How to Harvest Pine Nuts in Arizona
Pine nuts have become popular over the past decade and are loaded with fiber, protein and zinc. Unfortunately, they can be expensive in stores and laborious to harvest from trees in the Southwest and on the West Coast. With a delicate flavor, pine nuts can be eaten toasted or raw, and are a prime ingredient in pesto. In northern Arizona, singleleaf pinyon trees provide a pine nut harvest in the fall season, and prefer elevations between 3,200 and 9,200 feet. Does this Spark an idea?
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Things You'll Need
- Heavy duty work gloves
- Ladder
- Tarp
- Tweezers
- Water
- Salt
- Rolling pin
- Airtight container
- Refrigerator or freezer
Instructions
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Wear gloves when you harvest pine nuts to avoid the sticky pine sap and pricking your fingers. The best time to harvest pine nuts in Arizona is from September to October. In Arizona, you do not need a permit if you are gathering nuts for personal use.
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Use a ladder propped up against a tree so you can harvest the pine cones, whether they are open or unripe, by hand. Store the harvested cones in paper bags.
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Lay out a tarp beneath the pine tree and shake the branches. Pine nuts will drop from cones that are ripe and open and land on the tarp.
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Use tweezers to remove pine nuts from opened cones that may have fallen deep into the grooves.
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Harvest pine nuts from the closed cones using heat. In Arizona, if the sun is still strong, you can spread out the cones on the tarp in full sun and let the sun heat them up, or you can put them in a large pan over a campfire. Once the cones open up, shake them to make the pine nuts fall out.
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Remove the hard outer shell from the pine nuts by soaking them in a salt water mixture (about 1 cup of salt per gallon of water). Then use a rolling pin or something else to gently crush the softened shell, removing the small white pine nuts from the inside.
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Dry off the pine nuts and keep in an airtight container in the freezer or refrigerated for up to a month.
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References
- Photo Credit piñas doradas 2 image by DAVIDE CARDELLO from Fotolia.com
