posted 11 months ago
I tried this a couple of times living in Georgia and it always failed, probably due to summer rain and humidity. It actually grows in the warmer parts of California, not the high mountains, so I doubt the claim of zone 3 in any case. When I lived in California for a few years we had it around, and I would sometimes gather fallen cones for the few nuts left. This was an area with only moderate frosts (think lemons and olives) and absolutely no rain at all and roasting heat from May through October, sometimes only 15 inches all told for the year. So probably not a fit anywhere in the East. What's more, the trees only produce cones when they get way tall, and the squirrels and birds get most of them and the rest scatter. Only the few cones that fall half open, say after a windstorm, have any chance of containing anything useful. When I was at Michigan State I gathered quite a few nuts from some planted trees of Lacebark Pine (P. bungeana), which produced them either low enough to pick half open or else would drop in that state, so as to still have a worthwhile number of nuts. But this tree is notoriously slow growing, and hard to find. I had no idea how long they might have been there....
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