I’ve always loved acorns. We live in a neighbourhood that is plentiful with towering oak trees, and I can never resist filling my pockets with acorns when they drop to the ground starting in late August. It’s amusing to be picking them up from the edge of a neighbour’s lawn and hear the thwap thwap thunk of the acorns raining down around me, usually with the assistance of hungry squirrels.
This year, I guess I was in a crafty mood because when I saw all those acorns, and especially all those acorn caps, all I could think of was ideas for how to craft with them. And then I asked Google for its thoughts on the matter, and suddenly I couldn’t collect those acorns fast enough. To add to the excitement, I read that oak trees only grow and drop acorns irregularly, and that mast years (where production is off the charts) occur every 2 to 7 years. What, it could be 7 years before I get another chance to collect acorns? I’d better stash them by the bucketful then!
Knowing that they are items from nature, and thus subject to all sorts of nature’s forces, I looked into preserving them. Baking them at a low temperature, around 200F for an hour, seemed to be the general recommendation. I watched them carefully, fearful of blackening the lot of them, but they seemed to come through the baking process well. Something about the heat made the small holes created by hungry worms burrowing their way into the shell more obvious, and not really wanting to keep acorns full of baked worms, I carefully picked those ones out and put them in the compost. Nothing but pristine, unholy acorns for my collection.
As late summer gave way to early fall, I continued to collect the acorns whenever I saw them scattered under oak trees. What I failed to continue to do was regularly bake them to dry them out. Please learn from my mistake and know that just because an acorn cap FEELS dry and free of moisture, does not mean it IS dry and free of moisture. And if you put a ever so slightly damp thing into a plastic bag, especially a thing that has been rained on and fallen to the dirt and generally lived a natural life, and then you leave it for a few weeks? It will get mouldy. And it will share its mould with all your other acorns, even if you carefully baked them in the oven.
So, now I have pages and pages of pinned acorn crafts from Pinterest, but no acorns nor acorn caps. I’m pretty sure I had a full kilo of acorns stashed away, maybe more. Alas, they’re all in the compost bin now.
I just hope I don’t have to wait 7 years for the next acorn boon season. I may have forgotten this painful lesson entirely by then!
Edited to add: I know there is nobody reading this but for the sake of history I must add that one happy day this week I found a hidden stash of acorn caps that had not in fact been added to the mouldy pile. This is the benefit of having mad little stashes everywhere, I guess.