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Faculty Essay

Also check out our other articles available in the Ethnobotany series, Survival series, Wildlife series, and Earth Skills Education series.

Why Has the Oak Fallen?

This is one of a series of articles on ethnobotany. Click Here for an introduction to this series on the Most Important Plants To Learn and Click Here for information on our Oak Prairie Workshop the first Saturday in November at Wolf Haven, Int'l.

Artwork copyrighted and used with permission from Wolf Journey alumna Joanna Colbert. Megan collecting seeds from plants on the prairie at Wolf Haven, Int'l.

Oak trees (Quercus spp) give us the acorn, which is one of the most nutritious foods on the planet. But first, there are some other attributes of oak that shouldn't be overlooked. The wood is well-known for its excellent qualities for building, furniture, fire, and more. Also like the pine, oak cambium has edible qualities. However, because of its high tannic acid content, using at food entails more processing than its worth in my opinion, so I see it more as a medicine. In fact, there are many folk remedies which call for white oak bark as an ingredient, and in fact, there is a great web page which provides an excellent discussion of its medicinal uses. For that, check out http://www.medhelp.org/posts/Hepatitis-B/White-Oak-Bark/show/926087

Although that web page is excellent, it assumes you would be buying already-processed white oak bark. But we like to harvest from scratch, so I'll tell you it's a bit of a trick getting bark to a point that it is palatable or even very digestible. First, learn to identify the difference between "red" and "white" oak species, of which there are many, because the red oak contains several times higher amounts of in tannic acid. So white oak is preferable. In fact, there are a few animals which eat white oak acorns as an important food source (deer, pigs, etc.) while the red oak they won't touch. But even white oak acorns are toxic to horses, so you need to process any oak correctly.

To process oak bark, it's important to think about "tree rings" or how the tree marks its age. The lighter part of each ring signifies the spring and summer of each year, when the tree was growing thicker by sending nutrients up its outermost layer, just beneath the bark. That layer is called the cambium layer, and it is the only part of the trunk or stems which is considered "alive" aka growing. If you can harvest that cambium layer during a time when it is sending nutrients (sap) up the oak tree, then it is fairly digestible. If you harvest it during the fall and winter, when the tree is "making its annual mark" or in other words, when the cambium is turning dark, then it may not be as digestible.

The process for harvesting the bark is important if you don't want to kill the tree: be sure to harvest thin strips on one side of the trunk, because if you "girdle" the tree all the way around, it will not be able to send nutrients up anymore, and it will die. Once you have a slice of bark, it needs to be pounded thoroughly; otherwise, you will be chewing for a long time! And depending on how astringent (how much tannic acid) you want your medicine, you may need to leach some or almost all of the acid out of the bark before using it. The easiest way to do this is to place it in a clean, flowing stream for a few days. However, if you need to use the bark right away, then follow the steps laid out for processing acorns below:

To process acorns, find a tree or set of trees that produces acorns well. Some years, and some patches of oak trees, don't produce many acorns. In fact, this year (2010) there are almost no white oak acorns produced in the areas I traditionally gather, so I had to go around to parks where red oaks were planted in order to gather enough acorns to make flour. That was unfortunate because red oak acorns contain a lot of tannic acid, so to process them, my wife and I had to keep two pots of water boiling: bringing one to a boil, throwing in the coursely ground acorns (after cracking open the shells with vice grips, removing the inner nut, and using a coffee grinder to break them up), letting the water turn deep red, draining it out (saving it for later use in hide tanning), dumping the acorns into the other pot of boiling water, bringing a new pot of water to boil, and repeating the process about 10 times before the acorn meal started to taste good.

Acorns can sprout, mold, and get worms very quickly, especially white oak acorns, and none can be used if any of those things happen, so take care to process them as soon as possible, or freeze them. Drying is good as long as you really get the acorns to dry, which is a challenge. Even after leaching the tannins from the acorn meal, we roasted the meal on low heat in our oven for an hour in order to dry it, then taking no chances, froze it because we were not yet ready to grind the meal into flour for making bread, muffins, etc. But when we were ready, wow did almost every recipe we found online taste good!

Click Here for information on our Oak Prairie Workshop the first Saturday in November at Wolf Haven, Int'l.

Some of the other plants that I consider to be part of my Top 10 list for northern latitudes include grasses, pines, cattails, oaks, nettles, the rose family which includes many wild fruits and berries, a local wild edible root, plus a choice of seaweeds, bamboo, cacti, or palm depending on where a person lives, and the most prominent cedar, juniper or cypress tree in the area. Check out my articles on these plants by clicking on:

Learning to ID Plants
Herbal First Aid
If Sedges have Edges, and Rushes are Round, Grasses are Hollow from Nose to the Ground
A Cattail Tale
Ouch! Stinging Nettles Taste Good!
Spruce, Firs, Larch & Hemlock are all Pines?
Rose and Other Tasty Berries
Secrets of Seaweed
American Ginseng
Gifts of the Cedar
Bamboo, Palm & Cactus

Employment: We only need instructors with experience running camps and teaching in the field of Earth Skills Education, including skills of the Naturalist, Tracker, Herbalist, Survival Scout, Primitive Artisan and Sustainable Pioneer. Apply to become an instructor through our Earth Skills Teaching Apprenticeship.