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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] Pecans

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  • From: Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>
  • To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] Pecans
  • Date: Thu, 05 Jan 2006 09:22:30 -0600

At 10:03 PM 1/4/2006, Donna wrote:
I agree that if you want to eat pecans from your trees, that
you graft them to northern varieties. Our season here in Tennessee is
supposedly not long enough for the pecans grown down in Georgia, and you
for sure will have fewer heat units than we do.
Some Southern pecan varieties will survive, and even bear nuts, farther north than some of the 'experts' would expect.
There are two pecans I know of, one at Murray KY(Wortham) and the other at Mt. Vernon IN(Hausmann), that resemble the big papershell Mahan pecan(Mississippi Giant) that I grew up with in south Alabama. Dr. Larry Grauke, at the USDA/ARS Pecan Breeding & Genetics program, headquartered at TAMU, has examined nuts from both of these trees, and thinks that they are both Mahan, though that variety *shouldn't* be able to mature its nuts here.
Our friend Ted, in NJ, has a number of Southern/Western pecan varieties that are producing for him - he sent me some nuts from Nacono, Maramec, and Pawnee just a week or so ago.

My bigger concern, however, would be the chance that seedlings of Southern pecan varieties might be killed back to the ground in a particularly severe zone 5 or 6 winter. There is a fellow here in western KY, who planted 1,000 grafted pecans back in the early 1970s - all northern/midwestern varieties, but they were grafted on Southern pecan rootstock at a southern nursery(TX?) ; While the grafted varieties all should have been fully hardy here, the winter of 1978 killed the Southern pecan rootstocks back to the ground - and some were killed outright - with the resulting loss of ALL the grafted trees.

So...plant those nuts if you want to - they may be very successful, or they may be a bust, so far as nut production/maturation is concerned, but if you're considering growing and/or grafting some for nut production, I'd recommend planting seednuts of hardy northern/midwestern selections, and using those as rootstocks. These varieties produce nuts that are quite a bit smaller than the typical Southern pecan, but by and large, I think that most of them have better flavor and higher oil content than the typical Southern variety.





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