Shown below are the last of the 2007 shelled pecans that have been kept frozen in a solar-powered freezer:



They still taste great.

I'm about to chop most of them up as one of the ingredients in my late Mother's Banana Oatmeal Cookie Recipe:

c=cup, t=teaspoon

1 1/2 c flour
1/2 t soda
1 t salt
1/4 t nutmeg
3/4 t cinnamon
1 c sugar (or 1/2 c brown sugar and 1/2 c white sugar [I prefer 1/2 c each])
1 3/4 c oats

2 large (or 3 small) bananas
3/4 c butter, margarine, or shortening (I prefer butter)
1 large egg

1/2 c chopped nuts
(Optional and a healthy addition: 3/4 c raisins)

Mix all dry ingredients thoroughly, (except nuts and/or raisins which are last to be mixed in), followed by soft butter, mixing thoroughly, then mashed bananas, mixing thoroughly, then the stirred-up egg, mixing thoroughly. Mix in nuts and/or raisins. Drop by spoon onto baking pans then into a preheated 350F oven and bake each batch for 10-12 minutes.

These are cake-like cookies, and I think of my Mom every time I make them.
Thanks Mom!

Yum! I'll trade some maple syrup for some pecans.

Perhaps next year? My yield this year will not be very good. The two year old drought and last June's windstorm really took a toll on the pecans. I may not get enough pecans this season to make cookies for an entire year.


I do want to try some of your maple syrup. We'll have to wait on that trade.

I've brought in a little over 300 pecans so far this season. Most were from two of the younger trees (which I mentioned earlier), and this season has been their best yield so far. The four youngest pecan trees will not produce any nuts this year. The seventh and oldest pecan tree along the driveway has perhaps a hundred nuts on it, but they're not quite ready yet.

In 2007, I shelled over 1700 pecan nuts. Droughts bite.

So i learned yesterday that Paw Paws will fruit here. I was in Madison, WI yesterday and saw with my own eyes a paw paw tree with fruit. Madison and La Crosse have very similar climates (Madison overall may be a touch warmer)...so i know that if i do grow some they should make it. There a lot of really neat trees growing in Madison at the outside Olbrich gardens. Its a HUGE outdoor almost park type setting with every flower/tree you could imagine would grow up here, although not many fruits/veggies are grown there...

Other then that i don't think i'll add much this coming spring. I may get one more peach to grow in a container. I need to order about 50 or more arborvitae for a screen i want to grow.

This weekend i plan on wrapping my 3 sweet cherries with insulation and covering with plastic. Its a long shot, but i think it may help some...i'm temped to throw a heat source in there on any really cold nights (maybe christmas lights?)...although i hate to give it much heat....

I do think this winter for us in the upper midwest is going to be better then last 2 winters (warmer)...so hopefully el nino provides us with some relief

I hear that paw-paws are a really great native fruit. Do you like the taste?

I've never even tried one.

Yesterday I bought a pomegranate fruit at the grocery. $2.50 for one fruit. Excellent taste. I plan on planting all those seeds.

The three potted pomegranate trees (I received as sprouts over a year ago) are nearly three ft tall now, but still years away from producing any fruit. I haven't found (or made) time to transplant them into the ground yet, but I will. I read that pomegranate are drought tolerant. Could be a good cash crop in the future (if I live long enough) but at least someone after me might enjoy them.

Today I planted some of the pomegranate seeds.

I let out some of the collected rainwater (gravity-fed) on all 40+ fruit and nut trees and in the garden today. I noted that one of the young plum trees, that I thought had died during the recent drought, has put out some small branch sprouts near the base of the trunk. Guess I'll call this tree the "I'm not quite dead, I'm getting better" plum tree.

Today I transplanted a potted pomegranate into the ground where a young pecan tree had died during the recent drought this last year. The rainwater irrigation pipe is already in the ground to that spot.

I hope this tree does better than it's predecessor.

I thought I would re-post a picture of a device (an Inertial NutCracker) that is very useful for shelling pecans:



The nut is placed between the weights and the aluminum cylinder on the rhs is slid over the nut before one pulls back the rubberband or spring-loaded bar on the left hand side, and SMACK!: Out comes two shelled halves:



With this device, I have shelled nuts at a rate of about 100 nuts per hour. In 2007, I shelled about 1700 nuts with this device. Something to do while watching the University of Texas Longhorns beat up on the next football team. heheh