Tuesday, March 30, 2010

March 25 – National Pecan Day


I thought I would take this opportunity to give you some fun facts about Pecans:
• Pecans could improve your love life? If the body does not get enough zinc, it may have difficulty producing testosterone – a key hormone in initiating sexual desire in both men and women. Pecans provide nearly 10 percent of the recommended Daily Value for zinc. So, pass on the oysters and reach for a handful of pecans!

• Can you imagine a pecan skyscraper? It would take 11,624 pecans, stacked end to end, to reach the top of the Empire State Building in New York City.

• Texas adopted the pecan tree as its state tree in 1919. In fact, Texas Governor James Hogg liked pecan trees so much that he asked if a pecan tree could be planted at his gravesite when he died.

• Pecans in space: it would take a line of over 10 billion pecans to reach the moon!

• Albany, Georgia, which boasts more than 600,000 pecan trees, is the pecan capital of the U.S. Albany hosts the annual National Pecan Festival, which includes a race, parade, pecan-cooking contest, the crowning of the National Pecan Queen and many other activities.

• Would you go nuts for a refreshing dip in the pool? You’d need a lot of pecans – 144 million to be exact – to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

• It takes a magnificent tree to produce a great-tasting nut. Pecan trees usually range in height from 70 to 100 feet, but some trees grow as tall as 150 feet or higher. Native pecan trees – those over 150 years old – have trunks more than three feet in diameter.

• That’s one heavy nut: it would take 5,640 pecan halves to equal the weight of a standard watermelon.

• Pecans come in a variety of sizes – mammoth, extra large, large, medium, small and midget. They also come in several forms including whole pecans, pecan halves, pieces, granules and meal.

• There are over 1,000 varieties of pecans. Many are named for Native American Indian tribes, including Cheyenne, Mohawk, Sioux, Choctaw and Shawnee.

• Some of the larger pecan shellers process 150,000 pounds of pecans each day. That’s enough to make 300,000 pecan pies!

• The U.S. produces about 80 percent of the world’s pecan crop.

• Before a shelled pecan is ready to be sold, it must first be cleaned, sized, sterilized, cracked and finally, shelled.

For more information you can check out: http://www.ilovepecans.org/index.html Yupp - that is a real website – I bet you never knew did you!

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