Christmas Tree

[liz]

Pretty much. It tastes about like you'd expect: a tree. heheh Probably not going to convert you from your regular Earl Grey (or whatever). I inflicted a lot of strange, wild foods on my family when I was a kid. "Mom! Mom! Look what I found! You can EAT it!!!" Dogfish. Witch's butter. (It's a fungus that looks like a pile of orange snot. Pretty much tastes like that, too.) If it grows in the Pacific Northwest and you can eat it, I've probably tried it.

Someone gave me a little cactus plant. It is now huge. I noticed the same cactus peddles in a Mexican market so I tried it. Once deep fried - my Italian elders thought it was fried peppers.
I cut a peddle and skid it in the driveway to take the thorns off. Of course I wash and scrape it. The birds think it is candy.

[Naurthon]

Liz, if the cactus is one you saw in a market, I'd guess you have a variety of prickly pear. The fruit of those are quite yummy, once you get all the spines off. I've never eaten the green part of these cactus, which is something I'm going to have to rectify!

[liz]

The fruit tastes like berries. I guess it would make good jelly but there are so many seeds all I could do was suck the juice out. It was good.

[Cage Cleaner]

Does that mean I can try to dry out this year's tree and keep it around as a bird tree after the needles have fallen off?

I'm going to "picture's worth 1000 words" this one, I think:


If there are NO needles at all, you might be okay, but a dry Christmas tree is just a pile of kindling waiting for a spark, needles or no. If you not only removed ALL the needles and also trimmed off all the smaller twigs so only the perch-size branches remained you'd be safer, but I'd still lean toward a "not recommended" rating, personally.

Just last week I started the first fire of the season in the fireplace of my home. I didn't have any kindling, so I went into my back yard and gathered up a handful of needle-less Douglas fir twigs. They lit right up when I set the match to them.

That... is an excellent point.

[Munchy]

I used to be a photojournalist for a small town paper. Every year we did stories on the houses that burned down because of dried out Christmas trees. That is when I started not wanting one. One year there were at least three homes destroyed. It is far more common than most people believe.

[Curlgirl153]

Hi!!

This is a much later reply to this post and even later in the Christmas season. But we still have our Douglas Fir up and I have a question. Our parakeet Penny is obsessed with sneaking munches on the fallen needles and I'm frantically trying to keep them cleaned up because I read somewhere that birds shouldn't eat the needles because they can't digest the sap inside. Is this true, or is it ok for Penny to freely snack on any of the needles she finds?

[Pajarita]

I always put the half-dead Christmas fir in the birdroom but none of my birds has ever eaten the pine needles, they only use it for perching and such. I don't think I would like them eating pine needles, though. Firs are safe while pines are not but still... Do you give your budgie fresh leafy greens every day? Because they love them and need them for the nutrition. Budgies are partial ground foragers and granivores by definition so they eat a lot of greens in their natural diet.