On June 25th I posted a BLOG with almost the identical title ... except it said "two months" instead of "three months". Well, here we are almost three months later and the California Buckeye (Aesculus californica) has now set fruit and withered up its leaves for the year. Even though I was off a bit in my earlier prediction, a bit less than three months time is still an incredible feat in the tree world to go from flower to set-fruit.
Many groups of California Native Americans, including the Pomo tribes, utilized the buckeye "nuts". These large seeds, like acorns, have large quantities of tannins in them that actually make them poisonous for humans to eat. Therefore, the tannins must be leached out through an elaborate process of collecting, peeling the outer skin off, roasting, pounding into a mash (mush), and then leaching the crushed nuts repeated by pouring water over them for many hours. The resulting flour could then be cooked like acorn mush.
On occasion fresh buckeye nuts were crushed and used to poison fish in small streams, but I do not have a good reference for the specific techniques involved.
