Slow growing oaks #463

I spend much of my time selling tree tubes to commercial pistachio, almond and pecan growers, helping them shave a precious year or two off the time from planting to first commercial crop, while reducing the inputs of water, labor and chemicals needed to reach that point.  When planting a new pistachio orchard in the San Joaquin Valley, under drip irrigation, fertilization and with a kajillion degrees days (OK, that figure is approximate) per growing season, getting a commercial crop in the 5th growing season is considered very good.

Acorns, on the other hand, could never be a commercial crop because oak trees are so "slow growing" and because they take at least 15 to 20 years to produce a crop of acorns... right?

Wrong.  Take a look:

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This is a sawtooth oak tree (Quercus acutissima).  It was planted in Georgia in the spring of 2008 as an 18 inch bare root seedling.  It is now about 30 feet tall (I'll post a photo of the whole tree soon).  Sorry the foreground is a bit blurry - turns out I don't do my best photographic work with chiggers digging into my skin.

The red circles in the photo mark the locations of acorns.  Yes, acorns.  This is the 6th growing season for this tree and it is going to have a very sizable crop of acorns.

This is not a specially selected sawtooth variety - just a standard "bed run" bare root seedling.  It wasn't watered.  It wasn't fertilized.  Weed control has been sporadic at best.

With even the slightest modicum of genetic selection and 1/1,000,000th the amount of plant breeding that has gone into corn, and with only slightly more intense growing practices, I guarantee we could have oak trees producing a sizable crop of acorns in the 4th growing season, if not sooner.

Tell me this shouldn't be the basis for a viable "new" (and yet very, very old) crop.

But I was always told that oaks are slow growing trees... right?

A major reason people don't plant more oaks is the widespread - yet mind blowingly stupid - notion that oaks are slow growing.  Slow growing?  Cripes, I have customers texting me nearly daily photographs tracking growth. 

A customer in the panhandle of Florida planted 18" tall sawtooth oak seedlings in March. On May 7 he texted this photo with the caption "It will be out (the top of the tube) tomorrow."  That's a 4ft tree tube.   That means the tree had already grown 30 inches in about 60 days - 1/2 inch per day - despite being newly planted (so much for "transplant shock") and despite March and April being much cooler and cloudier than usual for the area.

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The next day, May 8, he texted me another photo with the succinct caption: "It did."

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Two days later - 2 flippin' days later - on May 10 he sent me this one:

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Five days later he sent this one:

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For those of you keeping score at home, on May 7 the tree was tickling the top of a 48 inch tall tree tube.  On May 15 is was 56 inches tall, growing at a rate of 1 inch per day... and the growing season has barely begun.

Corn is jealous of growth like that.   And no, my customer did not trade the family cow for a bag of magic acorns.  Somewhere in the panhandle of Florida a dude is sitting on a lawn chair with a cold beer watching an oak tree grow.

My point:  Plant oaks.  They grow way, way faster than you think, especially when you give them the protection and care they need/deserve.

Ghost Oaks

My work often has me hitting the road in my truck with the stars still overhead, in time to reach the hills around Paso Robles, CA at dawn - which means pea soup coastal fog.

It's my favorite part of my job, and my favorite time of the day, as ancient California white oaks (Quercus lobata) and California live oaks (Q. agrifolia) emerge from the mist.  I like to think of them as ghost oaks from a time when the native people of this area relied on them for sustenance.

Unlike usual, I actually stopped the truck to take these shots.  It's safety first here at Oak Watch!

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There is a steel post next to the trunk of this tree which you can't see from this distance.  In the morning mist I like to think of it as a decorated staff that indigenous California families would lean against their favorite acorn producing trees to claim their bounty for the coming harvest.  I know I would have claimed this tree for my brood.  In fact the post supports an owl box to help control rodents in the mist-shrouded vineyard just out of sight.

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I am particularly happy with the (purely accidental) reflection on the hood of the truck.

Ansel Adams eat your heart out.

Acorns Leached

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Last night I boiled the sawtooth acorn kernels.  Unlike Euell Gibbons who recommends doing so for two hours, I actually wanted to get to bed at some point, so I boiled them for about 1 hour, swapping the water every 10 minutes or so.

The first two or three times the water turned the color of Lutheran potluck dinner coffee, then more of a latte color, then a very light milky tan.

As I said, I probably should have done it at least a couple more times, but got lazy.  Still, the acorns have lost 95% of their original bitterness, and have a creamy, cashew-like flavor - which is to say they taste great.

And Euell was right when he said, "The acorns turned a dark chocolate brown and were without a trace of their former bitterness and astringency."

The plan is to roast some whole in the oven, salted and unsalted, and grind the rest and dry it for flour.

More later.

Acorns Shelled

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I spent part of last evening shelling sawtooth oak (Quercus acutissima) acorns with my son.  My method: Crack the shell with a garlic press and then peel by hand.  His preferred method: Smash the acorn with a meat tenderizer, then sort out the fragments.  His way looked like more fun (until it came time to clean up, when he disappeared faster than Houdini).  On an unrelated note, does anyone know how to remove acorn shell fragments from under thumbnails?

Tonight they will be boiled to leach out the tannins, dried and ground into meal.  Tomorrow they will be cookies.  Tomorrow night my short term memory will stop deteriorating.  Friday morning I will still forget to put out the garbage.

Many Forest Service and other academic/governmental bulletins in the USA state that sawtooth oak acorns are very bitter.  Those same bulletins, however, state that the acorns are highly valued by wildlife, especially wild turkeys and whitetail deer.  In the meantime, Koreans are clearly eating sawtooth acorns by the truckload.  Something doesn't add up.

My suspicion is that this is a bit of arboreal xenophobia; sawtooth oak is an exotic and potentially invasive species.  While acknowledging its benefits for wildlife (because not to do so would be to lose all credibility) the authors of these bulletins don't want to encourage the planting and potential naturalization of sawtooth oak.

But that's an issue for another day.  The issue for today (or at least tomorrow): cookies!