After mama and daddy bought their dream place, my brother went to Tarlton University and talked to them about putting in a pecan orchard. He told mama and daddy about it and they decided to use about 20 acres in the river bottom that had deep "made" soil. This was rich, fertile soil that had been deposited in the bottom through many previous floods.
By this time, Mr. Barho had purchased his place across the river and it had many huge native pecan trees. That fall we picked up hundreds of pounds of pecans to use as our seed. Daddy totally cleared the 20 acres and we planted the orchard. This was done by someone sitting on the back of the tractor just above the ground and dropping the individual pecans into the furrows one at a time! My dad drove the tractor, insuring that he had straight rows.
My brother's wife, Lou, was very pregnant at the time with their daughter, Tamra, and we've got a picture of her riding on the back of the tractor. Thus the pecan orchard was "born"!
