Late-fall demands of nature have kept us busy down here on the One Acre Ranch, what with freezes and thaws and exposed water pipes and still probably a couple hundred tender tropical plants complaining of too much cold and then too hot and damp and then cold again.
Yet I still find myself actually sitting on occasion, listening to a little Internet radio New Orleans blues with some visitors out back while smoking a batch of chicken thighs, perhaps. Today I realized I’ve rarely if ever had time for such idle luxury over the past nine years or so, and I realized why, too:
No giant crush of the pecan harvest. No harvest at all, really. Don’t get me wrong – native pecans are delicious, nutritious and versatile as far as food goes. But they are also lots of work if you just have a hand-tool operation such as ours. Picking them off the ground, sorting out the bad ones, cracking them one by one, then painstakingly shelling them, THEN processing for eats, such as roasting them, or baking them into pies.
No fresh pies or roasted wonder nuts for us this year, but also none of the forced calisthenics, either. The only things I’m harvesting from the pecan trees this year are a few big fallen branches to use for smoking meat. This is not unexpected; we just suffered through the worst summer of drought I’ve experienced, and it took a toll on all the trees, plus last year’s harvest was a big one, and these native trees tend to produce big one year and smaller the next. Not ever this small, but there were the aforementioned extenuating circumstances.
Bottom line, we still are only playing at this homesteading thing, derive income from other pursuits, and thus have the luxury of taking a failed crop in stride, as an excuse for rest and relaxation. For the critters that made it through the recent horrid heat, and I imagine for the ancestral caretakers of this riverbottom, a failed pecan harvest might mean (or have meant) serious suffering.
In the grand scheme of things, it might be one end of a cycle, where excessive or less hardy insects, vermin, plants and people give out. Then plants rejuvenate, survivors breed and repopulate and, for a good while, the woods are full of plenty.
In the smaller scheme of our personal things, it’s the place in the cycle where you deck the underside of your house with Christmas lights to ring in the season and warm the water pipes, eat more meat and less fresh fruit and wait for one of those wet springs of yesteryear.
