I made a bittersweet discovery last week. I had been noticing little piles of chewed up green stuff on the walkways and on my porches. It looked like unripe fruit, so I thought the rodents had gotten into some deep patch of the jungle that had a stunted peach or plum or something. I am sure there are at least plums in there – that’s what blackthorn is, after all, sloes, tiny plums – and I am also sure that there might be trees that have not fruited until now because until now they have been shaded out by jungle. The bottom of the slope, in particular, could have any number of newly exposed fruit trees because the town came through with one of those industrial scale weed whackers and cut down about six feet along the road. This did nothing to control the weeds. It just exposed the deeper layers. With all the new sunshine, the wild grape and clematis were quick to pour themselves over the retaining wall and out into the road. There are also a couple small trees, maple and locust, that were unburied back in June and are now fifteen to twenty feet tall. Now, I have to plunge deeper into the jungle to cut them down before they mess with the power lines that run directly above them.
But anyway…
These piles were not fruit. The more I looked at them, the more they looked like nut meats. Green nut meats. But I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from until…
I was clearing out the storm drain between my garage and the rental house next door to my garage, and the first thing I noticed was a lot of thumping coming from their driveway. The next thing I noticed was the spreading mess of the same nut meats that had been showing up around my house. The third thing I noticed was the concentration of squirrels. There were grey bodies everywhere, a veritable scurry of squirrels, mostly in the tree that stands on the property line right next to their driveway.
For those who don’t have the pleasure of living with squirrels, and especially grey squirrels, these are not social animals in any fashion. In fact, they seem to barely tolerate their own young long enough to raise them to adulthood. They are highly territorial and will draw blood at the slightest infringement of their property rights. They will chase off other species from favored nesting or feeding sites, which makes bird feeders problematic. I am sure they deeply resent what they see as human encroachment on their land, and that probably partially explains the malice they rain down on the garden. Though the garden is also a favorite feeding site that is maintained by humans to benefit squirrels, of course. So there are complicated feelings there, I am sure.
To have one tree covered squirrels is, first of all, a very unusual thing but you might not notice that if not for the fact that it is also a very loud thing. There are screaming contests and chases that spill out over the entire block. I have never seen it happen, but I am fairly sure they throw things at each other. At the least, tearing about knocks down leaves, twigs, rotten branches, other squirrels – and in staring open-mouthed at the squirrel mayhem, I finally saw the thing that I had missed about this tree until now… It is a hickory, fully mature and this year loaded with nuts.
Hickories, like all the walnut family and most mast trees generally, do not produce evenly each year. Nor is there much logic to when they will fruit. Some years the trees may have everything they need — ample water, sunlight, stress-free winters, and so on — and yet they will not set seed. Some years, like this one, they might endure any number of adversities in the preceding year and yet will produce a bounty. They hardly ever fruit for more than a year or two in a row, regardless of conditions. And they can go for long stretches where nothing happens at all. This must have been the case for the four growing seasons that I’ve spent here because I have never seen one nut until now.
One of the most fascinating things about trees is that they can coordinate their reproductive schedules. Even as random as the process seems to be, they all follow the same schedule. If one tree is fruiting the whole forest will be fruiting. This works across species within the same family – so the whole walnut family will fruit together – and to a more limited extent it will work between unrelated species of plants, even including some of the plants on the forest floor. If it is a fruiting year for a dominant tree, many other plants will join in the action. But, significantly, not all of them and not every time, otherwise it might just be all plants reacting to the same weather and soil conditions. Maples will set seed only if nobody else is on the reproduction project. The entire woodlot of maples will be in seed when none of the oaks, beeches, and nut-trees are producing. Similarly, some years the hickories will decide to forgo nuts even though the oaks are dropping acorns so thick you need a helmet to go walking in the woods. This year, the hickories are fruiting, the maples are quiet, and the honey locusts are heavy with pods — that I am sort of dreading… (Being rather nitrogen-enriched, they stink…)
So now I know that the big walnut-looking tree on the corner is a hickory; and knowing that, I looked harder at the raggedy young trees that I had deemed ashes — because all ash trees are raggedy from emerald ash borers these days and because these trees are too deep in the jungle for me to see their identifying bark. All I can see is a thin raggedy tree with strappy compound leaves. But this year, there are also nuts.
