By Joyce Arleen Corson
Guest Columnist

Joyce Arleen Corson

Editor’s Note: Joyce Arleen Corson is a master gardener who resides at Papakeechie Lake, Syracuse.

SYRACUSE — The oak trees of North America produce more nuts than any other tree region worldwide, cultivated or wild. Our northern red oak has had just a year. Our friend from Pennsylvania remarked in her Christmas letter of a heavy mast year for hickory nuts.

A single giant oak tree can produce nearly 10,000 acorns in a reproductive season. When a forest nut-bearing tree, like an oak, pecan or walnut, produces a high yield or bumper crop, the year is botanically referred to as a “mast” year.

I am just now finding them, in May, with the sprouting radical root out the pointed side of the acorn. They are already straight down into the earth or lying flat under a pile of oak leaves measuring 3 inches or more in length. Tributary roots may be at the bottom of the shell. The tree enters the world out of the round mark on the top of the shell.

Mast is a term used to describe the fruit of forest trees and shrubs. The fruit can be hard nuts, like acorns or beechnuts, or soft, like blueberries or wild grapes and are an important food source for wildlife. A mast year is when a particular woodland species produces more fruit than normal. Like man, trees, oaks, like my northern red oak Quercus rubra, have irregular cycles of high and low yields.

Scientists are uncertain as to the exact reason why oaks and other plans mast but there is a range of theories from climate temperatures and rainfall amounts to harsh summers affecting acorn production or the availability of spring winds during pollination. The specific causes remain a mystery, but one undeniable evolutionary benefit of “masting” is ensured future offspring.

In mast years, acorns fall by the thousands, increasing food availability for squirrels, mice, birds and other forest frugivores. During mast events, dependent wildlife populations increase. The following year, the trees will bear little to no fruit due to the abundance of energy required to produce the previous year’s bountiful harvest.

In subsequent low to no yield years, wildlife populations decrease as food becomes scarce. Then in a mast year, the overflowing harvest will more than feed the forest critters and ensure some seeds left to grow into future oak trees.

White oaks live up to 600 years and grow 18 inches annually, while red oaks live up to 500 years and grow 24 inches annually. Many new oak trees in the United States are planted on private properties. The forests are rapidly changing. Oaks are at risk due to logging, diseases, insect invaders, drought conditions, wildfires and urban sprawl.

When considering a new oak tree for your landscape, ask experts in your area which native oak tree species are dwindling in population and plant those species rather than the local garden center’s popular oak trees. Together we can increase the diversity of the species simply by planting a rare native oak in our own gardens.

I plant the sprouts into extra deep cups designed for native plants with long roots. I am open to sharing.