This squirrel actually bit them off the plant lol! The plant looked like this one https://bonnieplants.com/wp-content/uploads/thai-hot-pepper.jpg. What I would have given for a front row seat at his tree on pepper eating day.
Yeah those peppers are hot! I heard milorganite made from human waste deters
deer, and may be worth trying. Repellents though sound like a better option. I myself also have opossums to deal with. They tend to just take bites, so the pepper spray works well.
Since I’m starting trees indoors during the winter, I don’t have squirrel issues until I begin to acclimate them to the outdoors in the spring. Removing the nuts before putting them outdoors helps (they are big enough by then). I lost quite a few chestnuts and ACs last spring to squirrels before I started my forced conversions.
This year, forced conversion will begin about a month before I take my trees outdoors. Squirrels are territorial, so once you deal with the issue, it takes a year or so for the problem to reoccur. For those interested, here is the process:
- A small Havahart trap baited with chunky peanut butter. I just put it on my deck.
- I tie a string to the handle of the trap and begin the forced conversion process.
- Do not use the Catholic form of sprinkling, instead follow the Baptist model.
- After immersion, I generally get distracted with other tasks.
- When I get back on track, none of the converts have yet survived the Baptism.
- Rinse and Repeat…
I have a sort of off-the-wall question about acorns (I’m talking about the ones high in tannin, i.e. bitter). We have lots of those from red oaks around here, but they are inedible-too bitter. I understand the Indians used to leach the tannins out of the nut meat before using them.
My question, is that if a person were desperate (like trapped in the wild, or so destitute they could not afford any food) could they survive on these types of raw acorns with the high tannin levels, or would the stomach/intestines rebel? I’m not talking about eating one or two, but enough for a meal (again without leaching the tannins).
Just a weird curiosity. Anyone have any thoughts?
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I would say it depends on the person more so than the acorn. There are other factors to, like I have a habit of blowing out the pecan dust from grooves of the nuts. Those grooves contain the tannins. I would crack the acorn and wipe off the kernel and that dusty layer of tannins would get wiped off out of habit.
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Well around here the Indians used white oaks, whose nuts are low in tannin and are rather bland raw. They make a nice flour for bread. One does not have to leach them. The photo earlier by my me in this thread is of me holding white oak acorn meat. Across from my cottage on the other side of the south channel is Walpole Island an Indian reservation. They often come visit us, well used to before 911. Now the river is patrolled so heavily they cannot come across without alerting attention. Walpole is in Canada. We still hire them for various labor intensive jobs. Not as much though these days. My septic, my foundation, and my water line were all put in by Indians. Running Bear was an awesome worker, I have not seen him in years. Al White and his kids too were great workers and who we hired to do the work at my place. Al passed away a few years ago.
The white oak is a mighty tree and I have seen what it can do first hand!
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For Halloween we decorated the house! A Wizard of Oz theme. We put a scarecrow witch under the house on the left side.
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Dang, strong roots! At least you got a cord or two of good firewood out of it.
It’s awesome firewood! Not mine though. I have a white oak that fell on my property though. Cutting it up kicked my butt! I just had three chain blades professionally sharpened for next year, just did it a couple days ago, one never knows! I do sharpen them by hand but after awhile one side is sharper than the other and they tend to drift left or right on the cuts. So after a few hand sharpenings, I have them sharpened on a machine to balance the blades.
So I’m all set for next year if anymore trees fall. I have about 5 cords of wood currently. White and red oak, red maple and ash.
Tough to cut the rounds on the big trees. Here is a giant ash round, to give you an idea how big we grow them around here. The tree was infected with the Emerald Ash Borer, so had to come down, a shame!!! My wife is 5’8" tall for perspective.
Bumping this one up.
Was gathering some acorns from a very fastigiate F2 Bimundors oak (Q.albaXrobur) in my yard for a friend. Stepped to the next tree, a seedling of the ‘Sweet Idaho’ bur oak… cracked and peeled an acorn…and to my delight found it totally non-bitter… though not exceptionally ‘sweet’.
I’ve experienced this before with some other ‘low-tannin’ oak selections. I’m not convinced that genetics is the whole story - growing conditions from year to year may have as much or more influence on tannin/bitterness levels.
Some years, acorns from a particular tree may be sweet/non-bitter, but the next year, they’re indistinguishable from any other acorn from any other tree.
Guess I need to check acorns from some of the large-acorn bur oaks in the yard - if they’re good, too, there’s a lot of good material to work with this year.
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This thread has been a great read. Thanks for the “bump”.
I’ll be ordering a bunch of acorns from Sheffields shortly, but they don’t have Bimundor’s oak which would be interesting to try out up here. Both english oak and bur oak are hardy where I’m at but that’s about all we have available and they take literally ages to mature. Does anyone know a source for Bimundors (White Oak x Engish Oak) or heritage oak (Bur x english oak) acorns?
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I found my heritage oak acorns! How lucky I am! It’s a good idea to check amazon and ebay this time of year. I’ll probably have some local short season acorns to trade sometime next month. Check out the trading post then if interested. I’m still looking for english x white oak.
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I’d offer, but right now I’m so busy that I don’t know which way is up…
Ken Asmus, at OIKOS Tree Crops, has offered acorns in season, in the past. While the ‘mother’ tree may be a known entity, he’s got such an assortment of oaks and oak hybrids growing there that ‘daddy’ would be anyone’s guess.
I’ve got one somewhat fastigiate F2 seedling burenglish from Ken (grafted it’s other cohorts over to named oak selections years ago), and several bearing age grafts of the ‘McDaniel’ burenglish oak, which makes prodigious amounts of large acorns, while the fastigiate seedling produces much smaller ones.
Have not looked at the F2 Bimundors… not sure what it’s doing this year.
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Thanks, I hadn’t realized they also offer seeds. No acorns for sale at the moment but I guess they’re still ripening for the most part.
They even admit some of their “F2s” might actually be back crossed to bur oaks or bur oak hybrids. That’s not a bad thing necessarily but makes it hard to predict what you’re getting.
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I picked a bag of acorns while out hiking last weekend (mostly red oak). Left them outside for a few hours yesterday (was going to put them in some soil and refrigerate them) and went back out there to get them and every one of them was gone. Squirrels must have super smell. I’ll have to see if i can gather up a few more.
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I found these young but fruiting bur oaks yesterday and collected some acorns. The species is called macrocarpa, or big fruit in latin but some of these acorns are real tiny. I guess these are of the canadian sub variety as they’re growing happily way north from their natural range.
One of the oaks had a lot more acorns than the others so that’s by far the most promising source for early producing oaks in my locale. These trees are a little more than 20 years old.
I’m pretty excited to get some bur oaks into my garden as I’ve never had the opportunity before. They’ll probably outlive me by sevaral decades, lol.
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