Pecan Grove (www.pecan-grove.net) Pecan Grove and Senior Residence

A lot has been happening at the pecan grove!  First, an update on the senior residence.  The builder has given us a date when they’ll be finished… January 31, 2009.  Later than we’d hoped, but realistic.  The brick and stone are being laid now. The electrical and plumbing are well along.  It should be ready for insulation and sheet rock in a few weeks.  The 7 acre lake in front of the senior residence has been drained down so we can dredge out silt that has built up over the years, so it’s ugly now!  We have a very disappointed beaver somewhere.

We have one (of the possible 10) apartments spoken for already, and we’re receiving significant interest from other possible residents, so hopefully we’ll have some several moving in when we open in February.

Our neighbor, Glynn, finally agreed to sell us his place, so Jack and Leona will move into Glynn’s place in November.  This reduces the number of houses we need to build. Glynn is a master gardener, and has a very nice garden, which Kathy and Kim hope to maintain.  Here are a few pictures of Glynn’s place.  We’ll make a few changes before Jack and Leona move in.

Awhile back we were able to purchase the 10 acres in the front center of the property, so now it is all one piece.  The picture below (taken before we purchased the place) shows the boundary of the property in red.  The yellow lines are overhead power lines.  The light blue is the road into the farm, senior residence and Mike and Ronda’s place.  The dark blue will be a driveway over to Jack and Leona’s place.

Good progress has been made on the house for Mike and Ronda.  Here are some pictures.

Finally, the pecans are in!  The steps in the pecan harvesting process are:

1. Shake the pecan tree with a shaker causing the pecans (and sometimes squirells) to fall to the ground.
2. Use a harvester to pick the pecans up off the ground
3. Use a cleaner to separate the leaves, sticks, etc. from the pecans
4. Dry the pecans by spreading them out on a drying table (or drying them in bags)
5. Crack them in a cracker.
6. Separate the meat from the shell in a separator
7. Separate most of the shells from the meat in a blower
8. Run the meat across a vibrating table while people pick out remaining pieces of shell
9. Sort the meat by size – full halves and broken pieces.

Pictures of some of these machines and some pecans are shown below.

The center of the eye of hurricane Ike passed just a few miles east of the pecan grove.  The residence itself received very little damage… some tar paper was blown off the roof.

The two porta potties for the construction crews didn’t fair as well!

There was damage to the pecan trees, but not nearly as bad as we expected.  A few were destroyed by splitting.  About 25 others were blown over.  We’ve pulled these back up with the tractor and tied them to adjacent trees… they should be ok.

Of the 5 types of pecans we have, the Pawnees are the first to be harvested, usually in the first 2 weeks of October.  Many of the Pawnee pecans were blown from the trees.  We’ve picked a lot of them up and find that they are good to eat, though a little premature.  The following picture shows some Pawnees emerging from their husk.

There was other damage… some of which could be easily fixed…

And some cannot!

The residents found this whole experience very stressful….

For pictures from around our house see the newman family blog in the menu at the top right.

Ken