Cork oak acorns

The age at which cork oak trees start yielding acorns came up during the composition yesterday (Monday) of reference 1 and I took the answer of 15 to 25 years provided by Gemini. Waking this morning, I got to thinking about how one might check this particular fact.

From trawling the Internet to find out about this, I moved onto conducting one's own experiment. Establishing the truth of the matter directly, rather than relying on someone else.

One starts by buying a plot of land, in an area known for growing cork oaks, large enough to support 1,000 trees. Fence it in to keep out deer and other pests.

Plant 2,000 acorns, spread evenly across the plot. One would need to have consulted a cork farmer about spacing, but the idea would be that there would be enough seedlings to be able, over time, to thin them down to 1,000 mature trees, also spread reasonably evenly across the plot. Trees whose age one was sure about.

After maybe ten years one would start an annual inspection. An inspection which would take the form of sampling the ground underneath each tree and counting the number of acorns on the ground in the sample area. One's cork farmer would be able to advise on the appropriate time of year at which to do this.

In this way, over time, one would obtain a good indicator for the number of mature acorns produced by each tree, each year, and one could hire a statistician to turn them into a distribution of the age at which cork oaks started to produce acorns, with an early task for him being to determine the start point. One acorn would not be enough to make a start, but how many would be enough?

He might then define the range as running from the lower to the upper quartile. But this would all depend on what the distribution looked like.

If you were very rich and very patient, you might then think about replicating the experiment on a number of plots, taking in a variety of climate and soil conditions. And your heirs might be heir to a really good answer to the question.

In the meantime, I shall think about how one might do something in rather quicker time.

PS 1: the snap of acorns above was turned up by Bing from reference 2, with the root of reference 2 being reference 3. A family owned, Canadian cork company, established there after fleeing Czechoslovakia at about the time of my my birth. They look to have started out producing corks of various sizes for brewers, but I would not be surprised to find that they now own cork plantations.

PS 2: MSN brought me news of Greene King this morning, a modest East Anglian brewer when I was young, now a conglomerate. - which I now know has been owned by 2019 by a chap who lives in Hong Kong.

'... Greene King runs approximately 2,600 pubs across Britain, of which 840 are directly managed, with the remainder operating under franchise or tenancy arrangements.

Established by Benjamin Greene in Bury St Edmunds in 1799, Greene King was once listed on the London Stock Exchange before being taken private by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing's CK Asset Holdings in a £2.7bn deal in 2019...'.

It is now looking to sell off around 150 of them. Interesting that only a third of the estate is managed directly. And I have learned that 'Old Speckled Hen' is a member of the family. I suppose I mostly stuck with their IPA.

Another episode in the story of how smashing the big brewers' grip on the pub business, killing off their old-style tenanted houses, is panning out. Think also Wetherspoon, Stonegate, Mitchell & Butler.

Four day old news according to reference 4. See also reference 5 and 6.

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/05/more-tulips.html.

Reference 2: https://jelinek.com/blog/what-is-a-cork-tree.

Reference 3: https://jelinek.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.cityam.com/greene-king-selling-150-pubs-over-unprecedented-costs-boss-says/.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CK_Asset_Holdings.

Reference 6: https://www.ckah.com/.