It’s been a strange year on the ridge. We started with a wet, warm spring that seemed to bode well, but things dried up again in July. And as the water vanished from our intermittent streams, the deer congregated at smaller and smaller pools, where the midge that causes Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease had easy access to them. It’s devastated the local herd. We have at least two dead deer on the. property that I’ve seen, and based on smell I suspect there are a few more in areas where I don’t hike. The guys from Mississippi who rent the Airbnb for a tw0-week hunting trip each fall have canceled their trip this year.
Despite that, it’s a mast year, so there are acorns, butternuts, black walnuts, and assorted hickory nuts raining down day and night. I’m collecting them this year to experiment with which make sense to create a focused strategy for harvesting.
Butternuts (Juglans cinerea) have a hull, similar to black walnut ((Juglans nigra)). After removing it, you have to let the nut cure for a while before eating.My stone-age strategy for processing butternuts (Juglans cinerea). They have a hull, similar to black walnut (Juglans nigra)). After removing it, you have to let the nut cure for a while before eating.I’ve been fighting the squirrels for nuts that are falling from several shargbark hickories we have on the property. They’re like popcorn for local wildlife.It appears I’m not the only one squirreling away nuts for the winter. I suspect this is a chimpmunk’s stash based on the way they’re gnawed.A yellow buckeye (Aesculus flava) — not the Ohio buckeye, which is easy to ID because it stinks. The yellow apparently is edible but they contain a poison called saponins that pass through humans without affecting them. Wildlife love them. I’ve been leaving them alone.A well-guarded pear. The cage managed to keep the deer at bay.When the single pear on our tree finally dropped, I sampled it. Verdict: Delicious. Can’t wait till next year …Pawpaw (asimina triloba)It was small but delicious. I saved the seeds to plant next year. After finding this, I found another tree with fruit. This is the first time I’ve found fruiting pawpaw in our woods.There are a lot of trees, and many of them flower, but they require genetic diversity to actually fruit. Next year I plan to do some hand pollination between the trees in the woods and the ones I’ve planted in our Party Garden.We planted several peach trees, including this one with peaches on it. They were close to maturity when one of the local deer (demdamndeer, as we call them) couldn’t resist, knocked the cage over and ate all three peaches, leaving us with pits. We’ve reinforced our cages and are getting ready for next year …Our shiitake logs did really well this year, and one of the chesthut mushroom logs fruited. I’m planning to relocate and rethink my log storage. Several logs with other strains never fruited, so I’m going to double down on shiitake and chesthut. I’ve already located a chestnut oak that I’m going to fell after the leaves are down to use for my next set of logs.When I let a local mushroom grower cut down several beech trees for mushroom logs last year, I girdled the stumps and then inoculated them with chestnut mushrooms, lions mane, and shiitake. One of the lions mane stumps had a small fruiting this spring, and this chestnut mushroom stump did really well after a rare late summer rain. And the day I wrote this, I discovered one of the stumps inoculated with shiitake fruited.The spring rain brought the best chanterelle season I’ve seen. I also found lobster mushrooms amd puffballs during this forage.Our ginseng (Panax quinquefolius) suffered from the drought and deer grazing this year. Last year I found lots of three prongers with seeds. This year, not nearly as many. Not sure if it was the dry weather or something else.During last year’s drought, I didn’t harvest any of the ghost pipe that emerged. This spring was better so I did harvest some to tincture. I use it as a pain reliever.Laura is whipped up about bees, so we did the preliminary work to set up hives this year but we didn’t add bees. We just had too much other things going on during the spring. But next year, we’ll be adding hives to the mix. (That’s Ed the Bee Dude in the lower left. He’s the county bee inspector and a good friend.I’ve been planting ramp bulbs for several years, and we now have several beds that are thriving. I’m still not harvesting our ramps yet but probably will in the next year or two. We also set up a shade garden in the Party Garden where we’re growing ramps and ginseng in a more controlled setting. The stuff we’re doing in the woods is “wild simulated.”
And we’re just getting started. Laura has big plans and is planting fruit trees everywhere, which means our war against the deer will only get worse. We have several hazelnut trees that should start producing next year or the following, and there are crab apples along the driveway. We’ve also planted native persimmons and plum trees in the woods. Can’t wait for next year’s harvest update …
