On our way down to South Padre and SpaceX, we stayed the night at a Pecan farm. We met the owner on the road where he hopped into his old classic jeep and led us right into the orchard where we parked amongst the rows of trees.
It was a really hot and muggy day, so we were quite happy to set ourselves in a shady spot behind the trees. We explored around a bit, looking at the pecans on the trees and deciding which were ready for harvest.
We arrived in the evening, so we didn’t have long before we were watching the sun set through the silhouette of the orchard.
The next morning while we were eating breakfast, we noticed a group of workers just a couple rows away. They had a tractor with them and they were setting out tarps on the ground under a tree. They backed the tractor up to the tree and clamped on a funny-looking attachment with big jaws lined with thick rubber. They bumped up the RPM of the tractor, engaged the PTO, and to our surprise the entire tree starting shaking dramatically! Sure enough, pecans rained down from the branches onto the tarp. They stopped the shaking, pulled the tractor away, and picked up the sides of the tarps to pour the pecans into big containers. And just the same way, they moved on to the next tree. It was a pretty entertaining thing to watch, especially for the kids when the trees were shaking!
Before we headed out we went over to the farmer’s house to purchased a bag of pecans and say goodbye and thank you. He invited us into his home for some pecan cookies where we talked for nearly an hour. We discussed the different pronunciations of pecan (we would say pEE-can where texans would say pek-On) where he offered us valuable insight: “a pee-can is a can you pee in”. We learned that the farm had been passed down through the generations, and he had grown up in the other house just across the yard. We heard about the family’s wild stint of farming in Mexico, which culminated in the Federales taking over their land and sending them home. We learned that the farm was not always pecans; he planted these trees in the 1980’s after choosing them over citrus trees (to his later dismay when a deep freeze came over Texas several years ago which hurt most of the trees, yet the few citrus trees in his front yard survived just fine). We also got to overhear a call with a lively customer who was buying some young trees, which we found pretty entertaining due to the local idioms and strong accents mixed with the energetic character on the other end. This visit provided a very charming end to our stay.
