Pine Cones And Acorns: Why There's So Many This Year

White pines weighed down by a multitude of pine
cones in Burlington this past summer

The other day, I brought a load of yard waste from a client to a Chittenden Solid Waste District drop off site and nearly fell trying to walk across a big patch of acorns somebody left there. It was like walking on marbles.  

It turns out lots of people are cleaning up TONS of acorns and pine cones and such from their yards this fall. And there's a meteorological reason why. (With me, everything turns to the weather, doesn't it?)

An excellent article by Rebecca Way in the Vermont State Parks blog has an excellent explanation why, but I'll summarize it here.

The summer and fall of 2016 were quite dry here in Vermont, and much of the rest of the Northeast for that matter. When trees are stressed, they produce more cones, seeds and acorns than normal.

These cones and seeds and such started to develop in 2016 as a survival mechanism against the drought. (Produce a lot of seeds and you're more likely to get more seedlings to start growing, which would help perpetrate the species despite the strains of the drought, had it continued on into 2017.)

The summer of 2017 turned out to be rainy enough for trees to survive and thrive just fine. So all those pine cones and acorns and seeds developed just fine, too. You might have noticed over the summer the new pine cones were so plentiful that they weighed down the branches of white pines as if the branches were burdened with a snow or ice storm.

There's also a lot of acorns for the squirrels and you to clean up. And there were plenty of apples this year, too, so that means lots of apple pies for us to enjoy this year.  On top of that, you have plenty of pine cones and red berries to add to your natural holiday decor.

I imagine there will be fewer pine cones and acorns next year, since there were not particular drought stresses on trees this year. True, much of September and October were pretty dry, but that came at the tail end of the growing season, so it won't affect trees all that much. Especially since the rains returned in recent weeks, which put moisture in the ground to start off next spring.