When we bought the ranch, there were already a few landscape pecans around the house. After about a decade of neglect, they need a bit of care to get them back in shape. One of the youngest trees was being crowded by a hackberry tree and wasn’t producing. We removed the hackberry, so this year the tree produced a few nuts. When I collected the nuts, they looked unusual, lumpy. To my surprise, it turns out that this tree is a hican - a cross between a hickory and a pecan. There is limited information on the web about these trees online. Hicans can take on attributes from either the pecan tree or the hickory tree. Hickory trees are slower growing than pecans, so they don’t make great rootstock. There are different varietals of these crosses, some which are tasty and some which are eaten only by squirrels. With trepidation, we tried one of the hicans. Our hican was quite bitter. The mouth feel of the nut was similar to a heavy tannen wine times a thousand. It felt like all the water was driven from my mouth.