Living here in a very rural corner of the Sierra Foothills of California we are blessed with a number of old (and some young) oak trees. We use some of the trees as a wonderful source of leaves. When I was a boy, some 50 years ago,  I remember my dad taking me to the nursery to get fertilizer for the garden. He would buy a bag or two of what was labelled as oak leaf mold. He said that was the very best stuff for a garden. Fast forward to now, I haven’t seen oak leaf mold sold in stores in decades. But we have been making it here in our gardens for years. We just rake the leaves up and dump them in the beds. Or dump them in a compost pile, whichever was needed.

But this year I wanted to see if I could get even more out of the oak trees. I decided to gather the acorns and see how much food I could make out of these big oak trees! Knowing myself enough to know I would not enjoy kneeling on the ground gathering these nuts, I sprung and purchased a very cool tool that would do much of the work for me! The nut wizard I bought did a very good job of gathering the nuts! My only complaint was where we have pea gravel on footpaths the tool gathered nuts and gravel. This added a lot of work separating the nuts from the rocks. I will need to figure that out for next year.

I put the gathered nuts in buckets of water in order to separate the good ones from the bad ones (the bad ones float.) This led to another issue. Some of the nuts grew mold before they were dry. This will be easily remedied next year with a better drying station. Or, I could gather them more in line with the way the Native Americans did it and not wait for the acorns to fall of their own accord.

At this point, I have a couple buckets of dry unshelled acorns. Soon I will remove the kernels from the shells and further process them into flour and then, hopefully, delicious food!