Long Time No Post...

Hey Y'all...

So sorry it has been so long since my last post. Pecan season was literally "nuts" for us this year. We were so busy which is a great thing but I barely had time to see Dotty at night much less try to keep up with the blog. Now that things are slower I plan to do a better job though!

This time of year is a time for reflection for many people and that includes us here at the Pecan Shed. We look back at what was great and what was not so great. This year there were a lot of great things that took place and as always just a few...we will call them "lessons learned"!

Our Homemade Fudge was a huge success again this year. We had all the great flavors like Chocolate Pecan, Turtle, Tiger, Butter Pecan, Maple Nut, Chocolate Mint and more but we also added holiday flavors such as Pumpkin Pie, Divinity, and Candy Cane fudge. All three were huge successes. (My favorite was the Candy Cane just because it was so pretty!)

All of our candied pecans flew off the shelf as well. In fact we ran out of Chocolate Covered Pecans...not just once...but TWICE!!! (That was a lesson learned moment...both times! We are slow learners sometimes.)

The Texas gifts and souvenirs as well as all the gourmet food items, cookbooks, and just about everything we did not have nailed down (and some things that we did) all flew off the shelves, especially the two weeks right before Christmas! We had so many blank spots in our store I was about to begin to fill them with drawings from Dotty and Presley but luckily we made it work with what little merchandise we had left.

This time of year, even though I am still exhausted, is when I really begin to look forward to the Dallas Gift Market. I love filling the store back up with new and unique items. This year I will be going to Market on the 16th so check back to see what awesome items we get in!

The biggest "LESSON LEARNED" is that Mother Nature is a crazy lady!!! Back in August and even in September we thought this was going to be a bumper crop. We thought the pecans would be big, huge, and great and there would be LOTS of them. Not so it turns out.

The crop was decent but not great. The pecans were darker and not filled out as well as in years past. Usually we get over 50% of good kernels out of a pound of all our pecans (some varieties even run closer to 60%) but this year due to quality concerns we had to shell out most of the crop and then discard a lot of bad ones.

We had more than enough for the Pecan Shed retail store but we had to turn down many new wholesale orders. That is a shame but it is the name of the game in agriculture. Feast or famine is always the case when it comes to Mother Nature. However, we are luckier than some. Some orchards lost their entire crop due to a late freeze back around Easter last year and some lost their crop due to the drought down south this summer. Thus, we count our blessings!

I hope you all had a great 2009 and will have a great 2010! Sorry this post was so long. I will try to make the others shorter (since I won't have 6 weeks of information to cover).

"Tomorrow is a gift...not a guarantee."
Jill