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Growing Milkweed for Bast Fiber

Ryan M Miller

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posted 5 years ago

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Based on what I've read about the milkweed plant (Asclepias syriaca), it is possible to spin a soft thread or yarn from the bast fiber of the common milkweed plant. I have seed one blog documenting this process (http://inconsequentialblogger.blogspot.com/2014/04/processing-spinning-and-knitting.html?m=1) as well as an agricultural joural paper (https://www.jstor.org/stable/4251941?seq=1) and information from the Native American Ethobotany database documenting the plant's use for cordage and rope by American Indians (http://naeb.brit.org/uses/search/?string=Asclepias+syriaca)

As far as I know, this species requires cold, moist stratification to sprout. I have not gotten high germination rates when I tried to stratify the seeds in my refrigerator so it might be best to sow the seeds in fall.

This plant is native to much of the northeastern US and in addition to its use for fiber, it is an important food source for monarch butterflies. I have often found it growing in abandoned fields and prairie remanents where I live in Dayton, OH.

I would like to know if anyone else on this forum has any experience growing milkweed for cloth, rope, or even just to attract butterflies. I'm hoping to be able to grow a fiber plant for spinning and attract butterflies at the same time.

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Stefanie Hollmichel

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Hi Ryan! I live in Minnesota and milkweed grows in my garden, well, like a weed. I never planted it, it just appeared one year and has spread everywhere on it's own. It does need cold stratification in order to germinate. I am not certain how cold it gets in Dayton, but you may want to try sowing it outdoors in fall. It seems to prefer full sun and a loose sandy/loamy soil. A friend of mine has clay soil and has tried to grow milkweed a number of times without much success.

I'm pretty new to all this, but I just learned a few months ago about making cordage from milkweed and managed to save some from the garden before it went all moldy from the snow. It turns out to be a messy undertaking to process the stalks for the fiber so I have only done one because I have nowhere to work in winter other than my house. But I did get about a foot of really strong cordage from it. I, too, am interested in seeing if I can get some soft fiber from it, but in my researches it seems I might have more luck with nettle. Still going to try though! I have also learned that the milkweed fluff from the seeds provides better insulation than wool. Next fall I plan on saving all I can of the fluff (along with the stalks) and experiment using it to stuff a lining to make extra warm mittens.

And the butterflies really love it! I get lots of monarch caterpillars and butterflies every year. Harvesting for fiber happens at the end of the season when the plant has gone dormant so it doesn't impact caterpillars or butterflies.

Hope some of this helps! Good luck!

Catherine Carney

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posted 5 years ago

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Hi Ryan and Stefanie! I also grow milkweed (specifically common milkweed Asclepias syriaca) here in central Ohio (zone 5) as a monarch host plant, for the wonderful spicy-sweet fragrance of the blooms, and for limited bast fiber. I too have gotten relatively thick and stiff cordage rather than soft linen-type fibers, but I plan to keep playing with it. The seed fluff is supposed to be spinnable as well, and was also collected during WW2 as a filler for life jackets. The leaves of the plant yield a lovely butter yellow dye on wool with alum as a mordant that seems to be light and wash fast, but I hesitate to use it since I'd rather have the monarch caterpillars eat it.

In my garden it seems to be a relatively short lived perennial, preferring full sun, and reasonable soils. It doesn't do well in heavy clays that stay cold and hold lots of water.....But does quite well everywhere else as long as there's sun. For me at least it seems to do best in soils that produce good corn--so fertile, loamy, and with plenty of light.

Hope this helps.

Catherine Carney
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Nissa Gadbois

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I live in Massachusetts and we've made several visits to Plimoth Plantation where we have seen the Native American interpreters using milkweed bast fibres to make various items. The texture is much like hemp, rather than flax, which is considerably softer. There were several lovely bags and small mats made from it. The silk is supposed to be an excellent insulator, as long as it is kept dry. We have quite a lot of it here on our farm, and were delighted by the significant increase in monarchs last season. We've not tried using the fibre as yet, but perhaps if this year allows us some time...

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Ryan M Miller

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posted 6 months ago

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I haven't been able to do much gardening for the past two years, but one of my neighbors is currently growing swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) so I collected some plant stems from him while he was cleaning out his wildflower garden this week. I will be buying an antique flax brake in a few weeks to help process the fibers since splitting the stems by hand would take too long.

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M Ljin

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posted 6 months ago

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I think you are right to harvest now. I'd say don't wait too long or they will have decomposed and over-retted but those stalks look very beautiful for fiber processing. I have been working with milkweed fibers for six--maybe even seven?--years at this point and only this year feeling like I am figuring it out.

