 Good morning everybody. Today we'll talk a little bit about pecans. I take, there's four pecan trees in that picture and I took that picture last November. Every November it's not far from my house. I take a picture of these four trees. I've got pictures going back for many years and I see the same thing in these pictures. The second tree has a lot of leaves on it. The other three trees have very little leaves on them. The trees that hold their leaves the longest are going to be your better trees. So you can ride around in the fall and look and you can estimate what your next year's crop might be because if a pecan tree loses its leaves before October 1 your next year's crop is always going to be zero. So every day after October 1 hopefully you're gaining pecans. Now things can happen during the year that you know you may have a rainy year and have a lot of there's a bad disease on pecans called scab that makes the black spots on the leaves and the shuck and the nuts may fall off early. Well that can happen if you've got a lot of rain in the summer. But this goes back even if you have a good year if your tree loses its leaves before October 1 your next year's crop is nothing. And Dr. Bill Goff was our pecan specialist for a long time there at Auburn and this is what he would say the secret to pecan production and everything I tell about today is going to be how can we make this happen. But the secret to pecan production is maintain healthy foliage to increase carbohydrate reserves. What that means is we got to keep everything we do to this pecan and our mind has to be what can we do to keep the leaves on this tree as healthy as possible. And this is not as good of a picture but I got two pecan trees here one on the left one on the left has green leaves on it the one on the right the is very little leaves still on it. I took that picture late one summer I took this picture this past year on the side of the road a lot of these trees are planted too close together we'll talk about space and all later but I wanted to make a note of there's one pecan tree there you can see it still has some leaves on it where the others those leaves have dropped and also pay attention to how many leaves you're holding on to in the fall of the year. We need to plant these trees in a well-drained soil area that has trees growing all around it that cuts down on air circulation that might not be the best thing. There are certain trees we would plant that are scab resistant I told you pecan scab is the number one disease problem we have and there are some trees that are resistant to scab and you might think about planting those in in your planting we definitely want to plant correctly and don't plant the trees too deep that's a very common thing space in the trees when that tree's young and we plant them 30 feet apart it looks like a long way but you got to think if a tree's 30 feet apart from another that only gives each tree 15 feet to grow in either direction before they're touching so 80 feet is kind of a minimum now pecan growers will plant them farmers will plant them a lot closer knowing they may cut near half of them out at a later point in time so if you do not plan on cutting any out I would plant them 80 to 100 feet apart to start with. There's two terms protanderous and protogenous and that we call them type one or type two to be simple but it's talking about the when the flowers are receptive and in the type one the male flower develops first and is sheds pollen but the female part of a type one is not receptive on the type two the female flower is open and receptive to pollen but the male flowers aren't releasing yet so pecan trees don't need to this is a good thing we won't cross pollination we don't want one pecan tree pollinating itself you want at least two and if I was planting if it depends on how many trees I'm planting but if I'm planting six or eight pecan trees I might have six or eight different pecan trees I might not have two of the same one in a planting if you're planting thousands that you wouldn't do that but if you're just planting a few that would be encouraged cross pollinated nuts have higher percent kernel than self pollinated self pollinated nuts drop off the tree and higher proportions than do cross pollinated and a lot of times we don't think about unless you're growing seedlings that you're going to graft all these trees you see is grown from a nut and then at some point in time someone grafts uh sine wood or cutting a desirable tree a different country onto that seedling well cross pollinated nuts are more vigorous than the self pollinated nuts so it's important to for your cross pollination so if you only have one tree your neighbor may have a tree these the trees are wind pollinated so it could come if you can see other pecan trees in the area that pollen can come from somewhere else but if there's no trees around I would encourage you to have two different trees that you need a type one and a type two you don't need two different type ones for instance or two different type twos you need to so that the pollen is is being released when the the flower is receptive a lot of times a lot of people may have heard pecans are alternate bears and that's true if you have a heavy year a country needs to get growth six or eight inches this summer to produce nuts next summer or next fall so if you have a heavy load this year it's not growing a lot the next year's crop may be very light if you have a light year the next year you're probably are putting on six or eight inches of growth so that next year could be heavy and also why do you have a light load one year you might have had excessive load the year before you might have had I've told you keep those leaves healthy you might have had some kind of disease or or insect damage that would cause that tree to drop its leaves early you might have some kind of drought stress you can't irrigate a tree enough during the months of august and september that's when that nut is really filling out so if you have a way to irrigate that would be something to think about inadequate fertility if we're going to talk about how to fertilize and that sort of thing but soil testing and leaf samples is what we use to see what's in that tree and what we can do to help on the nutrition and then I said that their spacing needs to be 80 to 100 feet apart and that would be a good idea sometimes we need to cut some trees out but what can we do to favor a good crop well a farmer might go in if they have a heavy load and if they got a heavy load you know all the other growers may have a heavy load and the prices may be cheaper for instance they may go thin some of their trees shake some nuts off during the summer so they would ensure a better crop the following year that's something that can be done keeping these leaves as clean as possible with some kind of a spray schedule for disease and insects would be a big help and if we can irrigate late in the season it's important sometimes if we have a heavy crop not necessarily a light crop but