Here's hoping that's the case! We inadvertently discovered our female native totara trees fruiting about a week ago. This prompted a seed gathering frenzy the past few days around Struan Farm, as we tried to figure out what is seeding right now and what isn't. We found six female totara trees, three old trees I've christened "grandmothers," along with three younger ones. John put topsoil beneath several so we can grow young trees from the seeds as they drop. Later in the season we'll dig up and pot up the seedling trees.
We also noticed berries on the Miro and Matai trees, now I'm trying to grow too. Everyone needs a good challenge, right? The Miro berries are red, and are much loved by Kereru, our native wood pigeon, while the Matai berries are a dark purple blue when mature. Our tree books indicate that Matai seeds don't germinate quite so easily as the others so we'll see how I get on with those.
The tawas are also fruiting. I've been able to grow seedling trees from those, and they also self-seed, so I won't grow any more of those for now. The kahikateas aren't fruiting just yet, those also grow easily from seed. But despite an extended search, we haven't been able to find any rimu fruiting, and this is meant to be a "mast" year for them. They only fruit every 7-10 years. It may be that we don't have any female trees on the property, just males, rats.
For the moment John is focused mostly on totara. With about a thousand seedling trees growing away in his native tree nursery from last year, we're hoping to grow at least a thousand more to plant out in the area where the radiata pine trees are coming out. We've got a year or so before that rather big project starts to happen.
This is what the totara seed looks like, these look to be "twins."
We manage to keep ourselves busy here at Struan Farm, don't we?
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