The joys of gathering pine cones in Joburg over the quiet festive season

Among my annual rituals when the City of Gold falls silent over the Christmas holidays is the gathering of pine cones – nature’s gift to help start a braai fire and to clean the grid after the meat has been cooked.

At this time of year, where there are pine trees the surrounding ground will often be littered with the cones. The larger, woody ones are the female cones that contain the seeds.

My main gathering ground is Field & Study Park in Parkmore, and it usually only takes me a few minutes to fill a couple of burlap feedbags that are sturdier than your run-of-the-mill black bags for garbage.

I take a quiet delight in this as it is a simple task of gathering. Like casting a fly rod it puts me in a peaceful zone at a time of year when Joburg’s madding crowds have departed en masse for the coast or home towns and villages.

It is also a practical task. I braai a lot and love cooking potjies, and pine cones after they have dried a bit are perfect fire starters. The aromatic resin they contain readily flames and the coals that remain are red hot, if only briefly.

This does not mean that I dispense with orthodox fire starters, but it allows me to use significantly less – an eco-friendly plus. I mostly braai with firewood, and a couple of pine cones with a bit of fire starter ignite enough of a blaze to get things going. Old newspaper also works well.

And for the initial cleaning of a braai grid there is nothing better. After the food is braaied you simply take four or five pine cones and throw them on the coals and place the grid just overhead. After just a few minutes they typically burst into flame and the meat or fat clinging to the grid gets burnt off.

The cones also generate a lot of smoke before the flames and my next-door neighbour recently texted me asking if everything was okay because he had seen a smoke cloud billowing up from my yard!

Pine cones have also branched into a small niche industry, and various businesses sell them by the bag. But with the bounty literally lying in plain sight on the ground, I prefer to gather my own.

Pine trees are deeply rooted in Johannesburg’s relatively short history. A species not native to South Africa, pine trees along with blue gums were planted on the grasslands of the Highveld to provide the mining industry with timber after the late 19th century discovery of mother lodes of gold on the Witwatersrand.

This unfolding canopy would produce one of the world’s largest urban “forests” and give much of Johannesburg its deceptively green sheen.

And the cones in turn produce a white smoke that heralds the start of my braais, or the cleansing of my grid. DM