English Countryside - 2025 Mast Year
Once every so often, the English seasonal weather gets its act together and produces what is called a "mast year". A particular run of weather- a wet summer, followed by a mild winter, then a late warm spring, untroubled by frost, then ends with a dry very sunny summer.
Result? This is when every flowering tree (which produces nuts or fruit) has the most abundant harvest for years, if not decades. Shrubs and vines get in on the act, too.
The "mast" is the name of the accumulated material that ends up on the ground in such abundance that the animals and insects which normally consume the lot over winter cannot possibly manage to eat it all. As a result, there will be a LOT of plant and tree seedlings that will sprout and create the next generation. It's an evolutionary survival mechanism.
The word derives from the Old English 'mæst', meaning the nuts of forest trees that peasants harvested, beating trees to get the nuts on the ground to feed their pigs to fatten them up.
2025 is one of those Mast years. In the 32 years I have been living in a rural area of southern England, never have I ever seen such a crop as this year.
EVERYTHING went mad. Oak trees, walnut trees, chestnuts, beech, hazel, rowan and hawthorn trees, as well as apples, plums, pears, cherries, and just about every kind of seed producing tree is so heavily weighed down with them that the birds and small mammals are gorging themselves in delight.
Windfalls are so abundant that there is no way to keep up- half of these Bramley apples will end up in the compost heap, the other half will be left for the blackbirds and mice, still leaving plenty to rot and enrich the soil for the plants under them. (These are about a third of the crop; the rest we made into every conceivable form of edible- juice, jelly, slices in the freezer, punnets and punnets to all our neighbours - all from a tree that is 75 years old and totally hollow)
Even my magnolia tree, which has never had a berry on it for the thirty years we've had it, produced berries. My Japanese acers have so many seeds- again, on trees that have never before produced them.
The grape harvest this year is going to be massive.
Even my Virginia Creeper vine produced berries!
Mother nature keeps surprising me.
