

A wise move: Acorn kernels provide a complete vegetable protein, up to 7% by weight in some species. The Pilgrims found baskets of roasted acorns hidden in underground chambers and, noting the nuts’ similarity in taste to that of chestnuts, welcomed oak mast into their diet. They were the staff of life for many Native American groups, who ground the nuts into meal for bread and mush. Evidence of their consumption has been found amid the debris in Paleolithic cave dwellings. No matter how many mothers have told their children otherwise, acorns are not poisonous they are one of the oldest foods known to man. Most folks know a nut when they see one, but what kind of nut is it, and is it worth picking up? Acorns

ACORN TREE SERVICE MICHIGAN CRACK
Others, though toothsome, require extreme determination, if not demolition, if one is to crack them apart-and then they may yield little more than a smidgen of edible kernel. There is no better time to be in the woods, and no better excuse (whether or not you need one) than to be gathering tasty nuts.Īh, there’s the crux of the matter: Not all nuts are tasty. Nutting, (foraging for nuts), on the other hand, puts you inside the fall forest kaleidoscope, every step a crunch in leaves, the air crisp and laden with the musky scent of autumn. The nuts remain the quarry, but nuts aplenty (though perhaps of less noble bearing) can be had in any grocery store. Most people today go nutting for pleasure.

But in effect, it is a hermetically sealed energy capsule, packed with protein and fat a nourishment concentrate. Botanically, it is a seed, the embryonic life of a tree. Few foods offer nutrition as completely and as compactly as the nut. So it was with Native Americans and colonists, and with European peasants–and so it remains today among people still living a hand-to-mouth existence with the earth. Nutting was once serious business, a matter of survival, of storing sustenance for the coming winter. Learn nut tree identification and nut identification for acorns, beechnuts, chestnuts and chinquapins, black walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, pecans, and pine nuts.įor centuries we humans have joined the squirrels and the raccoons, the turkeys and the boars, the deer and the chipmunks in the harvest of fall nuts.
