It's Time for Oak Leaf Wine

This is completely new to me:  Making wine (and mead) from oak leaves.  Really, really cool.

And this page is going to keep me busy for weeks!

Enjoy.

Making acorn flour, acorn recipes

The most complete guide I have seen on collecting, processing and cooking/baking acorns.  Check it out and bookmark it.

Thanks Lucas.

And thanks, "Grandpappy."

Yours in Quercus,

How cool is this?  I received an email from a tree tube customer last week with the closing:

Yours in Quercus,

 
Totally awesome.  Tells me I'm doing something right.  Although I have to say it's not the best letter closing I have ever received.  That honor goes to a rather elderly gentleman member of the Pennsylvania Nut Growers Association who signed his letter to me, nearly 25 years ago:

Yours for better nuts,
George Dickum

Classic.

Hope on the horizon - Red Tractor Farm

Red Tractor Farm in Greece is turning the dream of re-discovering acorns as a food source into a reality.  It gives me great hope for the future.  Read this, watch the video.  Looks like paradise to me!

I received a "mail chimp" email from Red Tractor Farm about their 2013 acorn harvest.  I'll try to figure out how to post it on this site.  To quote:

3000 kilos (6600 lbs) of acorn collected in 5 weeks.

We began whacking green acorn out of the trees in late September. Trees that have been harvested in this manner, in the past, are healthier and heavier with acorns this year. We've learned that the best method for whacking the trees, in order not to damage the next year's crop. is from the trunk outward. Volunteers must be fearless of heights and able to climb trees as well as swing a stick.

That whole "fearless of heights" thing rules me out of the harvest process.  Second rung on the step ladder and my knees start to quake.  I will learn more from them about methods of harvesting acorns that do not reduce the size of the following year's crop.  This is fascinating to me, and critically important.

On an unrelated - and very stupid - note, it's surprising that the Greek economy is in so much trouble.  My family alone buys about 50 tubs of their yogurt every week.

Good bye, Mandiba

The greatest man of our age has left us.

Thank you Nelson Mandela.  For everything.  Never has someone left shoes so large to fill, to a world that so desperately needs them filled. 

Slow Growing Oaks #782: 6 inches of growth, but per year or per week?

A friend sent a link to this informational piece on swamp chestnut oak, Quercus michauxii.  Tons of great information about a very cool tree, and further proof that hunters are light years ahead of the landscape nursery industry in terms of planting trees that matter.

Two items in this piece caught my attention:

1) Swamp chestnut oak is allelopathic - it exudes chemicals that inhibit the growth of surrounding vegetation.  In Forestry 101 we are taught that black walnut is the Typhoid Mary of forest trees, exuding the dreaded juglone (good ol' 5-hydroxy-1,4-naphthalenedione or 5-hydroxynaphthoquinone) and killing everything in sight.  I had never heard of an oak being allelopathic, but the author's sources - and they are good ones - were probably this... and this. 

I have no reason to question this... other than that I always question everything regardless of how much more learned the source is than me.  It struck me that a) swamp chestnut oak is very closely related to (to the point of blurred and overlapping species lines - but you know my thoughts on that) several other oak "species," b) so if swamp chestnut oak is allelopathic other oaks must be as well.

Turns out they are, to varying degrees.  Along with just about every other tree in the forest.  So what have we learned today kids? Shockingly, trees use chemistry to gain a competitive advantage. 

2) Then there's this (and I'm not blaming the author - I'm sure this information came from another highly reputable source):  "Seedlings then grow fairly slowly at less than 6 inches per year."

Since we all know that the poet's conceit of oaks as the emblem of all that is slow but lasting, we therefore know that this must be a typo.

I'm sure what the author of the source of this little nugget meant to say was either a) "Seedlings then grow extremely rapidly at more than 6 inches per week." Or perhaps, b) "Seedlings then grow mind-blowingly fast at 6 squared inches per year."  (Sorry, I don't know how to do a superscript 2 in blogger and I'm not about to learn just to make a point.)

Six inches per week during the height of the growing season?  No problem.  36 inches of growth per year?  Child's play.

Don't believe me?  Watch this.  Brought to you by Dudley Phelps of Mossy Oak's Nativ Nurseries, aka The Wizard of West Point MS.  I told you hunters know more about growing trees than the whole landscape tree industry put together.

Slow growing oaks my heinie.

An acorn filled weekend

My sons definitely out-acorned me this weekend, I'm embarrassed to say.

On Friday night we played Scategories, an activity I enjoy only marginally more than a rousing game of Poke Your Head.  Or a really deep paper cut.  Anyway, one of the topics was Ethnic Foods, and the letter in play was A.  I suffered the brain lock I am prone to whenever an hourglass is transferring its contents with (seemingly) increasing rapidity from top to bottom and as the scrit-scrit of opposing players' pencils on their score sheets reaches a crescendo.  I scored a big fat zero.

My son wrote Acorn.  I immediately awarded him double points.  And stabbed myself with my Bic pen for being such a moron.

The next day we were working on his book report on Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve.  My son has read the book.  I have read the Wikipedia version (Wikipedia = the Cliff Notes of 2013; those beautiful black and yellow books that got me through high school and college).  One of the characters in the book was named Nikola Quercus, but later changed his name to Nikolas Quirke.  Two weird things about this:  First, if you were lucky enough to have the surname Quercus, why would you ever change it?  (Well, apparently in this case you'd change it if you were bent on creating a post-nuclear-apocalyptic new world order in which mobile cities roam the barren countryside devouring each other for food and spare parts.  You'd probably want to play down the "green" aspect of your family name.)  Second - and I'm not kidding - I desperately wanted to name our second son Nicholas Quercus Siems.  I was vetoed... for which Nicholas will no doubt be very grateful.  In the same way our daughter is forever grateful she didn't become Harriet. 

Later on Saturday, Ethan had a soccer match in nearby Templeton.  While I was riveted to the action (lost 2-1 but Ethan got the lone goal and we had a penalty kick that would have tied the game get saved by the goalkeeper.  A 6'2" twelve year old.  Who shaves.  But I'm not insinuating anything.  Or bitter.), Nicholas was busy doing this:

(Click to enlarge)

 

Gathering a cap full of massive valley oak (Q. lobata) acorns.  I asked what he planned to do with them.  He said, "Pant dem and grow oat tees!"  How cool is that?? Then I asked if we should grind some up and eat them, to which he replied, "No, papa. Dat would be ewey."

So the weekend wasn't perfect.  But it was darn close.