Madame and Monsieur Cottonwood

The ice-damaged branches blown down at my friend's house had leaf buds and THESE crazy things, which turn out to be emerging catkins. Which means the particular tree is Monsieur le Cottonwood, and not Madame.

The male trees produce catkins (which produce pollen when they are mature)  about this time of year and the females produce the seed pods that contain the cottony seed in May and June.

So the dark bits are very early catkins. And you can see one leaf bud there, sticking straight up. So we basically harvested a lot of the single leaf buds for another batch of cottonwood leaf bud salve.

And we put them in this high-class container, a Solo cup.

You actually don't want to use too much
high class hardware with these leaf buds
because the resin so So Sticky! Like super
hard to remove at all, sticky.

At this time of year, there were drops of goo
coming out of some of the buds. If you hold
a few in your hands while harvesting, they
will stick to your hands.

After awhile, these buds in the cup just stuck to each other in a loose block.