By the time you get your afternoon newspaper, you have probably already enjoyed a Thanksgiving feast. If so, please remember the things I discussed in this column last week about all those people who have a role in making sure you have food to enjoy on this special day.

Did you enjoy pecan pie for desert? If not, you missed out on the third most traditional dish for Thanksgiving dinner. A survey I found on the Internet indicated that the vast majority of people feel that turkey and dressing is the most traditional Thanksgiving dish. Far behind, but in second place, is cranberry sauce. In distant third place, but still popular enough to be mentioned, is pecan pie.

If you did not enjoy pecan pie for Thanksgiving simply because no one at your house knows how to make a pecan pie, you need to talk to my wife. She can make the most delicious pecan pies you have ever tasted. Each year, she makes at least a dozen pecan pies. The ones I don't help eat are given as gifts. The only problem I have with this is that I am the one that has to pick out all those pecans. I am sure she would be glad to share her recipe with you, but I am also certain that she will never agree to pick out her own pecans.

If you did not enjoy pecan pie for Thanksgiving because you did not have any pecans, that is not really an excuse. Because of favorable weather this year, most of the pecan trees in the county have an abundance of nuts. Those I have been talking to indicate that we have the best pecan crop in the county that we have ever had.

There are only a couple of pecan groves in the county with more than 100 trees. Most pecan trees are found in people's yards as part of their landscape. And then, there are usually only a few pecan trees in the landscape. This makes it difficult for owners to control insects and diseases, since they cannot justify the equipment needed to treat huge trees, and the trees are often too close to homes to be treated with pesticides.

Most homeowners do a good job of managing pecan insects and diseases by sanitation. By keeping fallen nuts and twigs picked up and burned, they destroy many of the pests that might return to infest their trees in coming years. This reduces insect and disease problems and often prevents the need for using chemical pesticides. If you do not have your own pecan trees in your yard, you probably have some friends who do. You should be able to buy some pecans from them.

If you don't have your own trees and don't have any friends with trees, you can always buy pecans at one of the local markets. There are several pecan-buying stations in the county that buy pecans from local citizens and then ship the pecans to processing facilities throughout the southeast. All of these buying stations will sell pecans to locals as well.

Carolina Grain, the local Purina dealer on Fayetteville Road in Lumberton, is a pecan buying station. They also offer pecan cracking, so you don't have to crack your own nuts.

They have three pecan crackers that stay busy this time of the year. Once the pecans began to fall from trees, there is a steady stream of people coming into the business with bags, buckets, or sacks full of pecans to be sold. Others come in to pick up pecans that they had left earlier to be cracked.

For most of the year, the pecan cracking machines just sit idle, but at this time of the year, they operate from the time the store opens in the morning until it closes at night. It keeps two workers busy filling the hoppers with whole nuts, adjusting and readjusting the machines, shifting the cracked nuts to the cleaning machine, and then placing them back into the containers they arrived in.

When whole pecans are placed in the hopper, they are fed one at the time into the cracking chamber. The clank you hear is the motor-driven plunger that slams into the nut, cracking the shell while doing very little damage to the meat of the nut. The cracked nuts fall into a tub beneath the cracker. Each machine can crack about one pound of pecans a minute.

If you need pecans, you can easily find them at one of the pecan buying stations. If you don't want to crack them yourself, take them to Carolina Grain. They will crack them for you.

Cooperative Extension has a very good free publication entitled Growing Pecans in North Carolina. You can pick up a copy from our office, which is located on Highway 72 West of Lumberton, adjacent to the Robeson County Health Department. Or give us a call at 910-671-3276 and we will be glad to mail it to you. If you are to the point you get everything off the Internet, the publication is available at http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/hil/ag81.html.

My staff and I wish you a safe and enjoyable Thanksgiving. Get into the spirit. The holiday season is here.

E-mail address: Everett_Davis@ncsu.edu

Mailing Address:
P. O. Box 2280
Lumberton, NC 28359-2280

Phone: 910-671-3276
Fax: 910-671-6278

Date Created 11/29/08