Members of the Capital Nut Tree Project had a meeting this
evening not too far from our house so Katrina and I decided to check it
out. My motivation for attending was to
try and meet someone that has a Davebilt Nutcracker in the hope that I could
borrow it for a day to crack all of our acorns.
Nobody in attendance has one, but one member was very interested in
getting one. I also wanted to share the
virtues of acorns to people that I felt would probably be receptive, so I
cooked up the English Oak (Quercus robur)
acorn meal that has been leaching for the last week and brought it along for
everyone to sample. It was my first
batch of English Oak, and I thought it turned out well. I sweetened it with maple syrup. They enjoyed the totally tree bread and were very excited
to learn more about acorns, so I arranged to lead an acorn workshop next weekend. This group is working to plant more nut trees
around Victoria and will likely host workshops on nut tree propagation and care.
My Balsam Root (Balsamorhiza
deltoidea) experiment, like many
others that don’t have the fortune of benefiting from very detailed traditional
knowledge, has not turned out as well as I had hoped. This afternoon the roots had a rich
black-brown color that suggested to me that they might be done. I decided to let the water boil down so that
any sugars that leached out of the boiling roots might concentrate to the point
of precipitating back onto the roots. When
all the water was finally gone I pulled a root out and sample it. The cooked roots are incredibly fibrous. They tasted like a hemp rope sweetened with
molasses and flavored with Fir needles. My conclusion is that I
harvested them too late in the year. A
woman named Sandra Peacock did her PhD dissertation on Balsam Root, so I will
try and get in touch with her, or her dissertation, to learn more. 
