Wes Rice might have large quantities… or may be able to direct you to a source:
Wesley G. Rice.
Address: 333 Braden School Road; Ponca City, OK 74604
Telephone: (580) 765 - 7049
E-mail: wrice@poncacity.net
Tom Circle might have seednuts available(I see they do offer Kanza and GreenRiver nuts) - I don’t see seednuts listed on their website, but I got my Kanza scionwood from him years ago.
While you’re at it, contact Clifford England at England’s Orchard/Nursery - he may have or have a line on Major seednuts. www.nuttrees.net
500 would be about 8 pounds of Kanza nuts. That is a LOT of pecans to plant to start trees. Presuming they produce 300 decent seedlings, you would have enough trees to set out 10 acres of trees on 30 X 50 spacing.
I can offer you up to 100 seed nuts of Kanza and Adams #5. I don’t have enough to go more than that.
The Pecan Pollination chart I posted in another thread shows nuts per pound in column D. This is the in-shell count of pecans that weigh a pound. Pecans vary quite a bit so allow for some samples larger and some smaller than this number. Try to start at least 30% more seed than the number of trees you want.
You’ll get high germination. Gosh I used to plant in pots and 30 of 30 in a flat wasn’t unusual. Some might of had 28 I don’t know. You saw that row this morning. All of them came up. I have a block of 25-30 Hark and those all came up too. Unfortunately for me/everyone, the ortet Hark that was 10miles the way the bird flies got hit by lightening this summer and was removed.
If you aren’t successful with Wes or Cliff or (Tom), you might ask John Nolin too. Gosh he has a lot of trees and I’m sure he’d have pecans. Give him a shot. John is Nolin River Nursery.
After about page 5 of google I stopped searching for in shell pecans of Kanza or Greenriver. I’d call these folks.
I also have purchased ‘Major’ pecans from ebay several times from a guy in either Kentucky or Tennessee. They’ll probably show up on ebay anytime now.
Lastly, there’s a guy in Texas that sells beautiful Kanza. You might ask @Lucky_P or @Fusion_power if they think the “southern gene pool of his varieties” are fine for you to use his pecans as seed. I would not tell the grower you intend to grow the pecans. I don’t know why but something tells me I was asked once that they were for eating only. I bought more than 20 pounds from this guy in previous years. http://www.swiftriverpecans.com/pecans/
The issue is not with getting only 60% germination. Like Barkslip says, pecans often give near 100% germination. Read Larry Grauke’s article about selecting rootstocks for grafting. He is very particular that only the most vigorous seedlings should be used. I allow for up to 30% of the seedlings that for one reason or another do not make the grade. Also, I grow pecans in a row with 2 seedlings per foot. That is close enough to give decent growth the first year but is a bit too close after the 2nd season of growth.
In the interesting trivia category, this is the list of varieties growing at Auburn’s E.V. Smith research farm. This farm has about 700 trees total with many duplicates for most varieties. There is another farm in South Alabama that has quite a few more varieties. This list does not include the USDA numbered lines held at this site of which there are about 200 more trees. Descriptions of several of these are on the Alabama Pecan Growers website at Cultivars or on the Georgia site at http://www.caes.uga.edu/extension-outreach/commodities/pecan-breeding/cultivars/alphabetical-list.html I will be getting scionwood of a few of these in January. If anything piques your interest, let me know and I will see if it is available. They will NOT allow collection of scionwood for any varieties that are patented or otherwise not in public domain!
