PERMABREED

 Araucaria araucana. Monkey puzzle. I took the special little seedling and one other normal one of the same height and potted them up and took better pictures. Now the difference is much more noticeable. All the other seedlings have long spiky ordinary leaves like the plant on the left. The leaves of the mutant seedling are much shorter and are growing closer more upward next to the trunk. The effect is that they prick your fingers much less when you touch them and they seem softer. Example of a normal seedling of the same height. The mutated seedling in comparison. It doesn't look like a monkey puzzle anymore. I will try and look after it well. I hope it will be female one day. It seems much easier to just sow its seeds than to collect its pollen and try to cross it then. In any case that won't be until at least 20 years from now.

 Araucaria araucana. I sowed 50 monkey puzzle nuts and got many seedlings to grow. These all came from nuts i collected last year. One seedling in particular is very different from all the others. Its leaves are much shorter and much less spiky. The leaves of all seedlings are between 15 and 20 mm long , except that one individual with 6 mm long leaves, about one third in length. Otherwise the individual looks healthy and is overall as tall as the other ones. It looks very different to the other seedlings and I wonder if other people have had seedlings like that.  

 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.

 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

 Araucaria araucana (monkey puzzle). This tree, from Chile, is a tree that i really like for several reasons. I am not going to get into descriptions, because you can find abundant information elsewhere. One reason i like it, is that it's the only tree that i can just plant and it will grow. It protects itself. I never saw any damage from deer, slugs, rodents or any other animals, or diseases. So i just plant it and it will grow. No need to protect it. This is something that i totally appreciate because all trees that i plant always need to be protected. It's such a hassle. This tree can and will, in favorable conditions, produce an abundance of food. Monkey puzzle, being dioecious, will have female trees that make large cones that contain many edible pine nuts. They are a bit like the italian pine nuts of pinus pinea, only much larger. Apparently 16 trees are able to give enough food to feed an adult human for a whole year. They can be used as a staple diet like potatoes. The ...