meet the producer
EDWARD HICKSON
Galah’s first featured Producer is my husband Edward Hickson, who grows pecans in the Dumaresq Valley on the New South Wales– Queensland border. I promise I’ll cast the net wider for future issues, but for now, please forgive me. I can’t help it, I think he’s great.
He’s really into sniffing soil. A handful from this paddock under the young trees, a handful from that paddock with the older trees, and then—he’s running now—another handful from over there under the gumtrees where it has never been cultivated. ‘Smell it Annie, isn’t it good?’ he asks, as he lifts his soil-filled hands to his nose and breathes in deeply. And I swear to you he partly closes his eyes as he inhales the rich hummus smell. Ed Hickson grows pecans on the alluvial soils of the Dumaresq Valley, 80 kilometres west of Tenterfield. It’s a new industry for the district, and it’s been a steep learning curve for the former cotton farmer; however, he is determined, a little obsessive and not afraid to wait. Pecan trees are slow to mature and need about seven years to produce nuts. You plant a pecan nut in its shell into the ground and, like magic, a pecan tree grows. Onto these baby trees you graft certain varieties that can pollinate each other with the wind. Pecans are relatively new to breeding, which means the varieties grown now are very close to ancient heirloom varieties. In late autumn a tree-shaking machine vibrates the trunks with such controlled force that the nuts pop off the trees like confetti. Out where we live, they don’t need pesticides or fungicides. The longlived trees are majestic and, if we let them, they’d grow more than 30 metres tall. But Ed will prune them with giant spinning saw discs mounted onto tractors to keep them at 10 metres to optimise yields. You don’t want all the energy going into the height of a tree; you want the energy going into the nuts. This is one of the many things he has learned since planting the first lot of pecans seven years ago. >
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