In spring of 2022, I wrote about an edible plant walk. Plants! With food! They’re all around us! In early October I went on another plant walk with the same guy, featuring oak trees. Did you know you can eat acorns? You can. But first you have to process them, extensively, to get rid of the compounds that make them bitter. I am probably not going to go to all that trouble, but it was fun to learn about oak trees and eat the acorn pancakes he’d made.
While we were at it, in this urban park with youngsters playing soccer, a tattoo parlor across the street, and a community college behind us, we also found edible mushrooms and a persimmon tree. I ate one of the persimmon, and it was new and custardy and sweet.
This photo is not of that persimmon tree. This photo is from the next day, when I was walking in my neighborhood, along the edge of a different urban park with different youngsters playing soccer. This is a walk I have done dozens of times in the last few years, including during persimmon season, but this time, there was a persimmon tree.
The birds certainly knew about it. I bet the deer did, too. It is not a new tree. It is very tall. All those years it had been living its life between the soccer fields and the tennis courts, minding its business and producing gobs and gobs of little orange fruits. But it only became visible on October 9, 2022.
Photo: Helen Fields