Pecans

We have a mature pecan tree in our yard in Houston.  There are pecans all over the grass and in the garden bed under the tree.  We picked up a bunch of them today so we could mow the grass. It was almost impossible to find them all; some of them had worked their way down into the grass.

I am drying them out on the porch now, and looking forward to cracking and eating them soon.  The shucks just fell off of most of the nuts; this makes shelling easier than with black walnuts, for example, which I have a lot of in Tennessee. Black walnuts are encased in big brown hulls that don't come off easily.  Most people dump the nuts in their driveways and run over them with cars to get the hulls off!  (The up side is that the brown hulls make a great dye for both cotton and wool.)