Perfect Pin Oak

(Click to enlarge)

Pin oak (Quercus palustris) is not native to this area, yet it is frequently planted as a street tree.  It's not hard to see why: Its architecture looks like it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  Or vice versa.  The problem is that pin oak generally doesn't grow well here in Minnesota.  Our soils are too high in pH and this acid loving tree becomes chlorotic for want of iron.  Most Minnesotans probably think pin oaks are supposed to have yellow leaves with green veins! 

The pin oak down the street from me is the exception.  It's utterly perfect.  In summer its leaves are a deep glossy green.  In fall in turns a dark purple/maroon.  And remind me to take a picture of it in winter - its form is amazing.

It's easily one of my top 500 favorite oak trees within a 10 mile radius.  And that's saying something!

And no, I didn't get any acorns from it this year.  Because I am an idiot.

Wanted: Oregon White Oak Acorns

A reader is looking for Oregon white oak acorns to plant, and apparently the crop in the northern Willamette Valley is poor this year.  They need about 200 or so.  Can anyone help?

Deer eat better than we do

There are two great ironies in my life. The first is that I don’t hunt. The second is my given name, but that’s another story for another day. Why is it ironic that I don’t hunt? One reason is that my father was advertising manager for Federal Cartridge for several years. But by the time dad joined Federal when I was in sixth or seventh grade my primary concern in life was spending as much time as humanly possible on a basketball court, especially in autumn as the basketball season approached – although I did enjoy the occasional duck or pheasant he brought home from “business” trips.

It’s ironic as well because I am in favor of hunting both as a means of gathering food and as a means of connecting to the natural world on a much deeper level. In an age when humankind is more disconnected than ever from our food chain, the immediacy of hunting your own food stands in stark relief. Yes, the animal pays the ultimate price in the transaction, but he has lived the life that he was meant to live. Our enormous disconnect from our food chain, our tendency to focus only on the price of our food, and our willful ignorance of our where our meat comes from has made possible the hideous cruelties perpetrated on livestock in order to convert them into cheap calories… and the resulting abuse of our land to produce the corn that is force-fed to animals who were never meant to eat it.

I have found, however, that if you don’t grow up hunting it’s difficult to get started later in life. That, and I’m such a complete flake that I don’t completely trust myself with a firearm. Or, for that matter, a boomerang.

When I’m not on my oaken soap box, I spend my days selling treeshelters (aka tree tubes) to tree planters who want to protect their newly planted seedlings from animal damage, as well as accelerate growth. At the risk of sounding arrogant (and yes it is possible to grow a tree "the old fashioned" way), becoming my customer is a measure of how much a person cares about the trees he or she is planting. Guess who a huge chunk of my customers are? You got it: Hunters.

Hunters also put a lot more thought into what they plant than most folks do - where it will grow well, what the resulting acorns, nuts or fruits will taste like and what time of year they will ripen and drop, when it will begin producing a food crop, etc. I mentioned recently that I had visited an Oak Utopia.  That place was Mossy Oak's Nativ Nurseries in West Point, MS.  Their greenhouse is one part of my idea of heaven (and yes that directly contradicts what I said about my given name).  These are people who can identify naturally occurring hybrid oaks* - in a region with a huge diversity of oak species.  Cripes, I live in a place with about 6 native oak species and I'm lucky if I can even tell the "pure bloods" apart.  It's amazingly cool to see a tray of seedlings grown from the acorns of a single hybrid oak, and see when they are just inches tall the full range of characteristics ranging from one parent to the other and everything in between.  It's like seeing one of Ness's or Cottam's experiments (search this blog for more info), previously relegated to grainy black and white photos from long-forgotten studies, come to life.

* Then again, perhaps I'm giving them too much credit, since I'm convinced that a huge percentage of oaks standing in the would are hybrids to one degree or another - it might actually be more challenging to identify oaks that aren't hybrids!  I do know, however, that Mossy Oak's guys have more innate tree-craft in their pinky fingers than I'll ever have, and than all of the taxonomists I have met put together.

Those of us dedicated to the idea of a permanent agriculture based on woody perennial tree/shrub crops can learn an awful lot from hunters:

Hunters plant oaks.
Hunters understand the value of and actively seek out hybrid oaks.
Hunters take the extraordinary steps required to grow a certain tree in a certain place for a certain purpose, in this age of record deer populations (there's two or three layers of irony in there if you look hard enough) and invasive weed competitors.

In 2006 comedian Jeff Foxworthy made the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Quality Deer Management Association (QDMA).  It was hilarious.  In a take-off of his famous "... you might be a redneck" routine Foxworthy lists a number of ways to know if "... you might be a quality deer manager."  One of those ways:  If your deer eat better than your family does.

A funny line to be sure, but sadly it's also a lot truer than Foxworthy even realized.  Deer who are have available to them a diet rich in acorns, chestnuts, tree fruits and perennial grasses (in addition to corn and soybeans) do in fact eat a whole lot better than most of our families do.  And the people who plant those trees, shrubs and grasses do a lot more good than simply growing big deer.

My work with tree tubes over the course of 21 years has kind of put me in the cat bird's seat overlooking the world of tree planting (with the exception of large scale conifer forestry).  It seems to me that hunters come the closest to fulfilling J. Russell Smith's vision of a food supply based largely on tree crops.

