“It makes him feel better, I think,” Smith said. Undaunted, Smith’s husband has managed to fill another trash can, using a rake to carefully roll all the acorns he can reach from the perimeter of their yard. The Smiths can’t walk on their new lawn for a couple more weeks. “I contacted a local pig farmer to see if he wanted them because acorns are supposed to be good for pigs, but he doesn’t have pigs this year.” “They just keep falling and they sound like gunshots when they hit the deck,” Smith said.
“If the new lawn does not take, we are going to grow an oak forest,” Smith wrote on Knight’s Facebook post. Now, the lawn is covered with acorns again.
#Broken acorn drawing full
She and her husband collected a trash can full before they had a new lawn seeded over a week ago. In Brunswick, the three oaks in Becky Smith’s yard started dropping acorns weeks ago. “I don’t even know where to begin to pick up all the ones that are on the ground in my yard!” wrote Jennifer Burke of Biddeford. Some predicted a squirrel population explosion next year. Knight posted a photo of her bumper acorn crop on her Facebook page, drawing sympathetic comments from friends throughout Maine. Oaks may respond with earlier and heavier masting, Bergdahl said. When there are added stressors like this drought, a tree may not be able to put additional energy into growing acorns to maturity.” “It takes a lot of energy to produce acorns. “It’s likely a stress response,” Bergdahl said. A large oak can drop as many as 10,000 acorns to ensure reproduction beyond those eaten by deer, squirrels and other animals or destroyed by disease and insects.īeneath the oak in Berghahl’s backyard in Manchester, the fallen acorns are smaller than usual this year and still a bit green, indicating that they’re not quite ripe. Exactly how they coordinate this reproductive response is unknown. “It is very strange for an oak tree to have a heavy mast year in two consecutive years,” said Aaron Bergdahl, a tree pathologist with the Maine Forest Service.īergdahl said oaks usually synchronize heavy mast years, when trees across a wide area put out large numbers of acorns in the same season. The latter indicates many oaks are stressed following a dry summer that has caused moderate to extreme drought conditions across Maine. While some acorns falling now are brown, ripe and fully formed, others are smaller, green and underdeveloped.
Heavy masting typically occurs every two to three years, and other trees may suffer through the winter if they don’t get more water this fall.
Widespread reports of oaks dropping their fruit early and in large amounts come one year after a heavy acorn mast, or crop, in 2019. It’s like walking across ball bearings in the front yard.” “It sounds like someone’s shaking the trees and it’s raining acorns. Lawn care workers used leaf blowers and shovels to remove a large pile of acorns last week and they’ll likely have to do it again soon. At Felicia Knight’s home in Scarborough, several oaks have put out so many acorns, she sweeps her deck and walkways regularly to make sure no one falls.
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