As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to favor summer as much, if not more so, than other times of year. I hail from a part of the world in which the heat and humidity are as oppressive as the inside of a hot, damp sock. This misery is compounded by the plague of gnats that thrive in the rapidly decaying organic matter of our countryside and fields. In these ways, summer in south Georgia leaves much to be desired.
As one who spends a fair amount of time outdoors, its easy to enjoy the dry air and perfect temperatures of fall, the mild winters, and the new bright skies and birdsong of spring. But as mortality makes itself known, one begins to appreciate more the burgeoning life of summer, the fat of the land, green leaves and fields. There are the darkened, enclosed hardwoods hiding their secrets, the smell of freshly mowed orchards in high summer, the limbs of the pecan trees as the fruit begins to size and the crop shows itself. The land is alive with vigor and a sense of youthful urgency about it that you can feel in the hot, heavy air.
There are reminders of this, even in the cool air of my office. As I opened the door and sat at my desk the other morning, my nose was tickled with the odor of ripening pecan leaves, freshly pulled from my trees the day before and bound within paper sacks—one sack for each orchard—sitting atop the desk. I left them there to dry as they await shipment to the agricultural laboratory. There’s no rush to get them there, for the lab will dry them down to ash for analysis, so I keep them here for a few days to enjoy the aroma of the leaves slowly curing—a smell not unlike tobacco leaves drying in a barn for those who are familiar. If I forget a bag that gets lost underneath the seat of my truck, it reveals itself by filling the cab with this same sweet, earthy smell.
I pull leaf samples in late July. It gives me an opportunity to walk the orchards and examine trees in an old, familiar way. There’s a specified process for this by which one takes a collective sample of 50 pair of leaflets from trees randomly scattered across the orchard. A pecan leaf has the typical arrangement of what we call a compound leaf. They have a long leaf stem and upon that stem are leaflets arranged in a row to each side of the stem, usually 5-7 leaflets per side and a terminal leaflet at the end. Together they all make up the compound leaf. It forms an arched pattern from the point of attachment and the leaflets tend to arch or cup downward. One removes the middle pair of leaflets on a compound leaf by pinching them off. It doesn’t hurt the trees.
You may be asking, “Why are you pulling these leaf samples?” The leaves hold the secret summer memories and mysteries of my trees. They collect the precious sunlight falling down, mix it in the water and nutrients pulled upward from the tree’s roots, and turn the whole concoction into the sugars that drive the energy processes that keep the tree running and producing pecans. The specific mixture of those nutrients inside the leaf is revealed in the leaf sample. This can give you a look at the tree’s health and nutritional condition much like a human blood sample can provide clues to a person’s health. Upon this, we base the tree’s fertilizer needs for the following year.
There’s a magic window in which the sampling should be done. The amounts of various nutrients within the leaf change throughout the growing season as the tree moves through its annual stages from leafing out in the spring to setting nuts, growth and development of the nuts, nut maturity, and finally leaf senescence, as the leaves fall naturally to the ground with the shortening days and cool temperatures of autumn. Years ago, someone discovered that from about the second week of July through the first week of August, these nutrients are at their most stable in the leaf. Therefore, we base the tree’s fertilizer needs for the following year off this sampling period. They are important because these samples can tell you when you need more or less of a certain fertilizer nutrient and when you can simply save your money rather than putting it into fertilizers.
Leaf samples are a form of communication with the tree. But, its not only the quantitative analytics found in the results of these samples that speak. One reason I enjoy walking in the orchard is that I’m an observer. Its what I do for a living. In case you haven’t noticed, trees tend to be pretty quiet. They communicate in other ways. If the foliage of a tree is particularly thin, with some limb die-back, that usually indicates some sort of root or vascular system problem. Large, lush, deep green leaves indicate a healthy tree. But the term large is relative when it comes to a pecan leaf. Some pecan varieties have larger and/or more dense foliage than others. Those with the smaller leaf characteristic tend to be more efficient because they can make better use of the sunlight.
Leaf color can tell you a lot. But there is variation by variety there too. Some are more yellow-green, while others are dark green. One develops an eye for this over time and you develop a mental scale in your mind for the range of green-ness to expect from certain trees. A yellow leaf with green veins suggest an iron deficiency. A green Christmas tree pattern along the veins of a yellowing leaf indicates magnesium deficiency. Curly leaf edges with some leaf yellowing is a tell-tale sign of zinc deficiency. Small, rounded leaves resembling a mouse’s ear reveal a deficiency of nickel. These are just a few of the things one looks for in the orchard in summer, when the life of the land is going all out to make the most of the season. It’s a joy to watch.
Though we still have months of warm weather left, leaf sampling time marks the beginning of the end of summer, which always gets me thinking. In a few months, the leaves will fall. Their job will be done and they will return to the earth beneath the tree canopy, surrendering their remaining nutrients back to the roots of the tree over time. For me, it is a reminder of the old Biblical truth, “”By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you shall return”.
For now, I will take pleasure in the smell of ripening pecan leaves. Its not only in the vitality of the orchard and it’s scenes that summer has its appeal. It is found in the tactile atmosphere of bent fishing poles, bare feet in the grass, spotted fawns, steam rising off a blacktop after a rain, birdsong, insects crawling over blooming flowers, the horizon to horizon layered colors of brown, green, and blue painted upon the landscape, the first ripe tomato off the vine. The smell of pecan leaves curing on my desk or in my truck contains all this. All that is summer. And so I breathe it in and hold it for a while.
Thoughts From The Orchard 