I know pecan trees cycle between good & bad years (from a squirrel’s point of view) and was wondering, was last autumn/winter of 2018-19 one of the low-yielding years?
There’s a few pecans nearby, and a neighbor has 2 of those named varieties that produce HUGE nuts. I noticed this winter there were plenty of acorns under the oaks, but almost no pecans strewn about. (Do different species alternate their years somehow?)
It varies tree to tree for us in NM.
Poking around online it* looks* like even years are “on” years, in aggregate. But I don’t have a cite I’m happy enough with yet to share it.
My trees produced as normal. We had a drought-y summer and I was worried. I got plenty of nuts. Left a few for the wildlife.
My trees had a really off year. The one in the front yard sometimes produces on the off year, and it had a few, but hurricane Michael took out the few unripe ones it had on it.
Here in south Georgia, the growing season was nearly perfect.
And the nuts were almost ripe when Hurricane Michael blew them out of the trees in early October. Similar event on almost exactly the same date in 2016 - Hurricane Matthew. In both cases, a lot of farmers lost the year’s crop and a significant portion of their orchards.
I don’t know about other growing areas, but the past 2 even numbered years have been disasters around here.
here in my patch of the ca desert …a lot of our stuff had an off year like our squashes (im not cryin over that one personally) no watermelons /(which did disappoint I loves me some melon the ) exception was pumpkins and we only had 3 or 4 of those and they were planted in a different spot
Useless piece of trivia in my brain . . . till now, the good years are called ‘mast years’.
CMC fnord!
Not useless! Led me to some other good info. We should bring the phrase back into general usage.
“My stock portfolio really had a mast year.”
“How’s the new job?”
“Cruddy so far, looking forward to finally hitting that mast year eventually.”
https://www.nationalpecan.com/update-to-the-trade/
https://georgiapecancorp.com/news-market-updates/
There should be some actual USDA data out there but I haven’t found them yet. Note that any particular tree may be planted counter to that, and entire regions may be the opposite of the national trend.
Here in Texas, it was a record crop.