Disgust with wholesalers

Well, my plans to have lots of "Desirables" waiting for Thanksgiving pecan pies (see previous post) backfired! These nuts were so good we ate all of them - yes, all of them!!! - raw as snacks before Thanksgiving ever arrived. Two days before the big meal I did what thousands of Americans do - I went to the grocers and bought pecans. I even had to get a stocker to go in the back and find me some because they were sold out on the shelves. Was I ever disgusted when I got home with my bag of Diamond brand pecan halves, opened it up and popped one in my mouth. I almost spewed it back out it was so disgusting compared to what we had been eating for the previous week. In tiny print on the bag it was noted that the contents were pecans and - AND????!!!! Yes, AND Corn Oil "to preserve freshness". Probably beacuse they are last year's (or year before kept in cold storage) crop from Mexico picked up cheap and resold to you in the grocery at premium price! If you have only ever tasted pecans like these I am very ashamed to tell you that we are pecan growers. You have not tasted a true pecan until you shelled an improved variety like "Pawnee" or "Desirable" and popped it straight in your mouth - no toasting, sugar, or CORN OIL needed! I guess in a way I should thank these purveyors of junk nuts because it has made me fully confident that our fresh nuts will blow them away once people have a chance to taste the difference. So, thanks, Diamond and Food Lion :) !
You're ensuring our success!

Marketing thoughts and ideas

Now D is much better at marketing than I will ever be. But our daughters seem to be better than both of us put together (got their Grandma's talent for that - she was a top-notch cosmetic salesperson for years). So as we put together information and ideas on marketing we are going to use family to "test market". Considering the wonderful size of our extended family (over 35 sets of aunts/uncles and multitudes of cousins as well as immediate family!) we should get a good idea of how well we are doing. This week we really got a boost when D told several of his co-workers about how we plant to process, package and market our products and several of them seriously asked him about if we would consider investors! These are ladies in real estate and marketing and they are very gung-ho about pecans?!! Hopefully that means we are on the right track! Personally I really look forward to the interaction with the customers when the time comes because that was so much fun at the Bagel Shoppe. Right now I have to begin testing chocolate coating recipes (oh, poor me!!) and chocolate fudge recipes and pecan pie recipes to get those down-pat. I must admit that we are all becoming "pecan connoisseurs" and I can now tell something about the age/drying time of a pecan although I still can't taste the difference in varieties that some people claim they can taste. Maybe with time.....

Daily journal

D is in Texas and had a fantastic meeting with Mr. Berdoll. We will definitely be getting trees from him but we need to decide fairly soon what size and get our order in to him before someone else snatches them up. Nursery stock is very short this fall after that very late spring freeze and ridiculously hot and dry summer here in the South. (This man and his family produce well over 1 million pounds of pecans a year, buy more from other growers to meet their demand, and sell about 25-30,000 trees a year! I can't even begin to think in those kind of numbers!) Tomorrow D goes to visit one other nursery and several orchards, retail stores and processors.

I haven't made much headway with the number crunching but hope to do so tomorrow. The land is cleared and graded (thank you Lord!) and we had a little rain this morning (much bigger Thank you Lord!!) If the Governor will just lift that burn ban for a few days we can finish prepping the land. The fruit trees and berry bushes have been hanging on and I am hopeful to keep them alive and actually get some small harvest from them next year, Lord willing. I especially would like to see the raspberries, blackberries, blueberries and grapes produce at least a little. It will probably be 2009 before we see any apples, pears, peaches and plums, though.

Bees - still researching how/when/where to set up the hives. As soon as we can get the clover established in the pecan orchard and it is feasible we would like to set up hives. It will not only be good for the clover and the bees but for the whole farm.

We've sketched out the layout of the retail space and will work on it ourselves over the next couple of years so that hopefully it will be ready by the time we need it. D and I have also been playing around with the layout of the logo but I think we need some more help. I am going to try to get Matt, Russ, Katy and Joanna all to give it a try to see what they can come up with either from their own photos or drawings or computerized drawing.