Not nearly as many as the mature tree on the corner, but definitely nuts. Also squirrels.
Which is the bitter part of this discovery. There are already ample hickory nuts on the one mature tree to feed a neighborhood, and when the trees in my jungle mature, nutting years will be a bonanza — but only if the nuts are allowed to mature and fall to the ground. Which is not happening…
Like all walnuts, hickory nuts are not edible when unripe. They are barely even accessible before the seed ripens and the exterior meaty rind dries out and pulls away from the nut’s shell. But if you get the nut out of the rind, you don’t want to eat it. Green nut meats are all bitterness and little nutrition. Fortunately, also, like all walnuts, the trees let us know when it is time to eat. The whole fruit is released from the tree when it is ripe, and not a second beforehand. All you have to do is pick them up. Nutting is one of the easiest ways to feed yourself. You just wander the woods and fill up your basket from the forest floor. With walnuts, you probably want to wear gloves because tannin and juglone will stain everything black, including your skin and fingernails. (Not that I’ve ever made that mistake and ended up with goth fingers for weeks…) But that is hardly an imposition. I’ll ruin a pair of gloves every year for the free, delicious food that this whole family provides.
But these damn rodents are not waiting for the nuts to mature. They are ravaging the hickories, taking every last fruit before it is ripe enough to fall. With most of the nuts, they will take a few bites of the rind and “discover” that the fruits taste horrible and then drop the unripe nut into mounting piles under the mature tree. Some of them, probably the lower status squirrels who aren’t free to munch on nuts at their leisure because their skinflinty superiors will attack them for trespassing, will take the nuts elsewhere before opening them. This is the source of the piles of green stuff on my porches and walkways. And it is green all the way through. There is no ripe, brown nut, just a sad little green lump that will never turn into a viable seed or a delicious snack.
So on the one hand, I have this wonderful source of free food. Food that is delicious and nutritious and nearly effortless. Food that I spend quite a lot to buy because it is my main source of dietary protein and it is expensive in the grocery store. Food that I could never have hoped to harvest from trees that I planted because I will be long gone before any walnut planted today will bear nuts. And here is nature providing! This is a joyous discovery! One tree that is already in heavy production. Several more that are coming to maturity and bearing lightly already.
But, I am not getting any nuts out of this… and I don’t expect that to change. Unless the plaguey squirrel population crashes.
This has implications for all the nut trees that I’ve planted. The hazelnuts that I’ve put everywhere do not take very long to reach maturity because they don’t grow as large. I would be able to see a nut harvest in my lifetime. But only if the nuts were allowed to mature. Maybe the spiny packaging on the kernel will discourage rodent destruction, but these seem like determinedly stupid rodents. For so many of them to spend so much time and energy on bitter walnut rinds does not speak to intelligence. You’d think after the first, oh, dozen nasty bites between prolonged bouts of fighting and dashing around, they might figure out that this is not a rewarding project. (Maybe in squirrel logic, pain is its own reward…) So the spines on the hazels might not translate into teachable moments. I’d likely just end up with many discarded piles of spiney stuff on my porches and walkways.
This goes beyond nuts. Squirrels don’t like fruit as much. They want the seeds, not the fruit pulp, and most of our fruits have rather toxic seeds. This is by design. The tree wants its seed to stay intact even after the fruit is ingested, carried elsewhere, and then defecated. So the seeds are enclosed in tough casings that are more or less devoid of nutritional value, being not much but indigestible fiber, and the kernels come laced with bitter tannins and cyanide. Any animal that chews up the seed is going to be eliminated from the food web in fairly short order. Apple seeds are not squirrel food.
