My daughter and her hubby bought 4 acres and an older home (built 1950) out in the country here. We have been helping them fix the place up some and it has turned into a nice home for them.
I was excited to see lots of black walnut, persimmons, pawpaw and a couple of pecan trees on the place.
About 3 weeks ago i picked up a few pecans… and put them in a bowl and sit them in their pantry. They were quite small… about half the size of store bought pecans.
Today we visited them again and i cracked one of those pecans and it cracked decent (much easier than a shagbark hickory nut) and i got out a near perfect half.
Poped it in my mouth expecting something decent… but got a quick flashback to a couple years ago when i found and tried a bitternut hickory… extreme bitterness… astringency…
It was nasty bad… and i had high hopes for those smallish pecans.
Photo of the native pecans, top, and the Folz bitcan, center & bottom. This one looks more like the bitternut parent, with the telltale pecan ‘stripes’.
@Lucky_P … I believe that Lucky… had to be related to bitternut.
It has shed most leaves now and still has lots of nuts hanging. I will be glad to send you some if you want. Just pm me your address.
There is another just across the road on a bank above the creek and that tree hangs out over the creek. It is a steep bank so i have not bothered to check those nuts out.
As far as i can tell those two are the only (what I thought were pecans) in the immediate area there.
Now I am wondering if the other might be pecan… instead of bitcan. I will have to check it out.
It’s an evil trick played by Ma Nature, to make a nut with a shell so thin that cracks out so well… only to be inedible.
However, since the tannins are water-soluble, cold-pressing those nuts yields a non-bitter oil, for culinary purposes.
While F1 bit-cans are usually very bitter, backcrosses to pecan can produce some very interesting genetics. Major pecan has a large introgression on chromosome 8 from bitternut. Selected offspring such as Kanza and Lakota carry the bitternut segment which provides improved strength of limbs and improved disease and pest tolerance. We could stand to do some serious breeding work with selected Carya Cordiformis where pecans could benefit from bitternut’s inherent advantages including cold tolerance, wood strength, disease and pest resistance, and adaptability to soils where pecan can’t thrive.
Red/black acorns, pressed for oil, leave the tannins behind.
White oak, and red/black oak species, if used for flour, must be ground/pounded and leached to remove the tannins.
Darrel makes a good point about incorporating C.cordiformis in breeding schemes for improved pecan selections in the future.
