| re: Why Lots of Elm Tree Seeds?
"Every five years or so" to be taken as a generalisation because it's not possible to be exact. Cyclical meaning reoccuring at regular intervals, however many years apart.
I am at odds with your comment that different trees do not share mast years though unless we're at a misunderstanding of the word "share". It's clear to me that the species I've looked at (and mentioned earlier) in the last couple of days have very heavy crops whilst others haven't. I'm looking at a Whitebeam, Hawthorn and Rowan at this moment and neither have anything like heavy crops or even regular crops.
The Sycamore and Ash (plus the conifer) seen earlier today, all having heavy crops, must be sharing a mast year as they are all in a similar fruiting condition. I cannot see how they are not sharing it.
Granted, all trees produce fruit every year to some degree and it just so happens that the fruit of the Beech is referred to as "mast" and the contents of the mast is the Beech nut. They do fruit every year but there will be one year when the crop exceeds that of the previous four, five or six years.
When you say that you've seen consecutive years of beech mast, do you mean a bumper mast crop?  |