Pecan No-Show
(Garden • )
It occurred to me while mowing the lawn and not hearing a sound like a machine gun shooting wood chips from under the tractor: There are no pecans this year.
Nada.
Keep in mind, four of the pecan trees in our yard are probably 80 – 100 years old, 60-70 feet high and produced literally tens of thousands of pecans last year.
People we never met before would come to the door last year and ask if we minded if they picked the pecans out of the front yard. And we didn’t, because we had more than we could handle without a mechanized shelling operation to back us. Roast pecans, candied pecans, pecan-stuffed this and that. We even made our own labels and gave jars of ‘em away as Christmas gifts.
This year there are none in the yard.
Not having experienced them for very many years, my guess is that it’s cyclical. If those old trees produced as much every year as they did last year, their bark would probably catch on fire or something.
Plus the extra hot, dry and hurricane-enhanced windy weather may have been a factor.
All I can say at this point is, don’t look for any roasted pecans in your stocking this year.
→ B.Dunn, Nov 06, 2005, 04 16 pm
