New Easter Tradition
I always admire the old oak trees at our local park. Whenever my family and I take walks around the area, I look up at the wide spanning branches and dream of a day when our farm will have these beautiful oaks. They would provide lovely shade in the Summer, drop an abundance of acorns that my pigs could feast on in the Autumn and over Winter, the leaf litter would break down to increase soil fertility before the cycle would start again in Spring. I follow this dream by collecting acorns each year and hope that my kids (or another responsible landowner) will benefit from this hard work in eighty or so years. To see this with my own eyes!
‘You should just collect the ones at the park when they fall,’ my wife said.
This is what I call a ‘Truth Slap’.
The answer is there, right in front of your face, but you don’t see it until someone points it out.
Once the sting subsided, I could not WAIT for the acorns to fall. I thought up a few creative ways to collect them from the ground: nets, blower vacs and the like, but given this particular tree was in a public place, there were limitations on what I could do. On Easter Sunday, the acorns had all fallen from the tree and the ground was totally covered. I opted for the rake and shovel at this first attempt. Guerrilla tactics with the wife and kids. We go in. We get out. Simple.
It turned out to be a huge amount of fun! We did get a few strange looks from passers by, but no questions asked as we were essentially cleaning up what would be crushed into the ground by cars or chopped up by council mowers.
It’s funny to think that less than 400 meters from where we were collecting all this free animal food, shops charge big money for an inferior version of the same stuff.
As we collected I could not help but think about conventional animal feed systems; shovelling with my bare hands probably helped :) Of course machines replace the people power required, so perhaps that’s a reason why we don’t see the deficiencies in large scale commercial operations. Plough, rotary hoe, seed, fertilise, spray, cut/harvest, store, transport … cheap oil may make financial sense of this scenario, but it makes no common sense whatsoever.
Bring the animal to the food and let it harvest for itself - tremendously effective and efficient.
We collected four bags in half an hour and I estimated around fifty kilograms in weight. There was plenty left behind but we were happy with our first run at the acorn harvest and agreed to do it again next year and perhaps turn this into a new Easter tradition.
Later that day I scattered a few handfuls of acorns to our Forrest Pigs and they devoured them instantly. I was extremely pleased, not only for making use of what would have otherwise been a wasted food source, but also for the beautiful glimpse at a possible future on our farm, even if it is one I will never see to fruition in my lifetime.