The magic and mystery of 'mast' years

NE of my favourite aspects of autumn is the seasonal bounty of hips, haws, nuts and berries which I enjoy seeing and utilising — especially by using foraged crops to flavour tipples to see me through the winter.

- BY ERIN MCDAID

The crop of apples on my allotment seems particularly plentiful and last weekend I gathered a couple of kilos of sloes from one small section of hedgerow. When I was picking apples, I spotted an impressive number of ash seeds, known as key, on a small selfset ash tree.

I've also seen numerous reports suggesting that 2025 is set to be a 'mast' year, suggesting that bumper crops are fairly widespread. Whilst familiar with the term 'mast' year, I wasn't particularly clear how they were defined, so I did a little digging to see what distinguishes a mast year from an average autumn.

Trees and shrubs produce seed to survive and have evolved a myriad of different seed types and approaches to ensure their seed is distributed far and wide. Ash trees have seeds designed to catch the wind as they fall, to carrying them beyond the can opy of the parent tree. Rowan, or mountain ash, have juicy berries that tempt birds which then carry the seeds away in their gut to be deposited elsewhere.