Now is the time for all good Permies to send Andrew any special acorns that are lyeing around :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl:
I went to look for that place you mentioned Andrew for your cork oaks, but I don't think it is what/where you think it is. I'll have a bit of a hunt around though.
im sure it is on the road from rutherglen to wodonga on a side road to the south there is a large industrial winery at the winery itself is the best trees cork oaks look alot like eucalipts at 100 kmh
....thinks of the 1,200 cork oaks in the Canberra Arboretum just down the road and thinks it may be time for another visit...
Hi andrew. We are 3.5km Sydney side of town. Re the acorns I can grab a heap of standard ones plus the cork oaks, just send a pm for delivery address.
I can probably get you cork oak acorns if you're still after them. I collected and planted 20 good ones from the Kyneton botanic gardens recently. There are only 3 big cork oak there and I wasn't the only person collecting so they might be all gone. Also collected and planted 200 burr oak acorns, and have over 1000 white oak acorns waiting to go in. All from the botanic gardens. Fortunately I trained my 3 year old daughter to be a master acorn collector
how fantastic are Oak trees. i went to great distance and secured prime seed a decade ago. my babies are 10 years old now,,,a couple even look like trees - the others are proto cork oaks,,,gangly shrubs that loose branches are a welcome after maybe 5 years of tiny little guys that the mower keeps finding. i scored my acorns from Balingup in WA. they have a kind of tree museum in a park that the public can use...classic specimens all over the place. i only realised cork oaks have a dark trunk recently - for some reason i just presumed it was a light cork colour. oaks represent part of my permaculture protein systems, carob and sandalwood also. i read somewhere that eating acorns is called a Balinoculture - or something similar - strange name, it sounds like whales should be doing it. at any rate - i reckon - irrationally grab at - the notion that Oaks and in particular acorns are one of the big earth secrets - pretty well lost on a humanity locked onto meat consumption - but a Balinoculture is a dam fine, sustainable, and noble as, protein system. supposedly primitive life was brutal, taxing and short. but that can not be all there is to it,,,can it? surely the dense forest and lack of roads made life somewhat secure? surely the natural abundance of these systems would have created a primitive 'good life'. surely the unbroken folklores provided a reasonably easy way.... not like these days - the knowledge of how and the means to achieve such are as lost to us as the great Oak forests....i enjoy relationship with individual Oaks, babies younger than me - but to have had relationship with an entire oak super structure of a forest - prr prr prr prr. oaks are supposed to be good communicators, and their extensive root networks, and associated microbial communities, maintain a communications network amongst the forest. it has been suggested that this vast subterranean oak network was utilised by evolution often - with other species of plants so reliant on the oak network, that they just didn't personally evolve their own coms systems.....i can relate, i did not bother to invent my own internet. any way, all these plants, connected [ think 'wired' ] to the oak network, and the sheer population of the forest, with every plant having a story and inclined to self publish resulting in lots of traffic. and humans cut it down all down over a few hundred years - and all the contemporary decendants of the plants that relied on the network, the plant equivalent of your gens x,y,z - they are fully screwed. thousands of years of species knowledge just vanishing as it becomes impossible to transmit that information....the mother nettle can not tell the baby nettle how to grow like the old days, because it knows not how.... it doesn't remember because it never really knew its magic, it was not taught. it receives little in objectivist pedagogy, having to make it up as it goes along. a nettle like this, is all nettles. unless maybe they are within touch of some old old oak. non pagans don't get the pagan fixation orn Oak trees,,,but an Oak Tree is like a Babel Fish. it facilitates communications between different languages... daisy sends 'aphids' in daisy - oak tree tells nettle - nettle tells resident predatory wasp...and the next thing daisy is sending 'happy , thanks'. gone daisy squeaks into the cold silent earth - no wasps come - nettle didn't get the heads up --- its a frkn debacle. hence- the oak denied world as we know it.
Easy done, I'll try to get back there one night after work with a torch. Failing that I'll check it out on the weekend.
@Kimbo Hau kola, I owe a great deal to Oak. She sustained me during a fasting ceremony that lasted roughly a month. Details are hazy since being in a sweat lodge 4x a day kinda messes with your reality... ..as it did mine. Acorn mush to keep strength going, and to heal. Powerful. Amazing.
TA As an aside ive noticed in the bottom of my acorn fridge, jelly that looks like the stuff Koreans make from acorns,(stops ya feelin hungary like Paka said)
I wonder if there is a way to send California acorns to Australia? Even if it were possible, apart from the legal issues, if any, they ripen in late summer here, which would be late winter there, and they want to germinate quickly....so they might be a bit confused as to season. But the local Blue and Valley oaks are wonderful Mediterranean climate producers....the acorns needing only a few hours leaching and much larger than a cork oak, more comparable to a bur oak in size. (Bur oak is a Midwestern tree and benefits from at least some summer water.....these CA species can go a full six months without....and those are the hot months!) They are so productive, and so adapted to the winter-rain, summer-dry climate that it surprises me if someone in AU doesn't have them already.....
Which species are we talking/? Ive got some burr oak Q macrocarpa and some red Q Rubra,,Q Palustrus> There is always a way!
The valley oak is Q. lobata. The blue oak is Q. douglasii, related enough to it to occasionally hybridize, but generally more upland and more drought tolerant. The foliage is a bit smaller and quite bluish, giving the woodland an odd look (though perhaps not so to people in AU, accustomed to bluish eucalypts) I wonder if the color of both is an adaptation to heat and drought.....Q. agrifolia is evergreen and not found right around here. I think there are some near town where it is a bit warmer in the winter. (my area is amenable to olives, but marginal for citrus....)