on the year that you have a heavy crop we might get some extra fertilizer later in the summer and then some of these trees that are planted way too close together believe it or not you can make a crop go up production go up by taking some trees out so that's something to think about we need half sunlight and half shade hitting the ground if you think about it in those terms if you're in a pecan orchard we need sunlight hitting the ground we need shade hitting the ground about half and half if you got all shade you won't have much grass to cut but your your production is just not going to be that good how can we improve our production well we're going to talk about several things and the first we'll talk about is fertility we can take leaf samples off the trees in the summertime we're taking just like you take soil test out of the ground you take samples off of these leaves and send to our lab they'll tell you what is lacking in that tree and that'll help us know how to fertilize that tree the following year so we can look at our crop load to know if you're light one year you're going to be heavy the next is a way to predict in that look at the deficiencies in the tree I can tell you if you can see the deficiency by looking at the leaf the the leaf sample would really a leaf sample can find things that you can't see and then I'll talk about how to fertilize but again I I want to see a soil test and a leaf sample but general guidelines is put a pound of triple 13 per year age of the tree it's 25 pounds per tree so if you got a tree five years old you put five pounds triple 13 if it's 10 years old 10 pounds 25 years old 25 pounds but if it's 100 years old you're still just putting 25 pounds triple 13 a pound of 3400 per year age of the tree it's 20 pounds per tree a tenth of a pound of zinc up to two pounds per tree per year age of the tree it's two pounds per tree and then I don't have any idea about the lime uh we I've got to see that soil test to know we want our pH to be around six six point one six point two six point three uh something in that neighborhood and 50 pounds of lime per a thousand square feet is the equivalent of a ton per acre we'll go from the base of the tree one and a half times the drip line and when we fertilize in that the feeder roots or root hairs that actually take in nutrients are on the tips of the roots so they can go beyond the branches so think about that when you're fertilizing when to do it it kind of depends on where you live in the state um my advice is wait do I get leaves on the tree if you're fertilizing early and there's no leaves on the tree it's not being the the nitrogen's only good for a couple of weeks when you put it out I would wait till like the trees are greening up and I'll add my fertilizer and it just depends we can do this on a monthly basis we can do it one time and not the rest of the year it all depends on how much time you have and how good you want this tree to be uh fertilized a lot of times the old trees would just fertilize once a year the younger trees would divide it in two applications but it can be divided up into more than that but I would at least suggest one to two applications I already talked about water those nuts are really filling out in august and september we need an inch to an inch and half of rain a week you need a rain gauge if you do not get uh the rain you may need to irrigate if at all possible and remember where I said about where the root hairs work it's not just putting water I mean we could water the root zone is what we're trying to do mulching the trees can be a big help uh studies have been done 60 growth is increased from mulch people ask me all the time how long it takes pecan trees before they start bearing fruit and my usual answer is it depends on you and how you're going to tend to that tree I can't answer that without knowing well one certain trees may bear a little earlier but I'm thinking about are you doing weed control are you mulching are you irrigating you see what I mean is the tree getting enough sunlight um wood chips I don't in a way it doesn't maybe doesn't matter to me I want it mulched with something so pine straw pine bark oh hey those are all good things to do and it can be deep but I like it to be wide and do not make these mulch volcanoes and pile mulch around around the trunk um it can be thin right there at the trunk but then it can get thicker further away and I like it to be wider if at all possible and that just shared another study there here's a pecan tree that's the keeping the weeds down around it weed controls a big deal uh studies have been done where just two weeds around uh a young pecan tree reduces growth in that set of that tree so any kind of other than bare ground or in mulch that's what I want to see around the pecan tree no weeds no grass on the left is a is two different kind of orchards left and right on the right is more of what farmers would do and they keep these weed free strips and that's the area they would fertilize in as well uh irrigating in on the right this is the left this is more of what homeowners would do and uh we could be wider than that but at least that that's certainly better than nothing in summary plant recommended cultivars planted the right spacing most again most people plant them way too close together if they're not going to take out trees and it's important I like the idea of planting them closer together and every tree doesn't have the same growth rate so it might be if one's not growing well that may be one you take out and also we may want to take some out anyway but if you're not taking them out uh I would space them further apart uh collect leaf samples and soil tests to know how to fertilize properly and then irrigate if at all possible but that is hard to do if they're way off in a pasture by themselves manage the weeds and mulch that's something anybody can do manage the weeds and mulch even if we can't irrigate we can manage the weeds and mulch other topics that we're not talking about today but it's just any debris that falls to the ground just limbs and if you could haul that off site and burn it or just haul it off site so it's nowhere around that would help and we're not talking really about training trees but I don't like narrow crotch angles the wind can break those apart uh there's some information we can talk about sometime on how to train a tree but um we do have to train these as they're growing and not just let them grow naturally a lot of times if you leave it let them grow naturally you'll have a lot of limbs coming out of one point and you'll have a lot of narrow crotch angles and the angle the branches starting from the same point are weak branches and we're not really talking about grafting but graft there's some nursers where you can buy these trees already grafted but you can graft your own and we in extension will teach grafting classes and we can certainly share more information with you about that and if you have any questions you can contact me or any other uh commercial hort agent