Some milkweed is wiry and hempy, other milkweeds are extremely soft like pure white shining cotton, and many are in between. The wiry milkweed is milkweed that is still full of the resilient gum, the "milk", and this milk is decomposed by various sorts of bacterial action, or sunlight. But it seems like it has to be exposed to the air as far as I understand. (Maybe that isn't right--I should try water retting again with some dried unretted milkweed. All I know is that fresh stalks tend to unhelpfully retain their rubbery bark when water retted.) Many milkweeds are also subject to a sort of fungus that decomposes the bark but can leave some grey patches on the fiber. Maybe these can be bleached naturally? As far as I understand it, the longer the milkweed is exposed to the sun and the rain, the less black staining it gets, and the bark and rubber are decomposed in a way that leaves it especially soft and fluffy. Well retted milkweed is shorter than length than other bast fibers, and very soft.

I had some success with a technique called "wind retting": https://permies.com/t/264445/Wind-retting

But harvesting late winter or early spring spring (i.e. right now) should also have good results for a bit less work.

I think that milkweed should also soften with use as time goes on. It might be prudent to make sure there is enough twist in the fiber.

One question to ask is do you need to cultivate milkweed at all? In my region I am guessing that enough fiber is growing wild, that everyone could wear milkweed and nettle clothing without much cultivation of any fiber plants. And since there aren't likely many other people making milkweed textiles, you may not have much competition with your harvesting.

M Ljin

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posted 6 months ago

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I also have some doubts about a flax break for milkweed, but no harm trying. The fibers tend to be short, so they might break apart with the stalk too, and you could end up having a mess of broken stem and fiber where it's difficult to extricate the broken pieces of stem--much thicker than flax--from the fiber. It is well worth crushing, and then peeling by hand, and the yield of fiber from each stem is much more substantial than from flax. In my experience it hasn't been a hassle at all.

With wild fibers, but also working with fibers on a small scale in general, some of the main lessons are patience and consistency, but also knowing when something is good enough, and finding a balance between those. It is worth asking: 1) how fine/soft/white/etc does this actually need to be, to be a decent item of clothing? (and how will it wear with use to become softer?) and 2) will these expedient techniques of make it easier as a whole, or will they make one task easier while sacrificing the quality in a way that makes it so I will have to work harder in the future?

I've decided for instance that with the textile technique I am using now I don't need to pre-spin the milkweed at all, just twist it a bit as I go along, and splice on another strip of bark when I need to, which saves a lot of work. The result is not bedsheet cloth, but it's thick-ish and comfortable and beautiful, which is what I want after all. But I am taking the effort to finger weave the milkweed (with nettle as weft), which I feel is worthwhile in the case of wild fibers and actually saves time and effort by skipping the conventional steps like spinning or loom setup. I also feel like a lot of care is beneficial in the peeling stage, to get a nice, tidy strip of bark that can be rubbed and then woven with the rest.

This is all my opinion and experience but feel free to experiment too! I haven't figured out everything. It's always good to find your own way when you feel you can see something good.

Christopher Weeks

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posted 4 months ago

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Ha! I saw in another thread last year that you can use milkweed bast fibers so now that the snow has gone, I gathered up a bundle of stalks that were still upright and I'm busting the fibers out. I'm not far enough along in this process to have a strong opinion, but it's feeling more like something I'd make twine out of than a garment. (But maybe more crud will still bust off from the fibers while processing?)

Should I comb or card it? Or just twist and ply once I've gotten out all the woody chaff?

Oh, my fiber looks really different than Maieshe's over here

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M Ljin

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posted 4 months ago

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Very exciting! Here in zone 5 we are getting lush rainy day after lush rainy day and the milkweed is probably all done.

There might be a variety of different textures in a particular patch of milkweed so perhaps there are some more cottony ones. I have some that look much like that too. It’s still somewhat a mystery.

I typically process milkweed by splitting and flattening the stalks, gently cracking off the chaff, and then rubbing the bark off by rolling it between my hands. If the fibers are particularly short and come apart very easily, it may be worth carding and spinning. It all depends on what you are making and how.

Making cordage, I only split the bark strips into a suitable thickness. In some stalks those strips are likely to come apart into smaller lengths in the process which is fine.

M Ljin

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posted 4 months ago

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There seems to be a lot of variation based upon soil, moisture, and sunlight. When there is an abundance of lush broadleaf vegetation, oftentimes the milkweed is affected by black rot; the stems are very tall and thick but can be wiry (generally the more robust the stalk, the coarser the bast, across plant families.) (also, sometimes they aren’t!) Full sun also seems to produce weak fibers and a propensity towards rotting and spotting. Usually when there is some cooler partial shade, a bit of grass, and ideally smaller, thinner, more delicate stalks, the fiber is softest and finest. Where milkweed is cut in summer oftentimes the new stalks are finer and a better quality fiber. So maybe that gives us an opportunity for two harvests a year, one for cordage and the other for clothing. I think that wood nettle may be similar, and ramie is also cut twice a year, with the second harvest being the better one.