However, squirrels are stupid… They will go through an entire apple tree, biting into the fruit, encountering the bitter seeds, and then tossing the ruined fruit to the ground. (Or in my garden, leaving it on the fence rail so I can see just how much is being destroyed — and then I have to clean up the destruction!) When there isn’t a bonanza of hickory nuts to distract them, they can devastate the orchard. Until this year, I haven’t had much of an apple harvest. I had thought this was because the trees were an unfortunate mix of too young, too crowded in the jungle, and too blighted. Or it could have been that it just wasn’t a good year for apples… for the last four years… we have had a long run of late frosts, after all… But this year the trees up by the house were covered in blossoms that then turned into fruit.
However, until the squirrels discovered the nuts, I still didn’t believe that I would get a harvest. In fact, the biggest tree near my house was more or less stripped before the apples got more than a blush of ripeness. They also tried out the peaches on the oldest and firmest branches, leaving the ruined fruitlets on my walk. But then the nut bonanza started and all the fruit trees were abandoned. I have four pints of peach butter. I also have more apples than I can process now — they’re in storage in the basement — but next year when the hickories decide to go quiet again, I’m afraid that I’ll be right back to no apples. And I can’t blame the trees or the weather. It’s the damn rodents.
And it’s always been the damn rodents. Not only in my garden, but in general. We talk about things like wolves and tigers and bears, but the real predators on our lives are the rodents. Rodents are implacable vectors of disease and starvation and death throughout human history. And, though we are causing extinctions all over the biological map, the rodents are thriving. At least the ones that prey on us and our lifeways – and thereby cause us the most harm. We are breeding our own immiseration and possibly annihilation. Combined with the insects and microbes that prey on us, rodents are devastating. Rodents, teamed up with fleas and the bacteria, yersenia pestis, wiped out 30% to 50% of Medieval Europe just through the black plague. And that was when rodent populations were held nominally in check by their predators. Which is not happening now.
I haven’t seen the foxes much this year, nor the coy-wolf that sometimes comes out of the Town Woods to eat the neighborhood trash (and the occasional cat). The skunk was hit by a car… a delightful experience for all… There are no peregrines in my jungle this year, and I have not heard them hunting anywhere else in town. After a couple years of pre-dawn silence, I was delighted to hear lovelorn owl calls in the dark mornings of late January and early February, but I’ve since encountered no evidence that they found each other and bred new owls. In short, I don’t know of one squirrel predator anywhere near my property… and this feels like an increasingly permanent condition.
This has serious implications for producing food in an urban or suburban environment. If we don’t allow the predators to live in our towns and cities, we are going to be overrun with the prey animals, who will in turn eat us quite literally out of house and home. I have a cat who does a fairly good job of keeping the mice and chipmunks in check within the house. But my neighbors are constantly talking about rodent damage. The mice are tearing into cereal boxes and pasta packages and trash. The chipmunks are living in the walls, chewing on the electrical wires. (Not sure what they get out of that, but it seems to be a common chipmunk avocation.) The son of one of my co-workers called him at work to say that there was “mouse poop all over all the pots and pans”. My co-worker advised the teen to get cleaning. And even with my psychotic cat, who probably has generated horror stories that mother rodents tell their kids to keep them in line, after the flood last year, I still had at least one really stupid mouse who got into the kitchen drawers, chewed up the silicone spatulas and pooped all over everything. I spent several days cleaning up that mess last fall. (Fingers crossed, this year they don’t seem to be invading my house… they’re probably all next door…)
But I can’t let my cat out. She would annihilate the bird population. Probably right before she got hit by a car. So my garden has no protection. I have a groundhog that eats everything I plant. I have chipmunks that dig up all the bulbs (most of which are poisonous, so they just leave them lying there in the sun). They’ve even taken to eating onions and garlic. Or more accurately, digging up the alliums, eating a sliver of the bulb, and then tossing the remains into the road. There are mice and voles throughout my yard, gnawing at the bark of young trees, tunneling underground, and eating whatever seed I plant outside the raised beds (which have a basal weed barrier of cardboard that they’ve still not breached… yet…). And the squirrels are truly a plague.
