GATHER ACORNS WHENEVER GOOD QUALITY ACORNS ARE FALLING

The best time to harvest is during the main nutfall. For oaks, the main nutfall is spread out longer than the main nutfall for trees like black walnut or hickory. This is helpful because, unlike shagbark hickory, getting the timing right is a little easier and also there is an opportunity to keep gathering every few days for a few weeks, possibly prioritizing days after a storm or high winds. The best way to test is to find some that look like the kind you plan to gather and cut or crush them. If those few that you crush are buggy, hold off on gathering. Wait a little while and try again. It may just be that you are too early - both early falling nuts and late falling nuts are known to have quality issues for many species.

Image credit: https://newenglandacorncooperative.com/how-to-tell-good-acorns-from-bad-acorns/

GET YOUR SUPPLIES

For acorns, we suggest a small-sized nut roller, the mesh bags that are pre-labeled with the name of your program tree(s) and one or more 5 gallon buckets. A nut roller is not required, it just makes the job a little easier. Put the mesh bags in the buckets as shown:

Head out to your tree and start gathering. The nuts that we want are the nuts would show up as "good for eating"  on the image above. For this program, we are trying to make sure that we know exactly which trees grew the seed collected so please only gather from under trees which are part of the program. If you have multiple program trees, make sure to have at least a bucket /bag/bag label per tree. Use the roller to gather up the freshly fallen nuts and, to the degree possible, leave the bad ones. We understand that it won't be possible to check every acorn and we are not requesting or requiring every acorn be check, please just make what seems like a reasonable effort to high-grade.

An old oak can produce over 10000 acorns per year! In some years, production might be almost nothing and some years it could be even higher. That's one reason that we don't want to use a year or two of nut production information to assess the overall productivity of an oak tree.

STORE OR DELIVER YOUR HARVEST

There are two ways to preserve the quality of your gathered nuts. If you are going to hang on to them for just a few days before dropping them off, please make sure the already-gathered acorns are stored in an area where there is some air circulation and where the nuts will be safe from predators like squirrels or mice. This could be as simple as temporarily hanging up the mesh bag(s) somewhere like a garage. If you plan to store the acorns for a week or more before dropping them off and you have space available, it would be great if you could freeze them. Oaks were originally included in our 2024 tree seed project. Red oak was added later through an accepted offer to our project to partner with a research project in Ohio that is developing acorn flour processing capacity. For this reason, many of our 2024 gathered acorns will be used as food, not seed. Freezing makes acorns non-viable as seed and does preserve their quality for food. This approach for 2024 allows us to start identifying regional specimen oak trees while providing a one-off use for the collected acorns. The results from the acorn processing research project will become publicly available in 2025.

We're happy to accept your gathered nuts anytime that you want to drop them off with us at Black Squirrel Farms, 590 NY 14, Penn Yan, NY. Mesh bags do not have to be full and we can provide additional bags and labels as needed. If you are transport-limited and cannot drop your collected nuts off, please contact us so that we can make some customized arrangement.