Happy Saturday! I am still figuring out how I want to do this periodic blogging thing. I have plans to write about projects of course but I want to occasionally write updates about what I’ve been up to since my last update. So in this one I might as well mention I raked up all the pinecones on the property and made a mountain out of them. I recently discovered you can sell pinecones as craft supplies or chewables for rabbits, chinchillas, and other similar mammals, and some buy them for the seeds. Because of that this chore of cleaning up pinecones suddenly became very interesting to me.
I have not yet ordered supplies to sell them with. I’ve been trying to decide how crazy I want to get about this. I have an unending source of pinecones because we have about 10 pine trees. And I’d rather not burn them all. If I can bag them up or box them up and sell them to crafters around the world (at least around the United States) then I could save some carbon being released back into the environment and save my fellow makers from relying on importing these local resources from international suppliers.
Based on my initial research it’s not as simple as “pick them up off the gravel, pack them, sell, and ship them”. It’s more like, “pick them up, wash them in white vinegar (to remove sap and also I guess it cleans them) and water, bake them for a while at about 200°F to kill anything that survived the wash, and then you can package them, and list them for sale”.
While raking and gathering the pinecones I kept noticing ones I thought looked visually appealing. They’re currently mixed throughout my mountain of pinecones. I can’t decide if it would be worth separating them out as the “best of the batch”, or if it’s better to go with the speedy and less profitable path of “gather them into a bucket, dump it into a mesh bag, and move on with your life” because of that path’s potential speed of them going away. But I still think based on reviews I read while reading through other folk’s pinecone sales pages, that the buyers would be so much happier to know that the pinecones they purchase were prescreened by a human to ensure they only receive good, intact, nice quality cones for their crafting purposes.
What a weird rabbit hole to find myself in. But luckily those rabbits like pinecones, apparently.