The Library of Work and Play: Outdoor Work

by Mary Rogers Miller

America is the only country that has native hickory nuts. Of these the best nut producers are the shagbarks and the pecans. These two nuts are increasingly popular. People are planting these nuts and experimenting with new varieties, with grafting and cultivation, as never before. Pecan orchards are being planted in many regions and hickory nuts are being studied with a view to improving the kernel and reducing the hardness of the shell. The value of hickory wood in the making of tools and for fuel has made the lumber more profitable than the nuts. But with improved varieties this may not be true. The poor quality of the wood of the pecan has saved these native trees from destruction.

Hickory nuts have a husk as every country child knows; but the husk has a good-natured habit of splitting neatly into four equal parts which fall away from the nut when dry. There are several kinds of hickory which produce sweet, edible nuts, but the nuts of the true shagbark are the best. They grow on low hills near streams or swamps in good soil in the Eastern and Middle states as far south as Florida, and as far west as Kansas. The king nuts of the Mississippi are bigger, but not so good, although the price you get for them is good and the baskets fill faster than with the little shagbarks.

PECANS

This nut tree grows in the South, and as the wood is too brittle to be very valuable nobody has cut it for lumber. Tremendous interest has been aroused during the past ten years in pecan growing. Pecan orchards are being planted in all sorts of soil, good, bad, and indifferent. The wisest planters have gone to nature to learn what kind of conditions the pecan requires. By cultivation and fertilizing and otherwise improving good natural conditions, many growers are succeeding. By planting nuts from trees that produce fine ones abundantly every year, and by budding these trees with scions from still finer specimen trees great improvement has been made. I have a picture of a pecan tree in Georgia, sixteen years old, which is nearly fifty feet high. It has borne already three hundred and fifty pounds of nuts and this year's crop will be over a hundred pounds. This tree has never had to fight weeds, has always had plenty to eat and drink, was protected in winter while young, and now it is ready to foot all its own bills and give a fine profit. How many of us are ready to do that at sixteen years? The cultivation of pecans is only just begun. Very little of the annual crop of these nuts is harvested in orchards. In "The Tree Book" the author says that ninety-five per cent. of the crop is still gathered in the woods. The annual crop is tremendous, and the pickers get only three to ten cents a pound for the ungraded nuts. For the very best nuts, mainly sold for seed, the retail price is from fifty cents to a dollar a pound, which is from one to two cents per nut.

Who picks all these nuts in the woods? Surely, the boys and girls of the pecan belt do their share. Do they do it in a primitive way or are their methods worthy of the up-to-date American youngster? Professor Hume of the Florida Agriculture Experiment Station (Bulletin No. 85, 1906) gives suggestions for gathering the pecan crop in the orchard which ought to be useful to the "wild picker." The nuts ought to be gathered as soon as the most of the burs have opened. In orchards, the pickers use ladders for young trees and climb the big ones and gather the nuts by hand into sacks. Beating and shaking the trees is only resorted to for the nuts that are entirely out of reach. If allowed to fall on the ground so many of the nuts are lost that the profits are materially lessened. If practicable a large sheet should be placed under the tree to save this loss.

The nuts should be spread under some sort of roof to cure, which requires ten days or two weeks.

Have you ever tried the experiment of sorting and grading the nuts you gather? The fruits of wild trees vary greatly in their size and general appearance. The wholesale dealer who buys nuts undoubtedly grades them and gets a fancy price for the big ones. Why should you not benefit by this?

Pecans are graded by sifting them through screens, the mesh of which lets only those of small size through. You might build up a private trade in wild nuts by packing your best nuts in attractive pasteboard boxes and charging a good retail rate for them. The inferior nuts you could well afford to sell at the lowest wholesale price as your average would be higher than the wholesaler would pay for unsorted nuts.

Your fancy nuts would have to be polished in order to compete with the nuts sold in city markets. The polishing does not make the meat any sweeter, but it does make a more attractive dessert nut, especially now that folks are used to seeing them polished. This is done by putting some dry sand into a barrel with the nuts and rolling the barrel about till the nuts are polished. If you have a worn out barrel or box churn, as we once had, that would be just the thing. Fancy packages of five to ten pounds would be very much in demand at Christmas. The big cities are well supplied with this sort of thing, but in the smaller cities and larger towns there are always some people who know a good thing when they see it and to whom the local markets often fail to supply these little luxuries.