Take The Pledge

The very cool web site Mast Producing Trees has a pledge you can - and should - and will sign promising to plant an oak tree between now and the end of the year.

I know that for most readers of this site, signing a pledge promising to plant an oak tree is akin to signing a pledge promising to breathe! But I think that a pledge drive is a great way to raise awareness of the importance and value of planting oaks.

In the landscape oak are horribly under-planted due to misconceptions about their "slow growth" (to which I say, "Pshaw!") and the insane desire not to "litter" the lawn or driveway with acorns.

In the forest oaks are either:
1. Planted but frighteningly unsuccessfully due to record deer herds, hundreds of exotic and invasive vegetative competitors, and the lack of fire as a management tool and a means for species like bur oak (in Leopold's words "the stormtroopers of the prairie") to gain a competitive edge.
2. Not planted due to fear of and/or past experience with failure as described in #1. How many prime white oak sites in SE Minnesota were planted into red pine it was thought that planting oaks would work (or wouldn't pay)?

So to the pledge I would add a plea and a challenge: Step 1 is planting your oak(s). Step 2 is making sure they survive and thrive. And 21 years after first being introduced to the idea and first writing an article about the concept for my little non-profit newsletter as a means for successful oak planting, I still believe there is still no more powerful tool for oak establishment than treeshelters.

Disclaimer: I still make my living designing, making and marketing tree tubes (among other plant establishment products). I always will.

So kudos to Mast Producing Trees for initiating this pledge. Now go sign it and plant oaks!

Cool Recipe? Yes!

OK so I made the Acorn Black Walnut Bread last night, and…

1- For visitors coming over from My Minnesota Woods, here's the highly anticipated photo (of what's left of a whole loaf made just last night):









(Click to enlarge) Looks good, eh?

2- Again, I was working from this Acorn Black Walnut Bread recipe, which in turn came from this very cool site. I stuck with maple syrup (hand produced in Rush City by tree farmers David & Carole Cartwright – delicious!) instead of the suggested alternative agave nectar. I went with Persian walnuts rather than black walnuts, for the simple reason I had them on hand. I went with applesauce instead of canned persimmons.

3- As is usual when I am in the kitchen, there was a bit of a mishap. Luckily this one did not involve an emergency room visit like usual (think Dan Ackroyd as Julia Child on SNL, except with more blood). I had the wet and dry ingredients mixed together before I realized I was supposed to have added a Tablespoon of baking powder instead of the teaspoon I had done. So I had to add a Tablespoon minus a teaspoon at that point and it never really got mixed in properly. My wife Alice got an especially large clump of baking powder in her piece. When I bake it's a surprise in every mouthful! (Of course that's better than the pancakes I made for my daughter's birthday when I mistakenly used baking soda instead of baking powder. I still think that the metallic tang those pancakes left on your tongue wasn't too bad. My daughter still hasn't forgiven me. Nor should she.)

Even after that, the bread turned out fantastic. Really tasty, very hearty and filling. Highly recommended. We did agree that if (when) we make this bread again we'll add either some nutmeg or vanilla (or both) for just a little extra flavor. We might try agave instead of syrup as well just to see the difference.

And we'll try again with acorns we gather and process ourselves. Acorn drop is almost here!

Cool Site, Cool Recipe?

Found this site while searching (in vain) for acorn flour for sale on the web: http://wildfoodplants.com/tag/acorn-flour - video on how to process acorns.

There are a number of recipes, including one for Acorn Black Walnut Bread. I'll be making it later today. I'll let you know how it goes and will post some photos.

UPDATE: The very end of the acorn flour video shows an additional source of acorn protein!

Construction Damage Clip

I grew up (to the extent that I grew up at all) in the western Minneapolis suburbs in the 1970's and early 1980's. I watched suburban development replace the (mostly) oak woodlands I played and hiked in as a kid. I worked summers at a garden center in Plymouth and loaded cars and trucks with the plant materials (Crimson King Norway Maples, potentillas, spireas), landscape fabric, crushed rock and plastic edging that were used to replace the native woodlands that were lost.

I entered forestry school intending to be the guy who figured out how to build in wooded areas with minimal damage to existing trees, and how to re-plant what couldn't be saved with native plants. Once in forestry school I quickly realized that I didn't have to figure these things out. A lot of folks much, much smarter than me had already figured these things out. Donald Willeke. Dr. David French. Steve Kunde. Many, many others. I decided instead that I was going to be the guy to bridge the gap between all of those brilliant people and the general public. I was going to be the communicator.

