The Oaks . . .

We have two red oak trees in the front yard.  They are Shumard Oaks, relatively fast growing trees.

The one in front of the window I look out everyday is the larger of the two oaks.  I think it has to do with the soil.  The top soil on the left side of the front was scraped off to level the lot for the house.  So naturally  the soil is not as nutritional as the soil on the right side.  So the tree on the right is bigger, and grows faster than the one on the left side.  Both have been treated for "Oak Wilt" and that treatment seemed to perk them up a bit.  Both have been fertilized a couple of times and of course the grass has been treated three or four times a year.

Any way the tree on the right is a little more than a foot in diameter now, rising up well above the roof line of our house.  It is quite stately.   I reminds me of the Pen Oak we had in the front yard in New Roads when I was growing up.  That tree was about 75 years old, when lightening struck it, and started an internal fire.  It must have smolder for a year, all remnants are gone from the tree.

I discover yesterday the Shumard has dropped its acorns.  That is a sign of maturity, I understand it takes usually 12 years of age before they produce any fruit.  Since we have volunteer growing in the flower bed (which the deer keep eating the top off) I am sure it produced acorns last year.  But this year there is a bumper crop of rather large sized acorns.  The Burr Oak produces the largest acorns I have ever seen, almost an inch in diameter.  These are about an half inch in diameter.

So I policed up a few of them and will see if I can get them to grow.  We have a ton of Post Oak acorns floating around.  They are smaller in size.  The Post Oak is a notoriously slow growing oak tree, takes maybe 50 years to be a 10 inch in diameter tree.  And they never get very big, die off before for any number of reasons.  They do not tolerate much of anything around them, animals, yards, fertilizers and so on.  I have seen them just die in the middle of the summer for no apparent reason, healthy one day and dead the next.

We do have a Barkley Oak on the side yard that is a volunteer.  There are a few of them scattered around the neighborhood.   They too are members of the "red" oak family, have a similar leaf as the Shumard but have the distinction of not dropping their leaves in the fall.  Their old leaves are pushed off in the spring by new growth.  But it is also a relatively fast growing tree.  I even tried to cut it down once when it was just a two or three footer.  But later we cut down the Hackberry tree that was next to it.  We managed to save it and it is now up about 20 feet and trunk is about four inches in diameter.  A Post Oak the same age is near by and is all of three feet high and about an half inch in diameter.

I had to pull up an Shumard in the back yard that had died.  It was pot bound when planted and when I pulled it up (it was quite dead at the time) the tap root was all coiled up and it had literally chocked itself to death.  I will try to get one of the volunteer oaks to grow there or maybe if successful with by planted acorns will put one of them there.

We have about 30 Post Oaks in the back.  There is one Elm, three large Hackberries (trash trees but produce shade), a smaller Hackberry.  We have two Peach trees off to the left in the back but they have maybe five or six more years before they will die off.  None of those threes are close enough to the house except for one Hackberry to produce an shade for the house.

There are lots of oaks in our neighborhood and most have been well taken care of.   Makes the place look good.