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Acorns are Pretty Squirrely...

© Emily Levitt

I am besieged by acorns.
A plague of them.

I am not alone in facing this nutty nemesis. A lovely, elderly neighbor has even more oak trees than I do, and her's are closer to her house. She says the racket from acorns falling on her roof would keep her up at night-- "if she couldn't turn off her Beltone."

Thousands of acorns have taken over the bulk of my gardening chore time, having appeared this season in greater numbers than I've seen in the last twenty years.
I scrape them, rake them, box them, can't stand them. Anyone who parks a car under an oak tree will find the auto finish looking as if it's been atttacked by crazed ping-pong balls. Insurance companies call this an Act of God. (It seems to me more like a Real Dumb Thing To Do.)

The acorns of all oak trees are both noxious and nutritious. Native Americans made flour out of ground up acorns, which was no easy process.

Acorns had to be beaten into a paste between a couple of suitably shaped rocks. Once the nuts were smashed into pulp, repeated rinses were neccessary to flush out the bitter tanin they contain. Acorn toxins are water soluble, and can thus be washed away. Tanin is the main toxic ingedient, and when its' bitter taste is gone, the paste is safe to ingest.

This rinsing process took place in finely woven baskets, or mounds of earth lined with straw. Cleaned acorn flour was used in cooking, for baking, and in stews and soups.

Several web sites have detailed information on this process. They were most interesting to the Sixth Grade at my son's school... Did the pilgrims eat acorn bread at the first Thanksgiving? Who knows? Food (oops!) for thought...

http://virtual-markets.net/vme/ARNHA/aco... http://www.tctraveler.com/recoptions/aco...

The other question asked not only by middle schoolers, but lots of frustrated gardeners, rather bluntly, is this:

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH ALL THESE ACORNS, ANYWAY? Some years there are very few of them, but they are produced like crazy in other years---like this one.

I've cast this last query far and wide, and will let you know what the results yield. I even asked my mother (the woman who knows more about such things than I will ever forget) and she said lots of acorns mean two things:

1) a long hard winter, and
2) fat squirrels.

Either way, a bumper crop of acorns meant good things for the Natives; nuts today, and 'squirrel du jour' later down the road, as a hot meal in the cold of winter.

Squirrels: The Other White Meat?

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