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Monkey nuts!
Sep. 21st, 2009 09:16 pmOoooh! Today I found something I've been looking for for years!
No. It's not an alien artifact. If you said, "Wow! That looks like a HUGE pine cone!" (that thing in the background is my sewing machine for a sense of scale)
You're closer than you think. It's the cone of Araucaria Araucana, the monkey puzzle tree. It is a 'living fossil' which evolved in the Cretaceous period (That's a quarter billion years ago) Modern conifers are descended from it and its cousins. It's actually rather fascinating how similar its cone is to that of other conifers (except for being about the size of a soccer ball and weighing twenty pounds)
It takes these guys decades to get much bigger than a shrub and they may be half a century or more old before they form cones. It takes them a staggering 18 months to grow a cone to maturity and they don't seem to fruit every year. Unlike a pine cone, the cones are also pretty easy to open and the seeds are huge (about the size of an avacado pit) and they're good to eat, so when they do drop cones, squirrels and the like make short work of them.
I've been fascinated with these guys for a long time, but they're both uncommon in my area and protected. I've never seen them for sale anywhere. There is however one that is in a parking lot between my house and work. Judging by its height, it's probably ~150 years old. This morning, laying on the ground beneath it was a broken cone (the cone in the photo is probably about 2/3rds of the full size of its cone) and on the way home, I found another ~1/2 of a cone dropped by the same tree. Squee!
It turned out that about 70% of the seeds I collected were probably not viable. They're much smaller than the viable seeds so it's pretty easy to tell but I still managed to collect a staggering 50 seeds though two of them had been run over by a car. We ate the car-damaged one. The flavor is a bit hard to describe. Very mild, kind of between pine nuts and jicama. Not bad really. Even the one that'd gotten run over had what looked like a potentially viable germ in it. Hurray!
So... I planted 10
and have another 20 that I put in cold storage (per info I found online, this will hold them for a few months) It can take a few months for these guys to germinate so I want to hold onto some viable seeds until I have strong seedlings.
That leaves 18. If you are interested in trying to grow one or you'd like to taste one, let me know and I'll set it aside for you. I'm going to take the rest to work tomorrow to share with coworkers. Of course, if I am successful with the seedlings, I will have more little dinosaurs than I know what to do with and some of them might need homes too.
Given their appearance and extremely slow growth, I bet they might make interesting bonsai.
Yay trees! ^_^
No. It's not an alien artifact. If you said, "Wow! That looks like a HUGE pine cone!" (that thing in the background is my sewing machine for a sense of scale)
You're closer than you think. It's the cone of Araucaria Araucana, the monkey puzzle tree. It is a 'living fossil' which evolved in the Cretaceous period (That's a quarter billion years ago) Modern conifers are descended from it and its cousins. It's actually rather fascinating how similar its cone is to that of other conifers (except for being about the size of a soccer ball and weighing twenty pounds)
It takes these guys decades to get much bigger than a shrub and they may be half a century or more old before they form cones. It takes them a staggering 18 months to grow a cone to maturity and they don't seem to fruit every year. Unlike a pine cone, the cones are also pretty easy to open and the seeds are huge (about the size of an avacado pit) and they're good to eat, so when they do drop cones, squirrels and the like make short work of them.
I've been fascinated with these guys for a long time, but they're both uncommon in my area and protected. I've never seen them for sale anywhere. There is however one that is in a parking lot between my house and work. Judging by its height, it's probably ~150 years old. This morning, laying on the ground beneath it was a broken cone (the cone in the photo is probably about 2/3rds of the full size of its cone) and on the way home, I found another ~1/2 of a cone dropped by the same tree. Squee!
It turned out that about 70% of the seeds I collected were probably not viable. They're much smaller than the viable seeds so it's pretty easy to tell but I still managed to collect a staggering 50 seeds though two of them had been run over by a car. We ate the car-damaged one. The flavor is a bit hard to describe. Very mild, kind of between pine nuts and jicama. Not bad really. Even the one that'd gotten run over had what looked like a potentially viable germ in it. Hurray!
So... I planted 10
and have another 20 that I put in cold storage (per info I found online, this will hold them for a few months) It can take a few months for these guys to germinate so I want to hold onto some viable seeds until I have strong seedlings.
That leaves 18. If you are interested in trying to grow one or you'd like to taste one, let me know and I'll set it aside for you. I'm going to take the rest to work tomorrow to share with coworkers. Of course, if I am successful with the seedlings, I will have more little dinosaurs than I know what to do with and some of them might need homes too.
Given their appearance and extremely slow growth, I bet they might make interesting bonsai.
Yay trees! ^_^
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