camas lilly and pine nuts.

anyone harvest either?

Nope, but you might do ok on the pine nuts. I think the tree has to be of a certain age to get good nuts from.

Please excuse my ignorance, but, what is a pine nut?

pine nuts are exactly that. lol nuts you harvest from pine trees. or pinecones rather.

camas lilly is a flower that the local indian tribes around here harvested it made up a great portion of their diet. the bulbs the flower grows from is said to have a potato like taste.

Thanks. So a pine cone and pine nut are the same thing? is it a west/east kind of thing.?

no pine seeds are inside the pinecones. each spine on a pinecone sprouts from a seed. these seeds are the pine seeds. once harvested the pine seeds can be eaten like sunflower seeds, used in cooking/baking, or ground into flour.

all pine trees produce pine seeds however certain trees produce bigger seeds. there are a handfull of trees that produce big enough seeds to harvest. or at least worth harvasting. our local tree would be the bull pine. or more commonly known as the pondarosa pine.

I picked a bunch of pine, spruce and fir cones last weekend to harvest their seeds. None of the seeds are a big as a match head. I'll have to do some research to see if we have any pines that produce larger seeds.

Thanks for clearing up my confusion, 208.

try a google search on
"harvesting pine seeds"

i think wikipedia has the better pine seed trees listed.

Here in Nevada we harvest pine nuts . The nuts we get come from a pinion pine and are the ones that most people can buy at the market. Very good.

i dont suppose you would be willing to share your proccess would you?
maybe some pictures.