Word: pecan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last week La Pasionaria de Texas was up to her small ears in a pecan pickers' strike. In a good year San Antonio's 147 pecan shelleries shell 21,000,000 lb. of pecans.* No successful machine has ever been invented to pick pecan meat from pecan shells and the "world's largest pecan shelling centre'' depends upon the family labor of Mexicans and Tex-Mexes (U. S.-born Mexicans). Wages were recently cut from (7? per lb. to 6? for halves, from 6? to 5? for broken pieces -which means that a pecan picker...
Precipitous drops in the U. S. pecan harvest are nothing new but growers do not agree on reasons. Some say that nut pests thrive so well on a good crop that they appear in legions to infest the next one. Some say that rain did not fall at the right time, others that "pecan trees are just that...
There are two general types of pecan, the native varieties which comprise from 85% to 90% of the annual crop, and the improved, or so-called papershell, varieties which have been grafted or selected from natives for transplanting and cultivation. Pecans grow in 37 states but eleven produce the bulk of the crop. No. 1 pecan State is Texas, whose State tree is the pecan. Native pecans are also plentiful in Oklahoma, Louisiana and Mississippi. Most of the improved varieties reach the market from Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina where tourists find almost as many pecan venders...
...Small pecan growers pick their own crops whereas big growers depend on nomadic bands who go anutting after the cotton picking season is over. Threshers may be Negroes, Mexicans, half-breed Indians or poor whites, and the typical crew, made up of a family and friends, cruises from job to job in dilapidated automobiles. They camp in the groves they are picking, put in a ten or eleven hour day, spend evenings singing and dancing, like a siesta at noon, a fiesta every weekend. Threshers, who climb and shake the trees, make from $4 to $6 a day. Gatherers...
...Pecans were known to white men as early as 1541 when Spain's Hernando de Soto explored the Mississippi River Valley, but it was not until after the Civil War that the nuts were used for much besides feeding hogs. First commercial sheller-dealer of any importance in the U. S. was a Swiss-born cake and candy maker, Gustave Antonio Duerler of San Antonio, Tex., who, in 1882, found a market for a few barrels of pecan meats he shipped East on a gamble. Today one out of every five nuts eaten...