Adams #1
Adams #5
Amling
Apalachee
B3405027
Baby B
Bar64_18
Barton
Bond_ll
Cherryle
Creek
Cunard
Desirable
Eclipse
Elliott
Ellis
Excalibur
Excel
Gafford
Giftpack
Headquarters
Izzy
Jenkins
Kanza
Kiowa
Lakota
Leander
Major
Mandan
Mcmillan
Miss L
Moreland
Nacono
Oconee
Oswego
Pippin 09-3
Pippin 09-4
Pippin 09-7
Pippin CM
Posey
Shotts
SMC
SME
Southern State
Staten
Stuart
Surprize
Syrup Mill
Tobacco Barn
Tree83
U/C 7-15
Wamble
Zinner
Darrel, I wonder if you have any recommendations for me. I’m looking for pecan trees that will do as well as possible with essentially zero care or inputs (besides maybe doing some things to limit squirrel predation) in my western edge of NC Piedmont location. If I go just 50 miles south it seems like there’s a pecan tree in every other yard, but pecan trees are much less common around me. I wonder if the varieties commonly planted further south and east just don’t do well here. And I wonder if I should be looking at Bill Reid’s recommendations for northern areas or if I can consider recommendations from Alabama or Georgia. I have an Amling tree already, but I could try to graft it over to something else if I’m too far north for Amling. I also have a small Stuart, and I guess I should graft it over to something else, but I’m tempted to grow it just because it’s so standard. Currently my plan is to graft Norton, Major, Shepherd, and Kanza onto seedlings I direct-seeded a few years ago (for a total of about 6 trees.) Adams #5 seems like potentially a really good choice, though, and the chart in that first link suggests it doesn’t require a super long season. Am I right to assume that season length is the only limitation with planting some of these varieties where I am? They’d all be 7a cold hardy, right?
Your area is due east of Nashville but the best I recall, the mountains make you a tad colder. There are three adaptations needed.
Early fall maturity is needed so the trees will mature nuts then go dormant for winter. One of those oft overlooked factors in the fall is that a tree that holds leaves longer after the nuts drop will gather more photosynthate which leads to better return bloom the next year. This helps with annual production. Countering this is animal depredation which hits early maturing nuts far harder. I have to gather nuts off the trees to keep the squirrels, jays, and crows from harvesting them.
Late spring budbreak is needed to prevent damage from late freezes. This is one area where just 2 or 3 days can make a huge difference in survival. Choose carefully to find varieties that break buds a few days later.
Strong winter dormancy is necessary to stand winter freeze/thaw cycles. Southern varieties do not go into winter with strong enough dormancy.
Stuart is surprisingly adept at missing spring freezes. Unfortunately, there are so many negatives with Stuart that I wouldn’t plant trees now. Fifty years ago, it was still scab resistant so made a lot more sense. The weaknesses of Stuart are scab susceptible, poor quality nuts often with fuzz attached, a magnet for insect pests like yellow aphids, not precocious, and low percent kernel. Strengths are late spring bud break, consistent heavy production, excellent nut fill most years, spreading growth habit, and strong wood that stands up to storms and ice better than others. You will have to make your own mind up whether to keep the Stuart tree. Given that it is already growing, it might be worth hanging on to it.
The varieties I suggest looking closely at for your area include Kanza, Hark, Major, and Lakota. Everything I’ve seen from Adams #5 so far suggests better than average wintering traits. It is probably worth getting scionwood and giving a try. I think Huffman might have a chance given that Pawnee is one parent but keep in mind that it is very late maturity. Avalon also might work if on the right rootstock. The only background info I have on Amling is that it is a Texas seedling. Nobody seems to know more than that. Harry Amling selected it and Bill Goff recommended it. The only weakness I know of so far is that ambrosia beetles ate up a young tree this past spring. I have another growing and saw several healthy trees at the E.V. Smith farm.
Ask Lucky_P for recommendations since he is much closer to your climate than I am here in Hamilton, Alabama.
That’s probably true anyways, but I just looked up Hamilton, AL, and officially it looks like we’re both the same growing zone at 7b. I’m guessing Lucky has seen colder temperatures than I have. The coldest I’ve seen on the thermometer in the last 10 years (and probably longer) is right around 0 degrees, but it’s possible we just barely scratched negative numbers. Lucky and I are probably more similar in season length than you and I are, though.
