Growing/farming Burdock

Most of my wild plants I have generally just allowed to exist and grow naturally, but I would like to move to farming Burdock  rather than just using what grows naturally here on our place.  I have all but given up on trying to dig volunteer Burdock roots from my yard and whatnot.  You need to ge a first year plant which is hard to guess for sure what is what growing naturally and my yard soil is about like concrete when it comes time to harvest.

I want to actually farm burdock root on a small scale.  I found that Burdock is grown commercially in Japan and many SE Asian countries, but I cannot find any pictures of these farms or how they go about farming Burdock.  I did find a few pictures of growing systems that allow you yo get to the roots much more easily.

Anyone have any experience or information on this?

I have grown burdock a few times, with seed from Japan. My wife likes it. I decided it was more work than I needed.

One trick is to grow it in large paper bags. Makes harvest a lot easier, but they have to be watered frequently. Dig a shallow hole and set the bag in it with most of the bag sticking out. Fill with dirt and put the seed or a young plant in. The bottom should be pierced so the root can go down.

Or, make a narrow raised bed and plant along the top.

The four kinds of gobo sold by Kitazawa (True Leaf) https://www.trueleafmarket.com/search?q=burdock all say they're amenable to growing in containers...that's got to make harvest easier. But even if you're growing in-ground, these long-cultivated varieties are probably more manageable than our weeds are.

I found a couple posts on the internet last night that talked about Burdock being able to grow in hay bales making it easy to harvest the root.  I was thinking maybe some pallets set up in a drainage area I have between my big pond and two other of my ponds.  

Set the pallets up 4 feet high and fill 2 to 3 feet with hay and top off the rest with good soil.  Make the structure 10 feet x 10 feet maybe and one burdock to each square foot for 100 plants.  Make a 5 foot long 3 inch diameter sharpened wood pole and drive through the soil/hay to make a 4 foot deep hole and fill it with some loamy soil/sand mixed.  Plant my burdock in the tops of those soil filled holes.

My theory is that I should be able to remove a bunch of the hay between the plants and pull the root without too much removal or trouble.  Watering should not be too much issue as the spring water should wick into the lower half of the hay and slowly dry out as the summer goes on.

As for seed I harvested 8 plants from beside my front porch and beside my house that were all 9 to 10 feet tall and 5 to 6 feet wide.  I have about a 25 pound bag of seed heads at the moment a 50 pound dog food bag 4/5ths full and packed.  I collected roughly 3,500 seed heads and still have another 500 to 1,000 or so seed heads that still had slight green to them so I will wait to harvest those.  I have found an average of 91 seeds per seed head so far so I should have just over 360,000 seeds collected or about right about 8 pounds of seed at the estimated 45,000 seeds per pound.

Turns out the wife is not a great fan of my burdock being next to the walkway and house and I was wanting to expand my project anyways, so the obvious next step is a small garden for them.  For my future seed needs I am going to go ahead and plant some burdock in my South Western forest where it is well away from people and animals.  That will be more popular with the wife.

From more reading last night I ran across information talking about growing Burdock from the top root cut as it is tough and not worth eating.  People were apparently cutting off at the harvest of the root and using it to grow a new plant.  

Has anyone done this and had experience with it?  If I could harvest plants and return the top six inches of the root into the plant hole I could harvest in rounds and maybe get a couple harvests per hole each year.  Then one could potentially replant the second topping of the root into the ground to grow a plants for seed collection in the second year like I do with my leeks and carrots.

I really look forward to hearing more from you next year at this time!

I will likely be starting late March next year with this.  I will go ahead and start the plants in my porch 4 -6 weeks before our average last frost date May 28 here.  So gearing up about Mid March seems the most likely scenario and beginning of posts.  

I will try to see if I can get five or six tons of rotted hay this month and clear another 10 yards of forest humous from my southern forest this month to use in the burdock garden setup.  If I can get the garden setup done this fall it will get a nitrogen boost from the 105 inches of winter snow melting onto it.  This will also give more area of cleaned ground in the forest, for planting the seed burdock, my garlic patches, leeks and the Canadian Ginger root I have ordered.  Kill three birds with one stone so to speak.

