Nuts about Nuts

Paul and Joan Reynolds are nuts about nuts. The couple has been selling pecans for many years, mostly at Riverview Restaurant, but with the restaurant closing they’re sitting on bags of pecans with nowhere to sell them.
“Right now I’ve got between 30 and 35 (one) pound bags,” said Joan Reynolds, who lives with Paul in Holland Subdivision in Lewisport.

Every year they harvest pecans from the trees in their yard and prep them for sale at the restaurant, where they’ve become an annual staple for some.
“A lot of them people wait for them to get ready,” she said. “They’ve bought them for several years and they know what they are, how good they are… A lot of people, before pecans even get ready, they’re asking at Riverview when they’re going to get pecans.”

Why so many people would anxiously wait for the fall for the Reynolds’ pecans is, the couple said, because of the quality of the end product, along with the price.
“I pick them out and I do them like I’m going to eat them,” she said. “Pecans, in the cracks of them has bitter stuff, like a bark type stuff that’s in them and I clean that out.”
“They’ll have a woody taste to them if you don’t get that out of there,” said Paul Reynolds.

Reynolds, now 83, cracks them open using a nutcracker that he modified to have longer arms for more leverage, which was right up his alley as a retired carpenter. Selling pecans is part hobby and part side hustle.
“We make money at it but mostly it’s the exercise,” Joan Reynolds said. “But if we wanted to make money at it we would sell them for more than $7 a pound bag.”

At Wal-Mart it’s around $9 for a bag less than one pound, she said, “so we’re well below Wal-Mart price.”
There are five pecan trees at the couple’s home, each of which produces a different size pecan than the others, ranging from very small to three inches long, and the couple speaks of harvesting and preparing them almost as if they’d still do it even if no one bought them.

“Some of them are a pure pleasure to pick out,” said Joan, of the better ones that re not only large and look good but crack open perfectly.
“It’s really a thrill to crack them,” said Paul. “You get on to it and you can crack and not even look.”
The couple divides responsibilities in the pecan process, with both helping gather the nuts in late September or early October, sometimes even in the snow, but then each fills a specific role after that.

“We get to pick them up and he cracks them and brings them to the house and I pick them out and sit there and talk and watch TV and pick out pecans,” she said. “He has cracked as much as 10 gallons in a day.”
They pride themselves on selling clean, fresh pecans harvested the season they’re being sold, even if they could store them up for future years without any problem.

“A lot of people don’t know you can freeze them three or four years in deep freeze and they’re still just as good,” Paul Reynolds said.  But, then they’re not technically fresh that year, which goes against the couple’s sales pitch.
“You can’t sell them as fresh,” he said. “I like to sell them fresh.”

They’re not getting rich off pecans, but they’re enjoying themselves and making a little useful money.
“We sell enough that every year it pays our taxes and the insurance on the house for a year,” she said. “…We’ll sell until we don’t have any more to sell.”

To contact Paul and Joan Reynolds for delicious fresh pecans, call 270-295-3969.

dave.hancockclarion
By Dave Taylor