My town is not at all unusual. In fact, my town might have advantages over many places. We are surrounded by woods filled with rodent predators. We have rather lax enforcement of regulations on shooting things within the town limits. And there are feral cats everywhere. If I was less concerned about accidental injuries, I could have taken up any one of several offers to shoot the groundhog. If I was closer to the woods, the coy-wolves and lynx and owls would be taking care of the rodents. The feral cats… well, they kill quite a lot, but they can’t hunt adult groundhogs or squirrels. Still, they probably hold back the rodent invasion at least somewhat.
But what we really need is real predators here in town, hungry predators, predators that need to eat rodents. We need owls and hawks and reptiles. We need foxes and skunks. Even the occasional coy-wolf and lynx would be welcome. And the town needs to pony up for a whole slew of Havahart traps and a large and permanent staff that will wield them. (I suppose paying teens with air rifles is right out…)
We also need to reduce rodent food sources, and this is where things get problematic. Because we also need to be producing more of our own food locally, and our own food is also rodent food. Or at least rodents will get into our food, discover it’s really not rodent food, ruin what they find, and leave the mess behind. And they will do this preferentially. The groundhog has a whole quarter acre jungle of groundhog plants, including groundhog favorites like clovers and sorrel and rampant bramble. But is he eating any of that? Well, the fact that the bramble is rampant sort of says no… He is climbing up the bank to eat my garden, instead of feasting on the normal groundhog food that grows in dense thickets all around his burrow. By eliminating the threat of predation and growing veg in nice orderly beds of nothing but palatable food, we’ve trained groundhogs to seek out our gardens and eat our food rather than eat what grows wild.
At least the groundhog does eat the veg. The squirrels just destroy it — because most of it is not squirrel food and yet they are habituated to look for food around human habitation. In fact, grey squirrels do not seem to know how to survive in the wild. Out there, there are predators holding them in check, but they also don’t understand how to get food from wild plants. Hence the constant testing of human food to see if it is edible. And hence the swarming of a hickory tree before the nuts are ripe.
In Massachusetts there were hickories and walnuts all around my farm. And yes, there were rodents eating the nuts. But red squirrels and ground squirrels and chipmunks will wait for the nuts to mature, more often eating them on the ground than in the tree. Red squirrels are smart enough to go up into the trees and bat at likely looking nuts. If a tap brings it down, then the nut is ripe but still unmolested. So they knock dozens of fresh nuts to the ground and then scamper down to gather them up. Inevitably they will miss some of the nuts they’ve dislodged, and other nutters will happily glean in a red squirrel’s wake. (Me included…)
But I have never seen more than one rodent working a tree, nor have I ever seen piles of green nut meats scattered about. These grey squirrels clearly do not know how to harvest food from a hickory. They are used to being able to eat anything that smells of seed proteins, without worrying about whether it is ripe or not, because we scatter this ready-made food all over our gardens and refuse bins and bird feeders — no-effort squirrel feasts. And no effort after a few generations means no learned knowledge of how to find food the harder ways. I should say that I only rarely saw grey squirrels on the farm, and then only in the garden. (They ate all the corn…)
Grey squirrels are not this stupidly dependent on humans for food everywhere. Yet. There are thousands in Central Park, eating every last acorn and maple key and birch cone that falls from the trees. They have learned to eat more exotic foods like spruce cones and arborvitae seeds, crabapples and cherries. They also eat pretzels and hot dog buns and popcorn from the street vendors and sloppy tourists. But they eat predominantly from the native trees. And they eat a lot! In less urban environments, the forest floor is carpeted in nuts every few years and filled with seedling trees. Central Park does have many gardeners on staff to keep things tidy, but I really doubt they are sweeping up the all the acorns and pulling all the volunteer maples. In a place with fewer grey squirrels, that would take an army working full time for most of the year. (And what would they do with the nuts?) So these grey squirrels are voracious.
