Monkey puzzle. I found monkey puzzle pine nuts for the first time. I went to collect them under several different trees. There are slight differences in the size of the nuts. There is also differences in taste.

Some tasted ok and some really nice raw. Fried in a pan makes them taste even better but if you leave them too long they turn hard. I didn't try boiling them in water yet.

In the neighbouring village there is a huge female tree that the owner wants to chop down.

I am personnally not at all worried about this tree becoming rare or extinct.

In brittany alone there are hundreds if not thousands of monkey puzzle trees.


Large tree nearby.

Differences in size and appearance of araucaria araucana nuts



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 I weeded all my malus sieversii trees and i lost quite a few to what i believe was a combination of deer, rabbit and rodent attacks. I think i lost between one fourth and one third of the 426 plants i grew from seed. I discovered some visually very amazing and different ones in two of the six seed batches. I singled out several unique ones that i planted in my polytunnel to grow them properly. I didn't have the time to protect the 426 as i would have liked to. All trees of the 4 other batches have basically green leaves. Here is one example. This is a very nice green leaved one. And another green leaved one. Already these two are different in leaf colour and shape. But i selected them from the batches where all had green leaves in order to be sure to have genetic diversity. I kept 18 seedlings in the polytunnel that contain some of every batch. The following ones are very special and unique and display many variations of red and green and even other colours. One seedling with nice
Read more

Monkey puzzle

Image
 Last year many monkey puzzle trees (araucaria araucana) around here made good nuts and for the first time i tried them. Raw they are ok, but not great like a raw sweet chestnut. Lightly roasted they are delicious. Roasted too much they turn hard and are less good. So i went and collected nuts under all the trees i could find and kept the biggest for sowing. I was surprised that they grow very easily if you don't let them dry out they germinate and grow quite well in poor soil. The seeds germinated very well and now i have quite a lot of young baby trees. One thing i love about them is that they don't need fencing. I heard that goats will eat them but my local wild life doesn't touch them. I will probably plant them all out amongst my larger ones. Lots of tasty nuts sometime in the future.
Read more
Image
 Avocado. My mexicola avocado is looking so bad now that i am starting to doubt whether it will grow back. It could always in theory sprout back up from the roots though and that's what i am kind of hoping for. If that happens i will probably cut everything off except the new shoot. I have a second smaller plant outside that looks in much better shape. It is a fantastic seedling so that might be why. To me, which might make some people laugh, it looks really good right now compared to the mexicola. fantastic seedling that up to now survived the winter quite well. Notice the green petioles of the brown leaves. This tree if no further catastrophe happens will surely grow again. And now here comes the mexicola: this is not looking good... It will be interesting to see if it grows back from anywhere above ground, from the roots or not at all.
Read more