But when you think about it, that should really come as no surprise, since hunters are much more closely linked to their food chain - a food chain humans much are better evolved for and suited to as compared to the super market food chain of today.

Acorn Exchange

I'd like to start an Oak Watch acorn exchange.  It is exciting to get acorns in the mail (at least for oak geeks like us!) to try out and compare.  I have several acorns ready to trade:

Oregon white oak
English oak, PA seed source, Swedish parentage
English oak, OR seed source, parentrage unknown
Northern red oak, Northfield MN from mature red oaks saved from oak wilt by S&S Tree Care
Northern red oak, large acorns from a very fast growing young tree
Sawtooth oak, southern seed source, parentage unknown

Let's make a deal!  Dwarf chinkapin, Gambel, Garry and Emory oak are the top 4 of my (very long) wish list.  Let us know in comments if you have acorns to trade or acorns your looking for.

Acorns in the mail

My 4 favorite words are: Acorns in the mail.  These beauties are sawtooth oak* (Quercus acutissima) from a buddy down South.  These have several futures:  some will be planted next spring, some will be eaten very soon, some will be analyzed for nutritional content.

In the short term all will be fridged, much to the chagrin of my family (who operate under the bizarre assumption that refrigerators are for food storage and were not invented for the sole purpose of stratifying acorns; sheesh).

I have never in my life been so anxious for the arrival of spring, which is a bit depressing since it's only October 8 and I have about 9 months of winter to go.  In part that's because every winter, as a result of some promise I don't actually remember making, my kids get to choose a sledding hill for me to go down and a jump for me to go off.  So far it has worked out OK; I haven't actually broken any bones (contrary to what I thought at impact) and my kids get a new story they can laugh about all summer ("Papa I never knew you could fly that far, ha ha ha.  I  thought you probably broke your arm, ha ha ha").  But I'm not getting any younger, and the jumps keep getting bigger.  So if I stop posting sometime about January 20, it's because I'm in traction somewhere.

But mostly I'm anxious for spring so I can get planting.  Nothing makes winter seem longer than having acorns starting to germinate in the fridge.

* Remind me soon that it's time to have a little discussion (and by that I mean multi-sided audience participation!) about native versus non-native oaks.

Still there and ready to be used again...

In The Omnivore's Dilemma author Michael Pollan goes morel hunting on National Forest land somewhere in the Sierra. He loses his way and accidentally ends up on private forest land. A company forester tells him he's welcome to continue hunting morels - so long as Pollan agrees to tell people that logging companies aren't always evil.  After dutifully (and with what is either a hint of sarcasm on Pollan's part or of knee jerk self defensiveness on my part) stating "Logging companies aren't always evil," Pollan goes on to write:

"The forester, evidently thrilled to have someone to talk to (editor's note: we're just thrilled to have someone listen to us!), told me to keep an eye out along the creek - it was called Beaver Creek - for large boulders with blackened hollows scooped out of them to make bowls. It seems the Washoe Indians would wash and mash acorns in these bowls and then bake them into a kind of flat bread.

"I never did find one of the Indian bowls, but hearing about them made me realize that this forest had been part of a human food chain for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. The Indians understood that you could work out relations with wild species that didn't necessarily involve bringing them under your roof. Oaks have always refused the domestic bargain, clinging to their bitterness in the face of countless human efforts to domesticate them. But the Indians found a way to live off these trees even so, by devising a way to detoxify the acorns."

Michael Pollan is one of my heroes, and it's fantastic to have acorns as human food mentioned in one of the best-selling and best-written books on diet and where our food comes from to be written in the last 25 years.  But even so I have several bones to pick with Pollan about this passage:

1. Oaks have not refused the domestic bargain, and many are not bitter.  If humankind would invest 1/1,000.000th of the time and energy in selectively breeding oaks that has been devoted to corn over the last 8,000 years we'd have acorns so sweet you'd get tooth decay upon first bite. 

2. There have not been countless human efforts to domesticate them.  There have been periodic efforts by a small number of visionaries (Ness, Cottam, Ashworth and others) who were largely viewed as crackpots or oddities during their own time, and whose work was largely forgotten when they were gone.

3. Most all, Pollan didn't gather or serve acorns in any form as part of the Foraging Food Chain meal he prepared at the end of the book.  Yes he did serve a wild pig he hunted himself & whose diet consisted largely of acorns, but not acorns themselves.

Even for the man who has done more than anyone to reconnect Americans to our food eating past & traditions, acorns don't seem to be taken seriously enough to become part of the modern dinner table.

That is about to change.

UPDATE: I just realized I didn't do a very good job of tying the post to the title I gave to it... shockingly, I strayed from my original point.  I meant to say that the mortar and pestles carved from stone by indigenous people throught the west are still there, ready to grind acorns again.

Acorns Fed Lewis & Clark

Excerpted from William Clark's expedition journal, as excerpted here:

"We got from those people a few pounded roots, fish and acorns of the white oak. Those acorns they make use of as food, and inform us they procure them of the natives who live near the falls below, which place they all describe by the term Timm."

By "those people" Clark was referring to the Yakama (the preferred spelling of the Nation) and the Wanapam near present day Yakima, WA.  Acorn meal was probably a welcome change from the Corp of Discovery's typical diet of meat, meat and meat. With meat for dessert.