Cedar

Cedar is the very special tree in my place.
There are many reasons for that:

- cedar's wood is very good for carpenters.
It's soft, easy to work with, and never splits during the work.
That's why if you are a cabinetmaker or something like this it will be priceless for you.

- It is big sized, 30-40 meters tall and more than 1 meter diameter.
It's good if you need massive and natural block of wood.

- It is a really rare tree. You can go hundred kilometers through the forest and don't meet one.
It likes very special circumstances: stoned mountain slopes with a lot of sun.
Look at this photo:

Steep cliff flooded by stones, sunny side, the place which I visited last weekend.
It has enormous amount of cedars, I've seen more than 30 of them here.

- Their cones (nuts inside cones) are really delicious. I don't know what to compare with, but I like them a lot.
Since my youth we are going to the special places in the forest to collect them.
It's a really hard work. Cedar is a tree which grow slowly.
It starts produced cones at age of 40-50 years, but it's very little amount of cones like 10-20.
In age of 100 and more, it become to be 150-200 cones for one shaft.
The cedar has cones not every year, but in the period of 4-6 years, it depends on many factors.
At this age the tree is tall enough and it is a hard work to get the cones.
We use this way: one of us goes up to the tree and shake sticks.

The sticks are fragile, and climbing the cedar is not safe.
Our guy who climbs is usually the lightweight one, and he uses ropes for safety.
All others collects the cones from the earth when they drop down.
This amount of the cones we collect for one hour, our team has four guys.

And it considered as a bad harvest, we didn't find a good cedar. The other hunters were here before us.
Two big cones contain this amount of cones (the glass is a big glass for beer 0.5L)

My 1/4 part of all nuts looks like that:

And this is the photo how the walnut (unshelled part) looks like:

It's very delicious, and very expensive (because of rareness and hardwork to get them).

- Local tribes who lived here before Russians (they called themselves Vogul) used cedar cones for many things, for producing oil for instance and cedar was they sacred tree.
In that time the man who kill the cedar has to be killed too.
We don't have such pagan's superstitious now, but our family has a story about cedars too.
Almost for each child the father plant new cedar somewhere on family's land.
Don't know why, perhaps without a reason -  just a tradition.

This one on the right photo is mine.
Planted 36 years ago.
He is already much taller than I ever will be.
I don't remember the time when I was taller, but my parents told me it was so.
Probably I will be able to taste his cones if I have luck to live long enough.
The tree near to it is my sister's tree.
2 years younger and slightly shorter.