Getting borage oil from the seeds

As spring is getting nearer and nearer, despite the inches of snow outside, the garden is on the verge of waking up.

I intend to try a lot of things this year with my plants, and that include trying to make borage oil.

However, I have no idea how much seeds I will need (and thus how many plants I should have). I'd love to have a decent quantity, maybe 50ml, but less would be OK. How many plants should I aim for to have enough seeds to make this amount of borage oil ?

ooh a google challenge!


The oil yield of seed is about 30% so for 50ml you would want around 300g of seed? assuming a 50% extraction
So expected yield per hectare is around 400kg. around 15kg of seed is used per hectare and there's approx 50seeds per gram so 750k plants per hectare. meaning each plant produces 1.8g of seed (90 seeds) From these calculations you would need 166 plants in 7.5m2

Now that sounds a lot of plants and I don't think you would need that many, a couple of reasons why, the first is simply that the commercial density is very high so they individual plants are small, and the second is that the seeds shatter so commercial harvesting is very inefficient down to 50% in some of the studies I looked at. So if rather than taking the number of plants (166) we went with the area (7.5m2) my best guess remembering how big my own borage gets would be somewhere between 30 and 50 plants in about 10m2

Thanks you, well it seem I didn't search using the proper terms.

So I'll aim for about 30-50 plants then. I had a few plants a couple year, they indeed grew quite a lot. Instead of aiming for a mini-monoculture, I'll be trying to grow them where I can, with some vegetables, on their own, with strawberries... it should be good enough for now.