Identifying Young Wild Pecan trees at your Orchard Site

In some of my previous posts I have talked about the advantages of grafting wild pecan trees that are already established (saves you time, saves you money, you get pecan nuts sooner, etc.). As I have said before, if you already have some larger pecan trees around your property, it is very likely that squirrels and mother nature have planted more pecans for you than you can imagine. If you want to let them grow, arguably, the most important thing you will have to do is not kill them. Whether they are in an area you mow, brush hog, or in an area where you have animals grazing, you will probably have to do something to protect them when they are very young.

The easiest thing I have found is to follow these few steps:

1) Identify the young pecan tree - often this is easiest in the late spring-early summer. First year pecan trees will be sprouting at this time and it is very easy to miss them and mow them over.

2) Drive a wooden stake in the ground next to the tree once it is identified. Make sure this stake will be taller than any of the vegetation around it. You want this to be tall enough that you will be able to see it above any grass.

If you want you can use a metal post, or a t-post instead of a tall wooden stake. I prefer using a durable wooden stake versus a t-post because I generally remove the stakes and cages in a few years when the trees are taller and since I do this with a lot of trees I don't want to have to go pull a few hundred t-posts out every year.  Also, if you are someone who may want to leave the cage and post around the tree longer (maybe you have livestock that might bother your tree?), then you need to make sure you pay attention when the tree is getting large enough that the trunk is starting to touch that post, or if the roots at the base of the tree are growing close to your post. It becomes very difficult to pull metal posts out of a tree if the tree grows into the post.


3) Put a cage around the young tree and attach it to your wooden stake using wire or rope. What I usually do is do to a hardware or farm supply store and purchase small rolls of 4 or 5 foot tall, 2 by 4 welded wire fencing, cut out a 6 foot length of it, bend it into a circle and use it as a tree cage. You can also use other types of fencing if you have it. The cages come in handy to protect the trees from deer. Deer will eat pecan trees, they will rub the bark off them, and further down the road they can also eat (or otherwise damage) your graft (if you graft your trees in the future).


So back to step 1. Identifying young pecan trees. This is actually somewhat more difficult than with some other tree species because very young pecan trees actually look much different than they will when they are a few years old.

It will probably be easiest for you to identify pecan trees in late spring and early summer when they have their leaves. Below is a picture of mature pecan leaves. Older pecan trees (normally older than 1 or 2 years old) will have what are called compound, alternate leaves. The leaf consists of all those individual 'leaflets' (this is what compound means). That entire structure is the leaf. Usually there will be from 9-17 leaflets on a leaf. Notice that those little leaflets always have small serrations, or 'teeth' along the edges, they are NOT smooth. Also those leaflets are almost always very narrow, or lance shaped. They are very pointed on the ends.

ABOVE : We have a pecan LEAF, it is a compound leaf, with 17 leaflets. Note the toothy, jagged edges of the leaflets. Note all the leaflets are pointed and relatively narrow. This leaf is from a tree that is around 4 years old. If you are identifying pecan trees that are a few years old by their leaves this is what you should look for. This is a relatively typical leaf. This is what you will find described in pecan leaf ID guides. At this stage the pecan tree you are looking at is likely quite large, it could be 4 feet tall, 40 feet tall, or 80 feet tall. Almost all the leaves will look similar to this.

BELOW: Here is a group of the leaves from that same 4 year old tree. This particular tree is around 8 feet tall. This tree is already so large that I would not really bother to put a cage or stake around it. If you have really big problems with deer rubbing your trees you could put a cage around it if you wanted.

BELOW: This is what you are unlikely to find in the tree ID guides. What we have here are TWO pictures of a pecan tree that is 1 month old. It looks very different from older pecan trees. If you are trying to find young pecan sprouts in an area you regularly mow, or that is fairly intensively grazed pasture, this is very likely what you will see. It does not even have the compound leaves with the 9-17 leaflets. It has a few simple leaves. If you are looking around your yard or field for small pecan trees that have just sprouted and taken root this year, this is what you should be looking for. These are small, and tender. They are easily mowed over and are easily consumed and trampled by deer. Notice it's leaves are a little wider, but they are still pointed on the ends, and they also still have the jagged 'teeth' along the edges of each leaf. This tree is only 8 inches tall. 

BELOW: Transition. If you are looking through hay fields, or pastures that are not mowed multiple times a year you may see something like this below in these TWO pictures. This is also a pecan tree, and it has some characteristics of both the really young (newly sprouted) pecan trees, and the older ones. Note it still has those simple leaves at the base of the tree, but it is forming compound leaves at the top. This tree is about 15 inches tall. Note that the leaves and leaflets still all have those jagged edges, and they still have points on the ends. 

When you are just starting to identify pecan trees you are going to make a few mistakes, that's the way learning happens. If you think you have misidentified some trees, then try to find out distinguishing features of the species you actually found and then look closely at those differences. 

In Missouri there are a variety of hickory species, and some look somewhat similar to pecans. I may dive into some of those differences in another post, but if you think you might be looking at something that might NOT be a pecan, but looks similar, look up Missouri's hickory species, and also the black walnut. Look for their distinguishing features and compare that to the tree you have.