Euell Gibbons and Pine Trees

[Ninurta]

I used to use pine sap to bind my homemade hash after I cooked it down. Dried pine sap can be chewed like gum. I've eaten Juniper berries from the bush and drank gin on a number of occasions. Pine boughs can be used as a natural bedding in a survival shelter situation. I've heard that old sap filled pine wood makes a great fire starter, however, pine wood is horrible to cook on. If you have to cook with it, seal everything in aluminum foil tightly.

The nearest town to where I grew up was named Lebanon, because of the "Cedars of Lebanon" and the prevalence of eastern red cedar all over the place there, which is really a kind of juniper. I never ate the berries, but it makes great fencing because it's slow to rot (we had hundreds of feet of split rail fencing that was made from cedars and had been there for 100 years or so), and if you just lay down the whole tree and make a line of them, cattle won't cross it. I cut down 3 fields of it one time with an ax, and stacked them into windrows to control cattle... but that stuff will eat you up between the sap and the needles scrubbing it into your skin. That's when I learned to use long sleeves when dealing with it in quantity. a lot of them had funny hard round brown balls growing on them, and when it rained the balls would send out rubbery orange tentacles all over the ball that smelled funny, I later found out that was some kind of apple tree blight fungus that cedars also got infected by, but it never hurt the cedars.

Now, all these years later, red cedars have taken over what used to be pasture when I was a kid, and there is a vast cedar forest growing there now.

The sap filled pine wood you mention is what old timers here called "fat wood" from the heart of the pine, and everyone kept some in their fire kit. It wouldn't take the spark in bulk, but shaved down and set to an already burning tinder, it would keep a small flame burning hot enough to catch the rest of the wood.

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