Everywhere there is abundance. Hiking Mount Philo, as we do regularly these days, we see it, or we feel it. The oak trees have produced a huge number of acorns. They litter the paths and the road. Clearly it is a mast year, a year where trees create an abundance of nuts or cones or fruit. We have to be careful where we walk. Those acorns are like marbles, so there is the possibility of a cartoon stumble. Best to avoid that.
I learned a lot about hickory nuts this year. There is one spot on the way down Mount Philo where they littered the road starting at the end of the summer. We kicked them down the road and they rolled off to the side. There were more and more of them and I did not know what they were. I looked them up, as one does. Turns out they are good to eat, really tasty even. I had the thought that once they get to full ripeness I could gather some and try them out. There were just so many. But my plans to try out those hickory nuts were foiled by squirrels.
There will be a population spike of squirrels next year. That happens with a mast year. With the Mountain Birdwatch study I have participated in for many years, I count not just birds but squirrels. When there is a mast year of fir and spruce cones, there are lots of squirrels the next year. All those squirrels are then competing with each other, so many predate bird nests for eggs. That can mean bird populations drop. But once all those cones are not available the squirrel population drops. It is a classic cycle.
Lower down, cedars and junipers have produced crazy numbers of berries, such as the ones shown here. It would be a good time to experiment with making gin, but I will leave those berries to the birds.
Even our garden had a bumper crop this year. Almost everything grew well (except for those butternut squash–not sure why they fizzled). I froze pounds of carrots. We have a bin of potatoes to plow through. Pesto and tomato sauce in the freezer. Last week I ate the last fresh cucumber. Frost has taken over now, but I still have dried beans to shell and popcorn to twist off the cob.
We did seem to have just the right mix of sun and rain this year. You could say it was a mast year for glorious days, with enough rain to keep things growing. It is hard to be upset about an abundance of loveliness. And those days seem to keep coming. Maybe I just see most days as glorious days. Either way works for me.
Leave a Reply