← pecan
freely propagated
Pawnee
‘Mohawk’ × ‘Starking Hardy Giant’, crossed 1963
The record
- Parentage
- ‘Mohawk’ × ‘Starking Hardy Giant’, crossed 1963
- Origin
- Crossed by Louis Romberg; released by Tommy E. Thompson, USDA-ARS · College Station, Texas · released 1984 or 1985 — the sources consulted give both
- Rights
- freely propagated — A public USDA-ARS release. No patent, certificate, or trademark found in the sources consulted.
- Harvest
- Very early, moving the commercial window forward to mid-September
- Nut
- Large
- Scab
- Susceptible
- Pollination
- Type I, protandrous
Description
The cultivar that moved the calendar. Early maturity was the explicit target of the USDA programme under Tommy Thompson, and ‘Pawnee’ ripens weeks ahead of the traditional cultivars — which lets growers in cooler, shorter seasons harvest before an autumn freeze takes the crop.
Its pollen parent is worth noting: ‘Starking Hardy Giant’ is a native selection out of Brunswick, Missouri. The same pattern as ‘Major’ again, one generation on. The seed parent ‘Mohawk’ descends from ‘Success’ and ‘Mahan’, two prominent eastern seedling selections.
It is scab-susceptible, which bounds where it belongs. Early and large is not the same as easy.