CHAPTER XIII.
GATHERING, STORING AND MARKETING PECANS.
While, in preparing a crop of pecan nuts for market, such extreme care need not be exercised as in handling a crop of peaches, plums or oranges, still there are a number of details which require careful attention to secure the best results. Careful attention to these few points is quite as necessary as in handling any other fruit crop, though it might appear otherwise.
Time to Gather. As a rule the bulk of the nut crop must be disposed of before Thanksgiving, and there is in consequence a strong disposition to gather the crop anyway, whether ready or not. Much might be said on both sides of the question, but in general it must be granted that gathering the crop while still somewhat immature, and beating the trees to cause the nuts to drop, cannot be commended.
When the great majority of nut husks are open, the crop of the tree is ready to be harvested. It will not do to wait until every burr is open (some varieties never open, but such are extremely undesirable), for it will usually be found that by far the most of those which do not open, on trees which open their burrs uniformly, are faulty, and it will not pay to wait for them. Neither should such be left on the tree, but the whole tree should be stripped at the time already indicated. It will be necessary to use light bamboo poles to remove the nuts with closed burrs.
Picking. The nuts must either be picked by hand or knocked off the trees onto the ground with sticks. From whatever standpoint we may regard the gathering of the crops, in orchards of good varieties, the best plan for the removal of the nuts is to take them off, in so far as possible, by hand. Men should climb the trees and collect the nuts in sacks. Men provided with sacks can, with the help of a good extension ladder, reach the most of the nuts on ordinary trees, up to forty or fifty feet in height. A good man will pick one hundred pounds of the shelled nuts in a day, at a cost of one dollar—or one cent per pound.
Fig. 35.
After the Harvest.