As mentioned before, acorns are amazingly scarce on the ground this year. The pecans are awful too. They look wonderful lying around, but most have this black stuff good on, or some white and black stuff. A few didn't have it but instead are all withered instead.
Last year I snacked on pecans out of the yard all the time. Haven't found a single good one this time around.
This could be stink bug damage but they don't usually ruin the entire kernel, just black spots on otherwise healthy looking meat. Could be a scab disease.
It rained for three days. It'll rain again tomorrow. The ground is fully saturated so more rain will mean flooding that has nothing to do with rivers or hills, although other places will get those floods too.
I still need to get out with the map on clipboard and inventory the trees and the junk piles and the campers etc. for a “current conditions” map for school. Also a map of imminent plans, like where the tiny house and outdoor kitchen are going.
We may have three species of oaks instead of two. By the pond this morning I found that the oaks nearer the pond have less rough bark and the sorts of leaves that have deep sinuses from the previous post.
However some of the oaks standing back from the pond have much rougher bark. Some of their leaves are still on, and they are a different shape than the other two. Oblong with a distinct tip, so definitely a member of the red oak group.
Here are the acorns I found along the fence line yesterday. They are nearly spherical and have a very pronounced tip on the end. The cap is more bumpy than flaky or scaly. As far as I can tell with my limited vision.
How is all this pertinent to permaculture? I'm still working on my maps, and will be for the duration of the course. The base map didn't have any trees on it because any of these trees may be removed. None of them are hands off. However, that doesn't mean they all go either. They do all have to be mapped out as I make a plan. And they need to properly be identified for species.
Why does that matter?
Did you know that some acorns drop the same seasonal year they start forming, while others drop two seasonal years after they start forming, while the next round of acorns are budding? That pattern has a lot to do with the interdependent species in the environment. That has to be taken into account.
Here is a video about telling apart some common oak species. There are 34 native oak tree species in Mississippi, and then some folks have brought in oaks from other places trying to boost acorn production through interbreeding. So identifying oaks can be tough.
Plus, this year, the acorns are scarce. I've been looking for weeks, and I finally found a few along the fence line. I suspect they got hit with Roundup or something and that's how they were left alone.
So I recently learned that while pecans are like dogs — they come in infinite variety but they're all the same species — oaks come in lots of different species. And it's important for me to identify which ones are on the land.
The tons of fallen leaves appear to be from water oaks. But there are a couple of places that have more complicated leaves that are plainly in the red oak family, but I don't know who they are.
Until I found the acorns this morning I've been working from one acorn I found under my bed. That one probably came from the tree that I used to be parked under. Which also dropped a lot of water oak leaves but the acorn does not match the description.
I haven't yet tried to match the acorns from this morning. It's been a really busy day.
I have pictures. There will be pictures. But I need to go take the laundry out of the dryer.
The current lesson consists of developing a base map of the property and interviewing the clients.
One was super rough because we are doing it in Google Slides, which is murderous to people with hand motion issues or poor hand-eye coordination. I spent easily as much time undoing as doing and it was a LOT of freaking hours. My future designs will be on paper until I find a better app. But I'm probably stick with this one for the rest of the course, since this is one single design.
The other was super rough because I had to overcome social anxiety and a certain amount of estrangement to get the input I needed from the clients. Two of whom declined to participate anyway.
The wind is mostly from the south, from the north sometimes in the winter.
It snows even less than I thought.
Hardiness zones are only about freezing temps. We are in the same hardiness zone as the West Texas desert.
Koppen Geiger climate classifications are way more useful.
There are no NOAA weather stations near here at all! There had been one at the chemical plant but it went silent in 2018. They came and got the equipment three years ago.
However, university mesonets are on the rise. I found some fairly decent data in (I think? I don't have my laptop up.) University of Illinois' mesonet network.
Dunno where I read that the Yazoo tribe was made up by white people, but I found a lot of stuff that seems to contradict the narrative.
This land belonged to the Yazoo, Choctaw, and Quapaw people. By 1850 they were all gone from here. The Yazoo took a lot of losses in the Natchez Uprising in 1729. The survivors joined the Tunica and Biloxi. The Choctaw and Quapaw were removed to the west.
