Thanks to a combination of hard work and support from fellow islanders – plus the occasional crowdfunding experiment – Marcie has used the acorns of Kea to create a cookie business, Oakmeal, which is working out rather well. It’s autumn 2016, and Marcie is in Paris, at the biennial SIAL, the biggest wholesale food fair in the world. The harvests could begin.įast-forward five years. In a population of about 2,000 talkative people, that was more than enough. And by the way, what do you think of these acorn cookies? A hundred or so people attended. The meeting was to say: Let’s make Kea’s oak trees part of the island’s economy. She’d learned how to remove the bitterness one would experience if eating them straight off the ground, how to mill them into flour, how to use that flour in cooking. For years she’d been researching the acorn’s potential as a source of food. What else would you do with them, exactly? Well, Marcie had a few suggestions. That said, there were still plenty of the trees, so each autumn, thousands of acorns would carpet the ground on farms and in back gardens, where they would just lie until they were cleared or simply merged with the ground. ![]() The oak forests that contributed so much to Kea’s serene, verdant atmosphere were thinning out. This had a lot to do with the islanders finding more value in the land on which the trees stood, which could be claimed for holiday homes, and their wood, which could be repurposed as a cheap source of fuel. For a long time, Kea’s oak trees had been in decline. They are sweet and musty.Back in 2011, Marcie Mayer invited her fellow residents of Kea, an island in a shipwreck-strewn part of the Mediterranean near Athens, to a meeting about acorns. Next I’ll be building the mushroom beds out of scrap lumber and looking for spawn. It will be turned every 3-5 days to ensure even heating. It should heat up over 54☌ (130☏), which kills a lot of bacteria and conditions the droppings into mushroom substrate. Once at home, the manure was piled onto the floor of the garage to ferment. Then I could shovel up the manure, leaving much of the shavings. I found that by tossing the mixed stuff up in a steep pile, the horse apples rolled off and the shavings piled up. There were so many shavings that I had to figure out how to separate the horse droppings from the shavings. I tried to avoid the white manure which has composted too hot and burned. It took me about 30 minutes to shovel about a ton of manure mixed with straw and wood shavings. Data Back when I was an archaeologist, this was called a shovel toss. Louis (a riding school and horse therapy place) offers free manure for the taking. Step one was finding a whole load of horse manure. I am following the process outlined in Falconer’s 1901 mushroom growing manual outlined in yesterday’s blog post. The pin flags and notebook at least gave me some semblance of “official science going on here.” Now who’s the nut? Growing Mushrooms This is due to tannins, which will be removed by soaking.Īlso, apparently it is unusual to see an adult man crawling on his hands and knees across the park, picking up acorns. Many acorns will give a bitter taste in 1-3 seconds of light chewing. It took 10 seconds before I tasted any bitterness. To test, I split the acorn open and chewed on the meat. Next will come processing, including washing, shelling, soaking, and grinding. That is 215 calories per kg (98 calories per lb), but that could be lowered by gathering more acorns in a single trip. Total calories burned in gathering acorns: 344. It was a 6.4-km (4-mi) round trip, which burned 208 calories. I burned about 136 calories in that hour (I estimate this to be equivalent to picking fruit or vegetables). I have certainly been in locations with much denser acorn concentrations. I believe this is a minimum amount of acorns per time and space because more than half of the nuts were already half eaten by squirrels. In that hour, I covered 140 m 2 (1507 ft 2), measured by collecting in 2-m-wide swaths marked by pin flags. Louis (with the permission of the park authorities, of course). I spent an hour gathering 1.6 kg (3.5 lb) of acorns from Tower Grove Park in St. Data Scott and Casey gathering acorns in the park. I am gathering data on the caloric investment and payoff from processing acorns from tree to meal. The common thought is that a person could collect many times more calories than he or she expended while gathering acorns. Acorn ProcessingĪcorns are a decent-value nut found widely across the temperate world. Two of our current projects moved along today.
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