North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Lucky Pittman <lucky.pittman@murraystate.edu>]

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.