There’s something perversely satisfying about stepping on an acorn and hearing it crack beneath my feet. This year was especially entertaining as it was a “mast” year for the tophat-wearing nuts. (According to Pat Rubin, a writer for The Sacramento Bee, that’s what experts call a year when acorns are beyond plentiful.) Rubin explains why it’s been such a prolific season:
“…the wet spring of 2006 was the beginning of this year’s bumper acorn crop, says Ken Menzer, arborist for the city of Folsom. During March 2006, it rained 21 of 31 days. ‘It’s a two-year process. We need to have a really wet year, particularly a wet spring, then a dry spring,’ Menzer says.
2007 was a much drier spring, and all of the flower catkins the trees produced because of the previous wet spring had a chance to be pollinated. Says Menzer: ‘If it had rained as much as it did the year before, a lot of the pollen would have been washed off, and we’d have very few acorns this year.’”
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