Getting Pecan trees into nut production quickly

Wild seedling pecan sprouts versus planting your own 

If you have seen my previous posts on pecan you know I am a big fan of finding vigorous native pecan sprouts that are located on good pecan sites and grafting them whenever possible, versus planting them and spending more time and money in tree establishment. It's not always the case that good seedling sprouts magically appear in perfect rows and work out with my plans, but when they do I absolutely choose to work with them, versus spending the extra time, energy, and money to plant and establish the trees myself. In fact, if within he first year of planting seedling pecans I see a wild pecan sprout come up near my tree I will often leave it and if it outgrows my planted tree that year, or the next, I will cut down my planted pecan (as long as it is also a seedling) and begin to care for the wild sprout.

This year I took a few pictures of good examples of why it makes more sense to favor wild seedling sprouts like this. The odds are favorable that they already have a fairly extensive root system and are often capable of fantastic growth with very, very, minimal care and inputs. This isn't to say your 1st year planted seedling tree couldn't make similar growth, but I have never seen a 1 year old pecan tree planted in the field that competed favorably in a low input environment with an already established wild seedling pecan.

Here are a couple examples.

BELOW: 

This tree was grafted in SP 2018. It was a relatively short sprout that had even had the top browsed off by deer before I grafted it. It was roughly 1 inch in diameter at about 2 feet from the ground and was relatively short (likely from being continuously eaten by deer) probably around 3 feet tall. I grafted it at about that 2- 2.5 foot mark (which is lower than I would normally graft) and caged it to prevent the deer from eating the graft. This is the tree in the summer of 2019. It is now approximately 10 feet tall, the very top of the tree is just off the top of the picture. The wooden post on the right in the picture is about 5 feet out of the ground. In 1 year and a half this tree has made 7 feet of growth (from the original 3 foot tall tree to the current 10 foot tall tree). Last summer was also a fairly severe drought in this area that killed quite a few seedling pecan trees I had tried to establish, but instead of dying this tree thrived.

BELOW: 

Another seedling that made relatively good growth this year. It is now approximately 9 feet tall. 

BELOW: 

I grafted this pecan at about the height I like to graft them when possible. It is grafted at around my chest height and it was grafted in SP 2019. It has a little competition for light from some nearby trees, so it is really trying to grow up. In the future most of those trees it is competing with will be thinned. This tree is 9 feet tall now as Summer 2019 wraps up, so over the spring and summer of 2019 it has done really well. We were blessed with heavy rainfall in 2019 so even the newly planted seedling pecans have done well, but still the already established wild pecan sprouts have done even better.

         BELOW: 

This is likely one of the parents of many of the seedling pecan sprouts in my upland pecan orchards. It is one of the large mature pecan trees on the edges of the woods and fields where my young trees are growing. Throughout the forested areas near my orchards there are large (50+ years old) mature pecans as well as younger pecans (1-20 years old) near any forest openings.