Nuts About Acorns
By now I’m sure you’ve noticed, as I have on my regular rambles through the woods, that we’re up to our — er, elbows — in acorns.
Honestly, I can’t remember so many of the nuts heaped beneath oaks, and they’ve made raking an even more challenging chore.
According to an old wives’ tale an abundance of acorns means we’re in for a brutal winter, but old wives, it turns out, are about as reliable as groundhogs or woolly bears when it comes to long-term weather forecasting. In short, anybody who believes that theory is, well, nuts.
Naturalists point out that a periodic profusion of acorns, known as a “mast” year, has little to do with the weather and more to do with random cycles of oak trees to overcome the voracious appetites of deer, squirrels, mice and various seed-eating birds. Oaks rely on acorns for propagation, so every few years they produce an overwhelming supply to ensure enough will escape consumption and sprout into new trees.
It takes two seasons for an acorn to grow, so the ones on the ground now first emerged at a time when the oaks produced a normally modest crop.
Last winter not only were there fewer acorns on the ground but most were covered for months by snow, so deer were forced to chomp away even more aggressively at alternative food supplies, including evergreens, laurel bushes and rhododendrons. I lost a few dozen pine, spruce and fir seedlings that the hungry animals chewed right down to the nub. The larger trees and bushes that survived looked like mushrooms, with foliage munched to a height of about 6 feet and then spreading like a cap.
I guess I should be happy that the acorns are available in such profusion now thanks to an absence of snow, but if and when the ground gets covered I’m sure the deer will start going after the evergreens again. Oh well, the trade off will be I’ll get to try out my new backcountry skis.
I may also try a few acorn recipes, but frankly, after my mixed success a few years ago with hickory nuts I’ve kind of lost my arboreal appetite. Loyal readers may recall about half the nuts I harvested were infested with worms, and the others were so difficult to extract it took hours just to get a few handsful.
As for acorns, from what I’ve read you can only eat the nuts from white oaks, not red oaks, which contain more bitter tannin.
For most recipes, you also have to grind them into flour.
I sampled some acorn muffins a friend made a few years ago, and the best I can say is they were edible.
I suppose if you added enough butter and sugar, even sawdust would be palatable.
Speaking of food from trees, now that we’ve turned the calendar into the new year I’ve started my countdown to maple syrup. Only about six more weeks, depending on the weather.
Here’s hoping the season eventually will turn cold enough for skiing and skating, and then warm up in time to start the sap flowing.
As for the deer, gather ye acorns while ye may.
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