Short morning excursion

My husband has a feral hog trap at a ranch in the Sunny Glen addition of Alpine. He invited me to go along this morning while he put the grocery store's discarded produce in it as bait.

It was bitterly cold but I was desperate for an outdoor distraction so rode along. Kind of a depressing place. It once had beautiful orchards of fruit trees, pecans, and grapes. But because the owner couldn't keep feral hogs from destroying the irrigation system to the 1200 acre orchards, he gave up the effort. So mostly all you see are dead trees. But in spite of that, hundreds, maybe thousands, of pecan trees are still alive and loaded with pecans... none of which are going to be harvested.

                            

We eat lots of feral hog meat. It tastes exactly like store pork, except leaner. And minus the hormones and antibiotics, of course. He catches more than we can use so gives some away if he can find anyone willing to butcher it, or has freezer space. (We have two big deep freezes.) 

We've been giving bushels of our own pecans away to anyone willing to come pick them up. We're close to through processing what we've kept for ourselves. One whole refrigerator in the carport is full of shelled and cleaned pecans. That's a two year supply just in case the trees don't produce next year.