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It’s pecan season and the ground is covered with delicious bounty just waiting to be harvested and eaten! But there are a few things you need to do in order to enjoy their wonderful meat safely…
On a recent trip to visit my husband’s parents we got to harvest a bunch of pecans from their backyard. About 20 pounds to be exact!
We shelled a few the night we picked them up, but most of them were tossed into a box to shell when we got home from our trip.
I loved shelling the pecans at the kitchen table while we chatted, Christmas music playing softly in the background and the baby running here and there.
How to Safely Clean and Store Backyard Pecans
The time we spent shelling pecans that night reminded me of my own childhood when we picked, shelled, and ate pecans from my grandparent’s yard! Fortunately I had the experience of cleaning and storing our backyard pecans safely, but not everyone is so lucky!
So let me share a few tips with you now.
How to Pick a Good Pecan
First, you need to pick good pecans. Here are a few tips for doing that.
1. Make sure the outer shell has cracked and split from the inner shell.
2. Try to harvest the pecans as soon as they fall. At least within a few days. This will help increase the number of good nuts you get, and reduce the number that are lost to wildlife.
3. Look for cracks or holes in the shell. Discard those and keep looking.
4. Shake the pecan in the shell. If you hear a deep rattle, then you have a mature pecan that is ready to harvest! A hollow rattle means an underdeveloped pecan.
5. Look for a tapered end. A noticeably tapered end means that the pecan did not fully form and will not be good when shelled.
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How to Shell Pecans
Next, you’ll need to actually shell them. You can do that in several ways.
1. A classic hand nutcracker: this method usually yields perfect halves every time, once you get the hang of it. The only downside being that your hand will get really sore if you are doing a large quantity!
2. A hammer and board: this is the method I employed while at my in-laws, since we couldn’t find their nutcracker. It takes a bit longer, but worked well and yielded many perfect halves, but there were still a lot of pieces that I had to pry out of the shells.
If you do use this method, make sure to fully crack all parts of the shell without smashing it to bits! It will make removing the nut easier.
3. A heavy duty pecan (and nuts in general) cracker: this method is my favorite! Each nut ends up taking about 15 seconds to harvest the meat from, so it’s perfect for pecans in large quantities! We built a little box around ours to catch the shells and have never looked back!
Safely Preparing the Pecans for Eating and Storage
After you have the meat harvested from the shells, you need to make sure the pecans are safe for eating and storing. Here are the steps to do so!
1. Pre-heat the oven to its lowest setting. For my oven this is 170°.
2. Place pecans in a single layer on a parchment lined baking tray.
3. Bake at 170° for 45 minutes, or until fully dry all the way through. Not only does this enhance the flavor of the pecans, and give them an amazing crunch, it also has the added benefit of preventing mold from growing inside your pecan storage!
4. Allow them to cool completely.
5. Eat right away, or store in an air tight container for up to a year!
Be sure to try these Cranberry Pecan Chocolate Chip Cookies!
How exciting! My in laws are heading down to Oklahoma tomorrow for fresh pecans. I cans wait to get some for my freezer.
Awesome! Gosh I love pecans! We need to plan better for next year, because I already know I want way more than we got this year! :-) Enjoy!
weĺl Victoria my pecan hunting days have treated me bad! Every single one of those pecans I picked up off the ground is rotten ! I don’t know when they start dropping from the trees all I know is I see them I pick them up. now I know why there wer so many on the ground! The squirrels didn’t even want them! I’m just tired of paying these ridiculous high prices for pecans and I thought maybe I could actually sell some of these at the Farmers Market. Obviously not this year! Are there any pecans that are still good that I haven’t found yet? I guess I need some guidance. There plenty of trees around just need to know when I need to be out there to get the good ones thank you! sent with a ☹️ thanks for any help you can give me!
Hi Maria, I’m sorry to hear this! I would say that if all the pecans you have found are rotten, then it’s likely you won’t find many good ones at this point. Likely high rains in the area have caused an issue – it happens, sadly.
I would check with your county extension office to find out when pecans normally ripen in your area, then start gathering at that point. If there are still pecans in the trees now, you could put some nets out (off the ground) to catch them as they fall in order to get the good ones!
Hopefully you are able to get some this year, if not then next year with the information from the county extension office, you may be able to get out there early enough before they rot. Best of luck!
Hey Maria,
You have likely picked up shells dropped for many years from those trees. Instead, next year, pick one or more trees that you know you will have access to get the pecans for next year and mow, rake, and clean up all pecans and whatever else you find around the tree away before the 1st of March.
Then if you like you can get lawn edging and then turnover the lawn around the tree and mulch it about 3 inches deep in pine bark nugget mulch inside the edging your surround the tree with..Fertilize with 1 to 2 pounds 10-10-10 about 10′ away from the trunk in February and no more.
Finally, next year when you go to collect, here in zone 6b in Somerset, Kentucky they were ready Oct to mid Oct to pick, still in the split hulls, the tree’s harvest, there will be no question it was grown & dropped that season and is not the cumulative uneaten drop of that tree for years & years & years.
I live in southern Kentucky and planted a Pawnee from WalMart in April 2015 and a (tiny) Lakota ordered from Stark Bros in May 2018 and this year my Pawnee finally had 2 pecans. I’m looking forward to much bigger crops of pecans as these trees grow & mature. Kentucky is not really peak pecan country but I’m trying.
We have one tree and for years have gotten a bumper crop. This year 7 5 gallon buckets full. We have a person that has a machine that cracks and shells. We bring them home, clean the remaining shells off them and then seal and save in quart bags. Then freeze. I’ m still
Baking with 2011. We’re from Texas. Never do anything else before freezing. Hope this helps.
Hi Janice! That’s wonderful!! I’m so jealous of your crop, that’s amazing!
I try not to store too much in the freezer, since space there is limited, so the oven baking process is to allow them to be stored at room temperature without issue.
Wish I had the space to freeze them though, sounds easy! Thanks for sharing!
Yi have about 400 pounds that are going in the trash because no one around want them.
Hi Walley, what a bummer! You could always process them and keep them in mylar bags for later. Or you could sell them to a local feed store, they usually buy pecans to resell during the holiday season.
OR you could package and sell them yourself!
Hi I am new to pecan trees. We have 2 trees in our backyard and I have found some pecans out of the husks. I let them sit on the counter for about a week and cracked them open. Some had worms inside, others were shriveled and brown and then there were some good ones but some of the meat looked lighter than normal pecans do. I just want to make sure that we are “safely” harvesting them. I have read where some people boil them prior to shelling them?
Hi Crystal! I would definitely bake them after shelling, to make sure you kill any bugs that you can’t see yet. Other than that, sounds like you are sorting them well! If you can clean the ground under the tree and then harvest daily (or every other day) you might be able to get a higher percentage of good ones. The longer they sit on the ground, the more of them rot.
I hope that helps!