Now, what if, as some people are perhaps rightly starting to suggest, Manhattanites started growing food in Central Park? Here is an ideal setting for veg gardens, probably sufficient space to provide veg for much of the borough and still have copious room for softball, soccer and picnic grounds. It is also less likely to have been as thoroughly poisoned as the various abandoned lots that are normally co-opted for city garden clubs, though I’m sure there are pesticides and herbicides in the soil and water as well the toxic rain of exhaust particulates that covers everything in New York. But there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of grey squirrels in Central Park. I’m not sure these urban food enthusiasts have thought of this… what happens when we put veg gardens in the grey squirrel food forest?
Will they keep eating the mast nuts? Or will they head out to the gardens? And what will happen to the woodlands? Will they become overgrown with spindly saplings and other brushy undergrowth? And if the squirrels become as helplessly dependent on humans for food as the city’s burgeoning rat population, will there be any gardens — or stored food — left unravaged?
Central Park still has a few predators. There are foxes and coyotes. I’ve even heard of a few bobcats. But there are few raptors and owls, and the large predators do not venture far from the parklands. There are plenty of street cats, but obviously they aren’t up to the task of keeping the rodents in check. In the last decade, I’ve not once walked down the street without seeing a half dozen or so fat and completely complacent rats. And of course, Central Park’s predators are doing nothing to keep the numbers of grey squirrels down.
Now, this all may not be legitimate concern. Maybe the grey squirrels in other environments will stick to squirrel food. Maybe. Though news from other gardens does not lead one to believe that will happen. But the scale of the problem is incredible. Add in deer and rabbits and there isn’t much garden food that is safe from predation. There aren’t many gardens that will reliably produce a harvest. And nobody is talking about this problem.
A problem which boils down to a need for predators near or within our gardens.
When we talk about re-wilding, we see pictures of savannas and mountaintops. These are places that humans don’t grow food. I’m certain that humans have adversely affected those environments, but they are as wild as they have ever been. The effects come from cities, not from the scattered peoples who live in difficult terrain. And anyway, there is no distinction between wild and human habitat. Humans are animals. We are wild animals. All beings manipulate their environment and create homelands. Humans, and especially modern urban humans, are just especially bad at it. But it doesn’t mean we aren’t part of the planet, somehow able to disconnect ourselves from everyone else.
In any case, re-wilding, if it is a thing, really ought to show us living in harmony with others. Not out in the desert or in deep woods, but in our cities, where we live. We need to make lives amenable to other lives. And part of the reason behind doing this is to rein in those that feed off of our ignorance — who have become just as ignorant as us. We absolutely need to stop emitting carbon and spewing plastic all over those mountaintops and savannas. We need to allow other beings the home space and food space that they require. We need to live lighter on this planet, using less of it and wasting none of it. But we really need to open up our lives to those beings that can help us live well. At the very least we need to be able to produce food reliably without huge inputs of poison and transport fuel and energy. Because that is clearly not working for anyone, most especially us.
The squirrels will not likely go extinct though their numbers will be reduced as collapse takes its toll on humans. It is not at all clear that urban humans, who have few life skills and few means of producing their own needs, will escape extinction though. I suppose that’s one method of re-wilding…
Some of the potatoes, curing on the front porch
If we are to survive then we need to bring back the predators. We need to foster balance even if that means that sometimes careless pet keepers will lose their cat to a hunting owl, even if we have to re-train ourselves to live with coyotes by not putting garbage outside where they can eat it rather than the rats, even if we have to hold regular deer hunts, rabbit culls and autumn feasts that feature large, fattened rodents — because we are predators also. Not as efficient, by any means, but we could at least make them think twice about coming into our gardens.
