Harvest

Though we did plant a vegetable garden this year, and some apple trees in the spring, we haven't done anything in the woods to increase wild food production - mast.

Wildlife biologists term variable seed crops as “mast” from "masticate." Hard mast includes seeds or nuts: acorns, beech nuts, maple seeds. Soft mast is fruit: wild strawberries, blueberries, grapes and apples.

Most of our mast comes in the form of shagbark hickory nuts, acorns, bitternut hickory nuts, walnuts, dogwood seeds, concord grapes and wild berries. We have not harvested any of these. Most are eaten only by wildlife.

We do harvest persimmons. They are noted in numerous earlier posts. Here's what we saw in October after the leaves had fall. Note the hundreds of ripe fruit still on the tree.



Another prolific crop, though one has to work harder to find it, is the hazelnut. Growing all over the Greene View Springs property as a shrub, our hazelnuts seem to fruit irregularly. By that I mean the same plant may have a heavy crop one year but not the next.

The hazelnut shrub - Corylus americana

The nuts grow in husked clusters of 2 or 3 up to about 10

This cluster had five nuts

This one, partially opened, had 3

These came from a single cluster

We probably have 4 dozen hazelnut shrubs on the site. Once one sees a few they are easy to spot from a distance.