Trees! They are beautiful, majestic and an essential piece of our earth's ecosystem.
Unfortunately, we humans have not been kind to our leafy neighbors- but we can
be. Planting trees is something that anyone, anywhere can do to help improve our planet.
Think global, act local. In this video I'll be documenting my own attempts to collect
tree seeds and showing you everything that i see and learn along the way. My hope is that
we can use the comments section to share information and together create a resource
that can help people grow trees. Please let me know what you think of my seed collection methods
and any ways you think i could improve them. In this video we'll be looking at pine trees!
There's a wide variety of pine trees out there, and what follows will apply to most of them.
The first thing we need to know is that pine trees develop their seeds inside of pine cones.
Pine trees typically have two types of cones- they have small cones which produce pollen and these
big cones which produce seeds. Collecting pine tree seeds is pretty simple, if we are patient
about it. We want to find our mother trees in late summer and begin monitoring the cones..
Young cones will be a bright green. They're tightly squeezed shut and not spreading themselves
out. As the season progresses, cones will begin to brown and open up. Looking around my local trees,
this process seems to be happening in early to mid-September. When I was able to spot these
aging cones, I would simply grab them off the tree. A light twist usually broke them loose.
As you begin to inspect pine cones, you'll often see seeds popping out of the scales.
Most scales of a cone will have a seed or two inside. Pine seeds have a small, leafy wing,
that helps them to catch the wind and spread themselves out. If seeds aren't readily falling
out of the cones, you can peel back individual scales and dig out the seeds more manually.
Going through this small cone, I managed to find 10 to 15 seeds. Jackpot! Or so I thought.. As I
was sorting through my haul, I realized that many of the things I found were empty, hollow casings,
which didn't seem to have anything of substance inside. As pine cones mature, they fall off of
their trees- this makes the ground a prime spot to look for cones with mature seeds. Here's a
cone that looks like it just recently fell. You can see these scales are just slightly opening.
Pulling this one apart, I was able to find some seeds and this time they were legit.
Pulling the seed casings apart, I was able to see their inner embryo. I had my best success
finding seeds in cones that were just slightly opening their scales. This seems to be the sweet
spot where seeds are fully developed but haven't flown away yet. This is where our patience really
comes into play. We're best off to be monitoring a tree over time and waiting for the cones to be at
just the right spot. All in all, collecting pine tree seeds seems like a straightforward process.
My biggest tip would be to wear gloves, as the cones can be sappy and are sometimes pretty sharp.
Next I'd recommend using a container or bag that you can shake your cones in to dislodge the seeds.
This is a bit easier than trying to manually remove those scales
to find your seeds. I also had success collecting cones and leaving them out in the sun to dry.
This forces them to open up more and makes those seeds easier to get to. Simple stuff-
at least I thought. Let me know in the comments how you collect pine tree seeds and if there's
anything you think I missed on this subject! I was able to get a decent pile of seeds in just
a few attempts and I look forward to trying to grow them. We've got more tree adventures coming,
so keep it locked on the channel. Thanks for watching and as always, Happy Harvesting!