The doulas of shortleaf
When folks see us dangling in mid-air trying to collect shortleaf pine cones, they often look confused.
Shoot, someone says, If I was going to restore the shortleaf forest, I could just go in my yard and pick them up off the ground.
Sure you could. And they may make nice holiday decorations. But they won’t produce seed, and they won’t help us restore shortleaf pine ecosystems
So as gingerly as I can, let me jump in with both feet.
Imagine that we’re the doulas assisting in the birth of a new generation of shortleaf pines.
Cone maturity is a bit like gestation, human, horse or otherwise. The cones, you should recognize, are not the seed, but rather the womb that protects and nourishes the seed. There are about as many seeds developing in a cone as there are prickly tipped scales on the cone. About 25 to 40 of those seeds will eventually reach maturity.
Shortleaf nourish and protect their seed in the womb twice as long as humans do. From the moment of fertilization, it takes about 17 to 18 months for those seed to mature (Yes, the cone crop of fall 2023 started in April of 2022.) So by September of the second year they’ve gone through more than 95% of their gestation period. And just as human babies can usually handle the world pretty well if they’re a few weeks early, so can pine cone seeds.
But wait! Why don’t we just wait until full parturition, when the cones open naturally on the trees? Because young shortleaf seedlings have wings, quite literally. And as soon as the mother cones opens, those seeds do what they’re designed to do, and fly as far from the mother trees as the wind will take them.
The womb the seeds are buried in – i.e., the cones – are actually perfectly designed to facilitate this. The cone starts losing moisture as it nears maturity, the cone scales shrink, and the openings between scales gradually dilate. That our-pouring of shortleaf seed almost always occurs in tandem with the first hard cold fronts. The cold fronts bring the dry air from the continent that teases the cones open, but they also bring something just as important: wind, blowing hard. The cones suddenly gape, the moisture holding the seed in place evaporates, and the seeds are loosed to the winds. A month after the cones start opening, some 80 to 90 percent of the seeds will have flown the coop. And in a forest, there’s just no practical way to gather the seeds once they’ve left the cones.
Another peculiar thing about shortleaf: Most trees are loaded with cones. But almost all of those cones are spent cones from years past. The only cones that still have seed are the small fraction of green cones at the very tips of the branches.
So we, the shortleaf doulas, try to gauge when the seeds have reached full maturity – that is, when they’re ripe enough to survive and grow well on their own, And we pick the cones while they are still green. If we picked too early, in August or early September, research suggests some of the seeds may not yet be fully viable. Even more of problem may be the womb itself, the cone: It simply doesn’t dry properly if picked too early, and thus may not open sufficiently to release seed.
So we use a variety of tools – the weight of the cones (do they float in 20 weight motor oil?), the color of the cones, and whatever experience with past cone crops we can find – to determine when they are most likely to be viable. Drought, excess rain, humidity, cold, heat, stress, pavement, shade – they all play a role in the precise maturity of each cone, though honestly it’s sometimes hard to figure out how all of these variables come together. And even on a single tree, some cones may mature well before others.
But in general, we try to start harvesting a few weeks before the cones typically start opening. And then we climb up in the bucket or raise our electrician’s poles as high in the trees as we can to clip off those green cones.
Since we’ve been shortleaf doulas for only a couple of years…and since we’ve been unable to find other eastern shortleaf doulas out there willing to take this on or give us much advice…we’re still learning a lot about when precisely to time our intervention in this birthing process. We’ve assumed that mid-October was a reasonable time to start collecting, under the assumption that most cones wouldn’t open until the second week in November.
But for the past two years, we’ve seen some cones opening by the last week in October, and a lot of cones opening the first week of November. So our advice to other aspiring shortleaf doulas: We think it will generally be better to start harvest of eastern shortleaf cones as early in October as possible, and in coming years, if our funding continues to allow us to collect, that’s what we’ll do. That should also greatly increase our harvest potential each year. This year, we lost a lot of the potential cone crop simply because so many cones opened earlier than anticipated.
If you’d like to become a certified shortleaf doula, give us a holler. We’d love to train a new generation to assist in the rebirth of the shortleaf forest.
Bill Finch