largest and tastiest pecans.  When we first moved here, we were picking every blessed pecan that we could find out there. We had so many pecans that I was sending them to my cousins up north... "These pecans are from our own trees!  I picked them myself!"  When friends from Clear Lake came up to visit, I made cute little take-away bags of "our very own pecans!" for each of them.   So proud was I.... but  I stopped doing that after the first pecan season in this house.

Now we know better... we don't pick the zillions of pecans that fall from the largest trees... those pecans aren't that tasty (sort of dry) and they're so small that it's hard to get the nuts out of their shells. The smaller trees have huge pecans, and they're delicious, like the finest pecans you can buy at specialty stores.  I store them in the fridge, and don't crack them open till I'm ready to use them.

For the rest of this month, I'll have to make sure to get out there in the yard every day and check for pecan husks that have opened up to reveal the shelled nuts inside. It's a balancing act at best... holding the little plastic bucket, looking up into the trees for the nuts (while watching for spiders) and looking down at the ground (being careful of fire ant mounds).  And you have to wear thin plastic gloves when picking the nuts because your hands will turn green and yellow from the husks, and brown from the shells.

Very different from those Clear Lake days when all I had to do was drive to Kroger and pick a bag of shelled pecans from a shelf. No gloves, no spiders, no fire ants.