North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

Title: Re: [NAFEX] monkey puzzle

Plan on planting this for your grandchildren. In 40 years I have seen cones on ONE (1) tree in the NW, and it was the largest tree I've seen of the species.  I've been watching one in Salem, Oregon that was planted before 1985 and it's still not up to bearing size.  These things make pecans look like speedsters (and they take 10 to 12 years to start bearing, and up to 50 to get to full production).
    If you can do the scoring or inversion without getting yourself scored by the sharp scales, you'll be doing very good.
> From: "Mark Lee" <markl@nytec.com>
> Reply-To: North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 10:11:08 -0700
> To: "North American Fruit Explorers" <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
> Subject: [NAFEX] monkey puzzle

> There are a number of monkey puzzle trees growing in Seattle, yet I have
> never seen one produce a cone.  The tree is very slow growing.  It can take
> 40 years to produce its first cone, and at this age the tree is typically
> 100 feet tall.  And only after this waiting period do you know if the tree
> is male or female.  For reasons given below, I would like to try growing
> monkey puzzle as a nut crop.  I want to overcome two problems with this
> tree:
>           100 feet is too tall in my neighborhood.
>           40 years is too long to wait.
>
> I have read that bark inversion, scoring and girdling have a dwarfing affect
> while inducing flower bud initiation... smaller trees and earlier fruiting.
> Any opinions on applying this technique to monkey puzzle?
>
> Here is some facts about monkey puzzle nuts that starting me thinking...
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pfaf/cgi-bin/arr_html?Araucaria+araucana&CAN=LATIND
> "Rich in starch, the seed is soft like a cashew nut and has a slight flavour
> of pine nuts. This is a delicious seed and it makes very pleasant eating. It
> is a food that can easily be eaten in quantity and can be used as a staple
> food in the diet. Fairly large, the seeds are about the size of an
> almond....This tree has an excellent potential to become a commercial crop
> in the western parts of Britain, it is high yielding, has large tasty seeds
> and is easily harvested.  Plants grow best in S.W. England and along the
> west coast of Britain where they produce seed regularly and abundantly.
> Female cones take 2 - 3 years to mature and break up at the end of the year.
> They contain up to 200 large seeds. Plants self-sow in Cornwall. We have
> records of trees regularly producing good crops of seeds in various sites in
> Cornwall, Devon and the west coast of Scotland. We also have one report of
> an excellent crop in 1997 from trees at Alvaston Castle near Derby and of a
> tree in Bedfordshire producing a heavy crop... Its main disadvantages are
> its slow rate of growth and the time it takes before the first crop is
> produced - this can be up to 40 years from seed though we have often seen
> plants less than 20 years old produce cones. The plant is dioecious so at
> least one male plant needs to be grown for every 5 - 6 females -
> unfortunately there is no way of telling the sex of the tree until it
> flowers."
>
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