HERB - Re: acorns

[Kathleen Keeler]

Oaks are one of the classic plants that "mast fruit", that is they have
some years with dramatically
more fruit than others, and the good years are for all the plants in the
area, not tree by tree.

Explanations of mast fruiting range of "some years are better than
others" to complex mechanisms in
the plant that save all the energy for one year so that they can
overwhelm the acorn-eaters with the number of
nuts produced and some of the nuts will escape consumption because the
animals have eaten all they can manage.  Mast years have to happen
irregularly or the animals would increase in number in response to the
food and be able to eat it all up.

The Flora of the Great Plains lists 18 species of oak in our region and
several subspecies and it notes that several European oaks can be found
where they were planted.  There are many more species if you include the
whole US. The group is also famous for hybridizing so that often plants
have intermediate characteristics and don't fit any of the definitions.
(This also means you can get two books with different lists of species
for the same area).  If your tree is hard to classify, it may be the
tree, not you.

Variation is found in the tannin content of acorns too, which ranges
from "easily removed" to "not worth the work to remove except in a
famine".  Between species this is clear, but likely also within species.
Its my general impression that the east coast oaks are more "tanniny" as
a group than west coast oaks, but that may just be a reaction to the
edibility of the acorns of a couple of the savannah oaks of California.
(Of course the ones in my upstate New York backyard as a child all had
worms in them so that also discouraged me from thinking kindly of them
as food.)

Agnes
kkeeler1 at unl.edu

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