If it’s confusing to you then it is also confusing to me. I have not really figured out milkweed but with enough time we may become wise enough to their ways so as to be able to gather and use them well.

Ryan M Miller

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posted 4 months ago

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I forgot to update this thread on my progress in processing the milkweed bast fiber. Considering how heavy these coarse hanks are, I suspect I might have more than six ounces of milkweed fiber after passing it through a hackle. I attempted to use a flax brake on the milkweed stems to separate the hurds from the fiber beforehand, but the fibers were so brittle that trying to use the flax brake would only destroy the fibers and break them into shorter fibers. I supplemented the swamp milkweed stems with some common milkweed and dogbane stems that I collected. I'm hoping to update again when I can find a suitable set of hackles to further process the fibers.

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Joylynn Hardesty

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I finally got some milkweed seeds to sprout! Hooray!

Um, how far apart should they be? Right now, they are very close together.

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Ryan M Miller

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When the common milkweed plant spreads clonally from a single rhizome, the shoots tend to space themselves out anywhere between eight inches and one foot from each other. I'd suggest one foot may work well and then you can thin out the rhizomes as the plant colony gets denser.

May Lotito

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This is a single plant in the third year. It has 10 stalks in the original spot and sends up 3 more 6 ft away.

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Christopher Weeks

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If a new shoot comes up, how do you know if it's a runner rather than where a seed landed?

Joylynn Hardesty

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Thank you May! I'll space them a bit and leave them in the garden until established. Hopefully transplanting in their second fall. Then I'll find a spot out of the garden to spread them around.

I finally have my nettles established. Took them years for the patch to be large enough to cut and come again more than twice a season.

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May Lotito

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Christopher Weeks wrote:If a new shoot comes up, how do you know if it's a runner rather than where a seed landed?

I only transplanted one seedling a few years ago and it was a single stalk without flowering the first year. Second year it grew 4 stalks and bloomed. There was no there milkweed around. So the new ones with flowers are from underground rhizomes originating from the mother. I have a second plant, it also has a central cluster and 3 runners spacing 4-5 ft away in three directions. If you want lots of long stems for early harvesting, plant lots of seeds at once, but prepare for the patch to grow. Other milkweeds won't run like this.

May Lotito

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A bit off topic but another fiber to harvest from Milkweed is the seed fluff or silk. Common milkweed has giant seed pods and the fluffs are easy to collect before the pod splits open. Here is what I got last year from the very same plant so it won't reseed everywhere.

I don't know how the fluffs compare to cotton but they feel similar to kapok fibers, great for filling pillows.

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Jim Fry

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Be careful bringing milkweed onto your land. It spreads somewhat easily. If your cows eat it, or if you bale hay with milkweed in it, and the cows eat it, they could die.

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Joylynn Hardesty

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Speaking of off topic, (

) Greene Dean's article on eating it. I've read elsewhere on the interwebs that at a certain stage, the pods act like cheese. Hmmm....

Which would be why I tried a 7th time to get it to sprout.

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Ryan M Miller

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My neighbor has been successfully transplanting common milkweed rhizomes to new parts of his wildflower garden over the past few weeks. I might take some photographs with his permission if he doesn't mind. He seems to get about a 75% survival rate with the transplants.

May Lotito

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I haven't tried transplanting common milkweed but have successfully done that to at least four other types of mature milkweed plants. It will save 1-2 years of waiting time if you can locate a patch in the wild.
I just found some monarch eggs on my milkweed.

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Judith Browning

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May Lotito wrote:I haven't tried transplanting common milkweed but have successfully done that to at least four other types of mature milkweed plants. It will save 1-2 years of waiting time if you can locate a patch in the wild.
I just found some monarch eggs on my milkweed.

now I have to look!
Have been following this thread with interest...my common milkweed patches are expanding nicely.

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Ryan M Miller

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Here's an image of the transplanting my neighbor made of his milkweed plants a few weeks ago. By now, all of the plants have perked up, but some of the shoots have aphids feeding on them.

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Ryan M Miller

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Ryan M Miller wrote:I forgot to update this thread on my progress in processing the milkweed bast fiber. Considering how heavy these coarse hanks are, I suspect I might have more than six ounces of milkweed fiber after passing it through a hackle. I attempted to use a flax brake on the milkweed stems to separate the hurds from the fiber beforehand, but the fibers were so brittle that trying to use the flax brake would only destroy the fibers and break them into shorter fibers. I supplemented the swamp milkweed stems with some common milkweed and dogbane stems that I collected. I'm hoping to update again when I can find a suitable set of hackles to further process the fibers.

I've already posted this on another Permies forum thread, but I got the chance to hackle these milkweed and dogbane hanks with a coarse hackle that I made with honey locust thorns. I'm more surprised that there's any line fiber at all left than the fact that I got mostly tow fiber considering the plant stems were Winter retted with the stems exposed to the weather all Winter.

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