Archive for December, 2006
Sunday, December 31st, 2006
Mesilla Plaza – Christmas
Taken this evening on the Plaza, looking toward San Albino.
Tags: Mesilla Plaza, Christmas
Saturday, December 23rd, 2006
Mesilla Post Office
Tags: Mesilla Post Office
Monday, December 18th, 2006
No Trespassing
As you drive the backroads around Mesilla, through the 18,000+ acres of pecans in the county, you will see these little signs every where:
Why such concern about trees? They are not going to be damaged by people walking under them.
Here’s the reason:
Tags: Pecan Thieves
Friday, December 15th, 2006
Blacksmith
Here’s the old Mesilla blacksmith shop, which was built before 1900. It’s been closed for 40 years. The original blacksmith and owner was Simon Guerra.
The structure is unplastered adobe.
Here’s a closer view of the weathered front and the sliding horse door.
The human door:
The inside:
Tags: Mesilla, Blacksmith Shop
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
Adobe Embeds
Here’s a well-maintained adobe building co-habitating with the remains of an old adobe structure.
This kind of thing can be seen around Mesilla because most owners don’t want to demolish this historical heritage. In recognition of this preference, Mesilla has a city ordinance against removing old adobe structures.
This tree was undoubtedly alive when it was incorporated into this adobe wall.
So we have duple embeds: tree in wall, wall in building. Or do we have tree in building, building in wall?
Tags: Adobe, Mesilla, Duple Embeds
Monday, December 4th, 2006
Pecan Harvesting
The 2006 pecan harvest is almost finished.
The trees are ready for harvest when most of the protective shucks have split. You can see the open shucks and pecans here:
Pecan trees alternate between high yield and low yield years. This year is a low year for this area. Production in a low year can be as little as 1/3 of a high year.
Here is a tree from an orchard with an excellent yield this year, perhaps because the trees are younger and were recently transplanted.
The first step in harvesting is getting the nuts out of the tree. This is done with a shaker:
The trees are shook for about 2 or 3 seconds and you can feel the shaking in the ground 20 or 30 feet away. The going rate to get your trees shook if you don’t own a shaker is $5 a tree.
Sometimes it is necessary to shake several branches of a large tree.
Here you can see pecans falling as the tree shakes.
The shaker shakes out anything that will fall, including shucks, leaves, and twigs. All of this joins the leaves which have already fallen from the tree, so the second step is to use a windrow machine to rake this material into rows.
The last step in harvesting is to use a sweeper to pick up the leaves and debris and pecans and separate the pecans. Here’s a sweeper in action.
The sweeper stores the nuts in a bin and grinds the leaves and debris and returns it to the soil.
Here are what trees look like after harvest.
Doña Ana county produces more pecans than any similarly-sized area in the world.
Tags: Pecan Harvest, Pecan Shaker, Pecan Sweeper
