It’s been a cold winter and I’ve spent a lot of it indoors, cleaning seeds, pressing hickory oil, and building this website. Learning to make a website has been frustrating and tedious, and I’d honestly prefer to be crawling around on the ground digging in the dirt. If it had been a milder winter that’s exactly how I would have spent it. The past few years I’ve been helping to re-wild much of my property by planting thousands of native trees, I will plant as many native trees as I can again this spring before garden season kicks in, and the sooner the weather shapes up so I can get outside to do it the more of them I’ll get into the ground. Last season I grew a large assortment of fruit trees from seed in air-prune beds and I will get them transplanted to the field as well. Someday, when all of the trees grow up, I’ll rename this property shady acres farm.
Bitternut Hickory oil is a new favorite of mine, but it’s in very short supply. I wasn’t sure if I should sell any or eat it all myself. I may press it to sell in years to come, or I may not. Because it took a LOT of time and effort to collect the nuts, clean the hulls off of them, get them washed and dried, and finally pressing the oil from them in my small manual oil press.
Find it in the shop while it’s available
Buckeye seeds are wanting to be planted ASAP if anyone wants to grow them. I’ll send seeds that have not yet sprouted long roots because they are fragile and would break in the mail.
I tried eating buckeyes this fall when I harvested them and was pleasantly surprised! I’ve read that some varieties of buckeye are poisonous while other types are edible. I tasted no bitterness in the ones I ate and it makes me wonder if I miss identified these as being Aesculus glabra, and perhaps they are the Sweet Buckeye? I’m not certain. I planted the trees on my property years ago from seeds that I collected from wild trees that grow nearby, and I’m glad I did.
pfaf is my favorite online resource for researching plants: https://pfaf.org/user/Plant.aspx?LatinName=Aesculus+flava
I have a large variety of new and interesting seeds that I’ll be growing this summer, so the seeds that I offer in the shop should increase substantially in the coming year. Sign up to the newsletter list if you’d like to be informed of new posts like this one from time to time as I add new products to the shop, or as seasonal items such as garlic becomes available. Thank you for taking the time to read my first ever blog post! Jason