Ice storm recovery update

    Its been 4 years since the pecan groves around Chetopa,Kansas were hit by a massive ice storm. Once the leaves have fallen from the trees you can still see the scars of limb breakage left behind in the canopies of our trees. In the photo at right, you can see that vigorous new shoots have developed where limbs were torn from the tree by the weight of the ice. With each passing year, our trees are filling out their canopies, increasing the area where nuts can be produced.

    But where are the nuts? It seems that the native pecan trees that did not set nuts on undamaged limbs, didn't set a crop on the new shoots either. In contrast, native trees that did set a crop (photo at left) produced pecans on both old and new branches.  What we are seeing at this point is that the new shoots developed in response to ice-induced limb loss are now fully mature (able to produce a nut crop) and synchronized with the entire tree.

    If you take a closer look at the regrowth associated with ice-storm-related limb breakage, you can see that an over-abundance of new shoots have developed in many areas (photo at right).  Note that these vigorous branches have also developed numerous lateral shoots. As the trees continue to grow, competition for sunlight among these new shoots will eventually lead to the  natural thinning of the most heavily shaded limbs (the so called self pruning process).

   Squirrel damage has also led to some much needed limb thinning on ice-damaged trees. I've been shaking trees this harvest season only to find several branches that have developed since the ice storm on the ground (photo left). Note the dried leaves still attached to the shoot indicating that this shoot was injured by squirrels last summer.

    If you look at the base of the shoot you can clearly see that the bark had been stripped back by squirrels feeding on the cambial layer of the shoot. A combination of summer winds and harvest tree shaking snapped these dead shoots out of the tree.     
    

Pawnee back in action!

The December 2007 ice storm left our Pawnee trees in shambles. Of all the cultivars we have under test at the Pecan Field, Pawnee was one of the most brittle under the weight of the ice (photo at right). Our trees required a massive amount of pruning following the storm and many trees were broken down to the point we had only the trunk and a few stumps of lateral branches left.

This fall is the first year the damaged trees have produced a crop. We knew when we pruned our Pawnee trees that the precocity of this cultivar would help us get back into production fairly quickly. Looks like the crop of Pawnee nuts (photo at right) we harvested today will help us pay some bills at the Pecan Field!

Recovery from the 2007 Ice Storm

    I can still recall the terrible sound of limbs breaking off of pecan trees during the 2007 December ice storm. Crack! It sounded like we were in a war zone. It took us almost 6 months to clean up and prune up our pecan grove. The first question on our minds was, "when would these trees recover from the limb breakage and when would the trees begin to bear nuts again?"
     We now have our answer. In the photo at left you can see the shadow of large limbs that had be snapped off during the ice storm. From those broken limbs, new sprouts have emerged, first shooting straight up, but with time, developing many short side branches. This year, the third growing season after the storm, we are seeing nut production on the side shoots of new wood grown since Dec 2007.

    Our recovery plan for getting back into nut production following the ice storm was simple. Keep doing what we always have done. That means we maintained our normal fertilizer program and continued to control insects and diseases as needed. Each year we apply 150lbs urea/acre plus 100 lbs potash/acre over the entire pecan grove around March 1. We add an additional 100 lbs urea/acre to the grove shortly after October 1. We have continued using early season fungicide sprays( in June) to maintain leaf health. We have also controlled all insect pests when they appeared. The key was to keep the trees in good condition so they could grow new, nut-bearing limbs that will replace those limbs lost in the ice storm.