Oi.!!

I separated out a few seeds from the seed heads manually to get some average numbers and get some seed for my wife's wound care nurse who wants to grow Burdock on their farm.  No big deal to do a few seed heads by hand and get 500 seeds, but there is no way I am doing thousands of seed heads that way, especially considering that I appear to actually be a tad allergic to something in the seed heads.

I decided to try some other methods today and so far the best way appears to be to lightly pound the seeds on a board with the claw side of a small hammer then rub the rest of the seeds out of it.  This releases the seeds and all the dander as well so the seed then needs to be chaffed more or less.  I used a hair dryer with no heat on low and was able to separate the chafe easily enough but that still a fair bit of time, work and itchiness separating the seeds out by hand.

I have been trying to look up how it is done commercially but I am unable to find "anything" on the subject.  Anyone have any knowledge base on this?

I was thinking that with some pressure and grinding movement the seed parts separate out fairly easily so my first thoughts were to set up a small cylinder at an angle on it's side and drop in a few decent sized river rocks and a bunch of seed heads and simply rotate the cylinder kind of like you do in rock tumbling.  Then just dump everything out, remove the stones and use air to clear out the chafe from the seed.  No big issue to design and build something that would work but it would be very informative to at least "see" how commercial operations are doing this.  

Doing this on any scale by hand would be amazingly labor intensive.  I worked for about an hour to get around 4,000 seeds freed and cleaned.  I didn't even make a small dent in the top of my dog food bag of seed heads.

Any links, info or ideas would be quite welcome...

I found a video where burdock was grown in 4 inch diameter x 4ft long plastic bags, the harvesting of the roots was amazingly simple and easy.  I like that method other than the fact that you would have to manually water each unit.

The thought occurred to me that a system similar to that but allowing water to flow through the containment system would be a handy setup.  Then you plant the units directly into the ground and allow them to grow naturally with no watering or anything and then come back later and pull the entire unit out of the ground.

My thoughts are to use 4 ft weed fabric and cut it into 16 inch wide pieces.  Sew the cut ends well, sew the bottom together, add four rope handles to the top and use some of my 1/8 inch electric fence wire to join the two ends together up the side. ( Years ago I used old dog food and animal feed bags cut and sewn to make 20 pound sand bags that I used as sound proofing for a small recording studio on my farm, the sewing of these should not be any more difficult than that I don't  imagine.)  

Then use either my post hole diggers or get one of my sons to help me use my gas powered auger and dig my six inch diameter holes.  Throw 4, 1/2 inch x 2 inch slats into the sides of each hole with the planting unit inside of them.  Fill each planter with soil/clay/sand mixed.  I should be able to pull those up out of the ground fairly easily for harvesting.  Then simply pull the wire holding the side together and roll out the soil and root. (Theoretically the wood slats would help to reduce friction a bit when it comes time to pull the planting units out of the ground.)  I can buy a 100ft roll of 4 ft weed fabric for $25 and make 70 units from it.  This would put me at less than 50 cents a unit.

My natural climate and water situation grows Burdock extremely well here so keeping the natural growth conditions I have seems as though it would improve my likelihood of success.  I was thinking of using hay to grow roots in, but I have some concerns as to how much moisture the hay will retain and whether it may become a root disease vector.

For overwintering the holes I can drop 6 inch diameter x 6 ft wood posts into each hole so that I do not have to keep re-digging them each spring.

With regards to separating seeds....Wow that's a lot of seed heads!

I have a apple crusher and I wonder if this would do a good job of opening the seed heads?



This one is like mine from Vigo. I expect there are similar ones in the US? If it doesn't work you can still use it for juicing apples! I think if you have enough volume, then separating out the seeds will get easier - it doesn't matter if there is a bit of fluff if you are not selling the seed anyhow.