Questionable Country Credibility

Let's get one thing straight. Down here it's pronounced PEE-can, not pe-CAHN or PEE-cahn. But that is a mere detail and not the crux of this story.

For the past couple of weekends, Neta has been rolling pecans under several of our best-producing trees. Rolling pecans requires a roller, which looks like a wire bingo ball cage on a long handle, and something to dump them all in after you've rolled over them and the cage fills up.

Pecans just laying around on the ground waiting to be rolled.

Empty roller surrounded by rogue pecans that must be captured.

A pecan-filled roller and a clean surrounding area

Neta got recommendations from family (thanks Pam  and Ann!) for a place that would crack, shell and "blow out" the pecans for us. So this past Saturday, after a morning spent at a local plant nursery, we loaded up 5 paper grocery bags filled with pecans and headed out to the Durden Pecan Co. in Metter (about 25 miles west of us).

Guess the total number of pecans and win the Grand Prize!

We arrived at the pecan company and let them know we were bringing pecans to be shelled. We unloaded the pecans and the total weight was 97 pounds. Looking at the bags the man asked, "Are y'all folks from Savannah? These pecans have a lot of hulls and we try not to run 'dirty' pecans through the machine."

Neta pointed out, just to me, that the "Savannah" question was a polite southern way of "blessing our hearts".

Translation: "Bless your city slicker hearts, but y'all don't know the first thing about bringing pecans to a pecan cracker do you?"

A lone pecan hangs in the tree, waiting to fall, with its hull split open.

The man and I culled out most of the un-hulled pecans as they were poured into two machines. Watching the process was quite interesting as the pecans were loaded into two hoppers. They were funneled down and ended up on a small conveyor belt that quickly grabbed the individual pecans and cracked them before dumping them onto another belt. That belt fed them into another machine that finished the separation process dumped both pecan halves and shell pieces onto a vibrating mesh belt that allowed the dust and small shell pieces to fall through. The final machine used forced air to blow the broken shell pieces and heavier pecan halves into circular chambers which separates them so they fall into two different containers.

At the end of the day I assured the man that next year we would make sure that the next pecans we brought to him would be without hulls. At the end of the day we got a 40 pound box of shelled pecans to bring home for just a little less than $40 for the service, saving us a lot of time.

A pretty good haul!