I got off to a good start. In 1988 with Don Willeke's help I started a non-profit organization called Lasting Woodlands. I published a newsletter on construction damage and celebrating our native woodland plants (being a forester I'm sure I focused too heavily on trees and not enough on shrubs, ephemerals, and other important components of a healthy woodland system!).

I gave my first seminar on preventing construction damage to trees 22 years ago. I wish I could say that I fulfilled my initial promise as the communicator of this information. I didn't. But I will.

Hopefully this is at least a small start. Again with deepest thanks to Ron Schara of Minnesota Bound and his top-notch production staff, here is the short clip I did on construction damage prevention that aired in May. If it made just one homeowner or builder stop and give some thought to protecting a 36" diameter oak on their property then it was worth it. (Actually, it was worth it no matter what because I enjoyed working with Adam and Steve from MN Bound. What I mean is if it saved one tree it was worthwhile.)

... proving once again that there is nothing as painful in the world as having to watch and listen to yourself on video!

Oak Nirvana

I just got back from Oak Nirvana. A place with staggering diversity of oak "species." A place where there's so much natural hybridization that it renders laughable the concept of species when applied to the genus Quercus (frequent readers know that I contend that there are perhaps two true "species" of oaks with hundreds of interbreeding variations in constant transition and evolution). A place that literally makes my head spin with the possibilities and potential for going back in time to our acorn eating Eden. A place where the word dirt is spoken with the reverence it deserves.

Stay tuned.

Happiness is... Absolutely Brilliant Readers!

I've been exploring - in a very intermittant and extremely haphazard sort of way - the question of why humankind "evolved," or more accurately transitioned, from living a life of relative leisure and plenty living on the "fruit" of trees - acorns - to living a life of toil and sweat waging war on the soil to grow grains.

Commenting on my most recent post on the subject reader "Eric The Red" wrote:

... consider these aphorisms. The way to a man's heart is through his stomach. An army marches on its stomach. The bible stating that man must support himself by the sweat on his brow. Control what a culture eats (and how much free time the culture has) and you control what that culture does.

Brilliant stuff, encapsulating in a few short sentences what I've been struggling with across months and rambling paragraphs.

Control. I have to think that the concept of control - over land, over food, and therefore over populations - has a lot to do with the transition from living off the bounty of trees to the sweat, oil and blood-soaked battle with the land.

Yes, traditional balanocultures had a tradition of "ownership" to some degree. In California's balanocultures, which survived into the 19th and even early 20th centruries (and which, I should thankfully add, still survive today as a culture but not with the same freedom of movement or control over the land) family would lean a decorative stick against the trunk of a particular oak tree to claim ownership of that year's acorn crop. A family hoping to share in that tree's bounty would then need to negotiate for the right to a share of that tree's crop, and provide payment of some kind.

But this is a very different concept than the kind of land ownership necessitated by and made possible by production of annual grain crops.

Dr. David Bainbridge writes that California balanocultures could gather enough food to last a year in just a few weeks of labor. Of course there would be continual labor involved in processing (leaching and grinding) and cooking the acorns to eat, but this work would be done with the reassuring knowledge that a year's food - or two years' food - is cached and safe. The amount of leisure time must have been astounding! Astounding... and a real threat to anyone hoping to control a population's activities. Far easier and far better to have those people (and by "people" I mean men who a) must have had immense amounts of leisure time in balanocultures and b) would be the people rulers would most want to control for their own military purposes) staring at the back end of a beast of burden while fighting to keep the plow straight. Far easier to own and control the land, and get others to work it in exchange for a very small portion of the crop. Far easier to keep others in a permanent state of indebtedness.

It's a system we all bought into, and buy into every day in a hundred small, almost unnoticeable ways.

I've been obsessed with the question of why we changed, why we stopped eating acorns. Greed, control, guilt, wanderlust. I'll keep thinking about and writing about this question of why.

But the new question I'll be spending a lot more time thinking about, writing about, and hopefully living out is: How do we go back?

Oak Wilt Clip

With very sincere thanks to the fantastic production staff at Minnesota Bound, here's the clip on oak wilt they aired this past spring.



We're losing enough oak trees through forest succession, land "development," disease and poor natural regeneration due to high deer populations. We don't need to lose any more oaks to something as ridiculously preventable as oak wilt.