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The next crop was serviceberries. The crop looked good and had me excited. Two major types grow in our area — Canadian and common — with occasional saskatoon berry escaping cultivation. My crew and I set out together. Each day we woke at the crack of dawn to harvest as many as possible before the sun decided to melt us and we had to retreat to the local river or pool to cool off. This was the first test for my wife, tutored by Karen Verboom on how to process berries. As we found out later, the serviceberries processed in the first few weeks weren't near the quality of those later — but by bunchberry season she was producing bags of pure seed!

The first season went on, species after species. Travelling thousands of kilometres each week. White Spruce was in short supply, Red Spruce non-existent, not a white pine cone to be found, hemlock looked good but had almost no seeds inside. Sugar maple hardly produced anything, yellow birch was good, paper birch awful. The season went on until Northern Red Oak were falling — finally a tree species with a decent crop. We spent months harvesting these squirrel favourites, gathering over 6,000 lbs of northern red oak.

In September we made our second trip to Quebec, travelling and harvesting for 10 days throughout southeastern Quebec — small town and rural community after community. The people were so friendly, forgiving of our broken French, and curious about what we were doing. We found sugar maple, northern red oak, black ash, highbush cranberry, sea buckthorn and more. The small town of Amqui became our centre of operations on the Gaspé peninsula.

Then our first of three trips to southern Ontario took place. One of our major goals is to promote the native species of the Carolinian forest, which exists in a small area of southern Ontario. After going south of Toronto, the forest changes — conifers become rare, black walnut, northern catalpa and hickories become common. Our centre of operations: Glencoe, a small farming town in the heart of Canada's sliver of Carolinian forest. We harvested shagbark hickory, bitternut hickory, buttonbush, northern spicebush, northern catalpa, nannyberry, barberry, white oak, pin oak, red pine and others.

We searched for sugar maple from the deep south of Ontario, throughout Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia before we finally had to give up on finding any meaningful amount. Perhaps the coming season will yield a good crop!

On return to Nova Scotia we continued the Northern Red Oak harvest as weather allowed. By mid-November the seed collection period was coming to a close. A huge lesson came in late October at a nursery conference on Prince Edward Island, where we learned that 75% of all nursery space in North America is taken up with white spruce, red spruce, red pine, eastern white pine, tamarack, norway spruce and balsam fir. We listened — and we are completely changing our focus for 2025.