Young, A. Lubbock's pecan bumper crop good for business, nut lovers, Lubbock Online. http://lubbockonline.com/local-news/2015-12-24/lubbocks-pecan-bumper-crop-good-business-nut-lovers#.Vn3qxlLjIeI. Accessed Dec. 2015.
It's good to hear about the people who are in the same occupation I am, namely picking up pecans wherever I can. My own back yard has been good for maybe ten pounds so far, and on my way to work, I stop at a professor's house and pick more. Also I have a neighbor who doesn't touch theirs'; I grab a few there as I walk by as well. I try to keep my hands off where I don't know the people or where I really don't know if they want to get out and harvest their own, but I've noticed that for the most part, people don't care. A whole town of pecans, and they're just sitting there, waiting for the harvesters.
A friend of mine told me that they're hot all of a sudden in China, but I haven't confirmed this. Does this keep the price high? Or would the price come down, later in the year, as people come out with these thousands of pounds of shelled pecans, and they all hit the market at the same time? Or, here's another question. Say I bring home my 26 pounds (as it stands, I've added a pound or two to that, but I'm not sure how it'll work, and I supposedly will be able to pick up my shelled pecans around the middle of March)....and let's say there's a glut on the market and I can't even give them away to my immediate relatives. Do they keep? If so, how? How long will they last?
The pecan place gave away two kinds of mulch: the rough kind, they sold, as people found it useful for all kinds of things. It breaks up the soil, someone said, so it's generally well-sought-after. But there was another kind, the finer mulch. That was free, and it sat out in their driveway in two large gallon-drums. People use that in pin-cushions, they said, and they gave that away free, or at least they gave some away free to an older lady who asked them. She had asked me first, but I had asked the worker there, who was an Iowa Hawkeye like myself, and also a musician. She, upon finding out that it was for pin cushions and was for free, got them to make her a bag of it, and she took off with it.
Now that set me to thinking: maybe I should go into the pincushion business. I have lots of quilt fabric still hanging around. I want to go back into quilt making, but for the time issues, and being overwhelmed by work backed up. Pincushions would allow me to basically do one little thing at a time, and, on top of it, put pecan mulch in there.
It's a true-to-life, down home, Lubbock-style occupation. We're into those, these days, due to the fact that the academic world is just pretty much going down the toilet.
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