Until we do that, we can pretty much count on not getting much harvest out of our gardens and orchards and wild nut trees…
Except potatoes… I’ve got plenty of potatoes… two bushels, in fact. And enough tiny ones to plant in the next few days for next year’s harvest.
I went out to one of our local farms that does apples and pumpkins, among other fun fall things. I got two large bags of Zestar apples that are being turned into apple butter, apple sauce and apple plus other stuff chutney. I will go back when the Macouns and other good keeping apples are ripe to fill up more bins in the basement.
I also bought a hubbard squash. It was a monster, barely fit in my oven. But I did manage to get it in and get it roasted. The result was ten quart-sized bags of roasted winter squash purée.
That’s approximately ten weeks of soup base or several dozen loaves of quick bread. One more of those things and that’s all the squash I could possibly use in our six months of winter. But I think I will get other squashes, because I like variety — and because I like so many kinds of squash!
Apple Butter
I know that there are dozens of apple butter recipes out there, but I think mine is interesting enough to add to the list. So here is what I do.
Peel, core and quarter about 10 medium apples. Or a mix of large and small ones, as was this case this past weekend.
Put them all in a heavy-bottomed pan with a tablespoon or so of water, enough to just moisten the bottom of the pan. Cover and cook over medium heat until the apples are soft. Usually takes about twenty minutes.
Turn off the heat and use an immersion blender to pulp the apples. You could also use a food strainer or other external pulping method, but using the immersion blender means you don’t have to wait for the apples to cool, nor do you have to worry about spilling hot apple mess all over your counter. (Not that that has ever happened…)
To the hot apple pulp, add 1 1/2 teaspoons of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon of allspice, and a scant quarter teaspoon of clove.
Then add 1/2 cup good cider vinegar, 1/2 cup molasses and about 1/4 cup raw or brown sugar. Adjust the amount of sugar to balance the tartness in the apples and cider. So add a little, taste it, and add more until it tastes right. I like my apple butter tart and spicy, so you may find that you need more sugar than I use.
I use the immersion blender to stir all this into the apple pulp because it’s quick and it’s already in use. But stir it up however you prefer.
Then put the pot on low heat and let it cook down. It will take at least 90 minutes. Don’t put a lid on the pot or it won’t cook down. However, if you don’t want to clean up apple splatter from every surface in the kitchen, prop the lid on a splatter-guard screen or something else that will allow steam to escape but will keep the splats mostly contained.
When it is cooked down, you can ladle it into two hot, sterilized pint jars and then process in a water bath canner for ten minutes. Or you could wait for it to cool a bit, spoon it into pint freezer tubs and freeze it.
I like both methods, though right now I don’t have much space for jars of food and plenty of space in the freezer. So I went with frozen apple butter this year.
I never make just one batch of apple butter at once. It’s always at least tripled. This past weekend was quadrupled. So I have eight pints of apple butter in my freezer now. Well, seven. One went directly into the fridge for eating right now.
What is interesting is that it never takes longer than about twenty minutes to soften the apples, no matter how many apples you put in the pan. However, it takes an hour or so for every additional batch to cook down into butter. So a quadrupled batch took about five hours. Which was fine… I had other things to do…
In the days when I was cooking for a crowd of males and had a bounty of apples coming out of the garden, I would do several rounds of apple butter each year. I gave away jars for holiday gifts and school raffle prizes. But mostly we just ate that much apple butter.
These days, I think this one round of eight pints is plenty.
Next weekend will be applesauce… which, made with Zestar apples, is pretty much just cook the apples until soft and purée them. I doubt I will even need sugar. And that’s eight more pints of yummy apple stuff for the winter.
I also have ambitions of combining the last round of these Zestars with tomatillo and serrano chiles to make chutney. But we’ll see… the tomatillos are refusing to ripen, and we’re getting close to frost. And I have to find serranos for sale somewhere… since the damn marmot ate all my chile plants…
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