You’ve got me thinking more about trying to graft Stuart over to something else, maybe Adams #5. The traits I’ve been looking for are scab resistance, large nuts with thicker shells (with the hopes that those traits will reduce bird predation – I assume thick shells correlate directly to low kernel percentage), strong limb structures (because I’ve already had significant issues with limbs getting broken and twisted off), and varieties that fill their nuts well (even if that means lower production.) Stuart has some of those traits, but insect and disease resistance would trump some of those other traits for me.
I’m hoping I can keep squirrels out of my trees by pruning to avoid any low scaffolds and then baffling. And I can trap squirrels, too. Birds seem a lot harder to deal with. I don’t have any pecans even near bearing yet, but I’ve had huge crow problems elsewhere on the farm. I don’t know if birds would simply cause less damage with thicker shelled varieties or if they just go after the thinner shelled varieties first, in which case selecting all thicker shelled varieties might not do me any good at all.
I haven’t seen any information on relative budbreak. It would make sense, especially in my location, to consider that, but it seems like I couldn’t find enough information about budbreak timing to even consider that trait. Related to budbreak, I’ve never noticed any ambrosia beetle damage on any of my fruit or nut trees except in years and on plants that were hit by late spring freezes.
I have a Stuart, grafted from the old tree back at my ancestral homeplace at Auburn AL (War Eagle!), mainly for nostalgia’s sake. Scabs pretty badly most years. I haven’t even looked at it this year, so I don’t know if it did anything at all.
Major, Kanza, and Posey were the best bearers here this year - but all my trees are young.
McMillan, Jenkins, Nacono, and Oswego produced a few nuts… first time out for all 4 of those trees.
Have one tree of Osage… despite reports of it having good scab resistance, it has had scab worse than almost anything else three years in a row… I’m fairly certain that it’s true to name… the narrow branch angles and propensity to develop included bark is there in spades.
Scab was bad on Peruque, Jay Ford, and I-10.
CF, bird predation is worse on early maturing nuts and on “smaller” nuts. Thick shells help quite a bit. Large nuts help even more. No puns needed folks, this is simple reality with pecans.
You might look at getting Excel though it tends to overbear. It is very scab resistant so far for me.
Major is a really good pecan but Hark is better. If you put an order in with John Brittan at Nolin River you can get Kanza and Hark next year, I believe.
You get the best quality trees from him. He hires backhoe operators to dig his trees. They’re extremely reasonable in price, and you’ll get the taproot included.
I was shocked when I opened up the box. First of all I bought a 4-5 foot ‘Dumbell Lake’ from him several years ago and it arrived in what looked like a 9’ long box. He had every single bit of the root from that tree. I was actually standing in the hole I dug to plant it.
Ozy,
Major is very good. It’s a medium to small nut (60-80/lb), but has excellent kernel quality, good crackability, and the tree has excellent resistance to pecan scab, and good branch structure. USDA/ARS has used it extensively in its breeding program as a source of scab resistance, precocity, and kernel quality.
First selected in 1907, it’s been propagated for 100 years now, and I still regard it as a ‘must-have’ for pecan growers here in the northern/midwestern pecan belt.
Some of it’s offspring (Kanza, Hark?, Lakota, Yates 68 & 127, etc.) are making moves and may surpass it, but not all that long ago, if you were planting a pecan orchard here, ‘experts’ would have recommended that 70% of your trees be ‘Major’.
Major and Kanza complement one another well with pollen-shed and nutlet receptivity. Biggest problem for Major is finding a good late pollen source to set full crops. Kanza fills the bill.
Thank you both for your insight. It sounds like I have two good options. I will have to look around and think about where I will order from. I have had good luck with edible landscaping, but their trees are potted and certainly won’t come with nearly as much of the root system… on the other hand I am a little intimidated by needing to dig a 6’ deep hole. Maybe if I got a post hole digger…