Article via New Hampshire Bulletin
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"On a late August morning, the sky gray and spitting, thousands of balsam fir and white pine cones are spread across wooden trays in the “drying hut” at the New Hampshire State Forest Nursery in Boscawen.
The smell is that of being inside an L.L. Bean balsam pillow. An aroma that’s sharp, invigorating, and serotonin-producing. Memory-evoking terpenes hitting from every direction.
Inside the small greenhouse, the heat causes the cones’ wings to open. In the case of fir cones, they don’t just open. They fall apart, leaving only the cone core. Those cones go through a shaker machine that separates the seed from the “wings” via a wire screen. The unprocessed seed is put into a many-gallon drum. "
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