The Amazing Acorn
Its acorn season here! The trees are finally dropping some leaves to get ready for the winter ahead. And with that the acorns are dropping all over the place! The animals are super happy (especially the squirrels) munching them up or finding their perfect hiding place to store them.
We love acorns. These small but mighty fruits (yep, thats what I said) are fun to collect, replant, eat and make crafts with! So many fun things you can do with them!
We love to collect acorns and store them (just like the animals, haha) and we take them to our Liferoot Ranch and plant them. Some will make it, some will get dug up and eaten by the wildlife.
Some cool facts about acorns:
The acorn is the fruit of the oak tree.
It is a nut (although it is rare to have an allergy to them if you are allergic to nuts)
It contains a seed (rarely two seeds) and is encased in a leathery shell.
Acorns can take anwhere from 6-24 months to mature and drop
There are about 90 speices of oak in North America and all of them produce acorns.
Oak trees of North America annually produce more nuts than all the region’s other nut trees together, wild and cultivated.
One huge oak can drop up to 10,000 acorns in a mast year (a mast year is a heavy acorn producing and falling year).
Masting takes a lot of energy! Oak trees grow slowly in a mast year and grow well the year after.
If you see a lot of green acorns on the ground, the tree probably dropped them before the acorns were ready. Sometimes the tree will undergo stress and drop acorns early in the season.
They are also fun to eat! The common, ordinary acorn is one of the ancient foods of mankind. The first mention of acorns for human consumption was by the Greeks over 2,000 years ago. Over the course of human history it has been estimated that people have eaten more acorns than both wheat and rice combined. Native American Indian tribes all across North America, such as the Cherokee, Pima, and Apache, used acorns as one of their primary staple foods in the same way they used corn. Now, humans don’t have the capacity to digest and enjoy them like squirrels do, because they have strong tannins on the outside. To prepare acorns for consumption, crack them out of their shell and break any large pieces into "pea-sized" chunks. Then soak these acorn chunks in cold, warm, or even hot water to remove the bitter and irritating tannic acid. Note that some books instruct to boil acorns, but this locks in some of the bitterness. Then you can let dry and grind into a flour. Here is one of our favorite recipes using acorn flour.
Acorn Flour Pancakes
Ingredients:
1 cup acorn flour
half cup arrowroot flour, cassava flour, or potato starch
2 eggs (or chia egg equivalent)
half a cup of milk or milk alternative
half teaspoon baking soda
pinch vanilla powder or 1/4 tsp extract
pinch salt
Directions:
Blend all the ingredients until smooth or whisk vigorously until fully incorporated. Use non-stick spray or cast iron skillet to fry up :)
We also love to craft with them. Felted acorn our the favorite. They are so pretty and fun to make. The kids started their education with a classic waldorf influence, and these were a staple every fall, and the hunt for bur oak acorn top was always top priority. Instead of write out all the instructions here, here is an awesome explanation for a fun craft afternoon with your kiddos. :)
https://honestlywtf.com/diy/diy-felt-acorns/
Have fun with the bountiful amazing acorn this fall! xo