Narrow leaved plantain for textiles

A whisper on the forum on using narrow leaved plantain for fibre and I'm trying to find out more. Anyone heard of it, or how it is used and extracted?

PFAF says

A good fibre is obtained from the leaves[4], it is said to be suitable for textiles[115].

[4] Grieve. A Modern Herbal (ooh, I've got that one - I'll look up what she says)
[115] Johnson. C. P. The Useful Plants of Great Britain (hmm, that could be one to look out for!)

Narrow-leaved plantain has more tender leaves than the broad-leaved kind but the stalks of inflorescence in both are tough and fibrous. In narrow leaved plantain the cluster of stalks can reach 2ft long so I guess it is possible to get fibers out of them. I have the plants but never tried doing that.

Nancy Reading wrote:A whisper on the forum on using narrow leaved plantain for fibre and I'm trying to find out more. Anyone heard of it, or how it is used and extracted?

PFAF says

A good fibre is obtained from the leaves[4], it is said to be suitable for textiles[115].

[4] Grieve. A Modern Herbal (ooh, I've got that one - I'll look up what she says)
[115] Johnson. C. P. The Useful Plants of Great Britain (hmm, that could be one to look out for!)

"The stalks of narrow leaf plantain only need a bit of scraping to reveal the beautiful long white fibres lurking underneath. Lovely fibres, they are super strong and flexible also whilst dry."

https://linktr.ee/foragedfibres

Well that sounds promising Ac. The link you gave doesn't go to the quote you give however.
Unfortunately Mrs Grieve doesn't say much more that the quote from pfaf:

The leaves contain a good fibre, which, it has been suggested, might be adapted to some manufacturing purpose.

So not necessarily textile suggested there. I may have a bit of time to play tomorrow and see what scraping the leaves may involve..

The flowering stems were especially long this year in our part of the UK, I can imagine picked at the right time, before the stems get brittle, they could make good fibre.

Some of mine are very long and some are quite short. I'm assuming it has to do with where they are growing, but maybe the weather also has something to do with it. The seeds head length too seems to vary considerably.
Flowering stems are something else to try out perhaps! I'm thinking if the fibres are good, they will be quite long. Easily as long as nettle between leaf nodes for example.

Most of the plantains are done by now and the dead stalks are brittle and break easily. Green stalks collected when the plants are flowering are the strongest. Plantains grow just like other crops, given more water and nutrients they will be bigger and taller.
I scavenged dozens of green stalks to try retrieving the fibers. It's time consuming to scrape skin off the skinny stalks so I am testing the biological way to get rid off skins. I will report the result in a few days.

Nancy Reading wrote:Well that sounds promising Ac. The link you gave doesn't go to the quote you give however.
Unfortunately Mrs Grieve doesn't say much more that the quote from pfaf:

The leaves contain a good fibre, which, it has been suggested, might be adapted to some manufacturing purpose.

So not necessarily textile suggested there. I may have a bit of time to play tomorrow and see what scraping the leaves may involve..

The quote & image are from Foraged Fibres, but I'd only spotted it on their Facebook (from 31 Aug 2020).  The link I gave is to their LinkTree which does include their FB link.  

Video of making narrow leaf plantain string: https://www.facebook.com/foragedfibres/videos/1025470231221090
Finished narrow leaf plantain string: https://www.facebook.com/foragedfibres/posts/pfbid0246BwV7kHnL7dXW8RjP8N5c1Rbe7cqMXyYr29t8HKQmWo1g3rr23VdwAi1UPbmJ61l

So the skins are mostly off the stalks after 3 days. I will let them go a few more days for cleaner finish so I add more feed to my bioreactor to bring up the enzymatic activity.
ETA 8/27
Fibers turned pliable on the 4th day so I gave the bundle a final rinse. Stalks just done flowering are of the best quality, older ones start to have deteriorated spots.

I don't have the tools for further processing but the fibers as is can be easily twisted to strong twine. Retted fiber has a lighter color with a beautiful sheen. The bundle of fibers within the stalk can be further spliced and carded for spinning.

Is the fiber from just the seed stalks? Or are you using the veins of the leaves also?

I tossed a huge bundle of plantain flower stalks under a dense rhododendron bush. I'll have to go look up retting. I'd forgotten that option. The plantain is very happy in the parking lot island, very very happy. The fiber in your pix is beautiful. Thankyou for sharing the process l

Joylynn Hardesty wrote:Is the fiber from just the seed stalks? Or are you using the veins of the leaves also?

I didn't use the leaves. I test peeling the veins but they don't come off. Besides, the seed stalks are much longer.

Wow! That looks great May. Thank you for trying  it and sharing. I'm not having much luck with the stems as yet - the fibres are just breaking off in small lengths.
From the face book video link Ac gave:

Suzie Grieve wrote: picked the stems then left them for a day then scraped the green off until just the fibres where left

That's all the detail she gives - makes it sound easy!
From her youtube channel I found this video on making cordage - looks like she just used the whole stem for that:

I managed to extract the leaf veins from the leaves - getting lengths a few inches long. I suspect they are not as strong as the stalk fibre, and certainly much less fine.

Hi Nancy, when the flower stalks turn brown or black when seedhead matures, they break down very quickly. I found the strongest ones are green with flowers still blooming at the top of inflorescence. Besides, what I am doing is retting and degumming to remove the epidermis and pectin, leaving only lignocellulose flosses. The fiber won't further shrink, chaff or mold and can be dyed to a different color.

Or maybe you mean the stalks break after retting in water? That means the microbes have a high cellulose activity, rather than hemicellulase and pectinase activities. The liquid I dip the stalks in degraded squash leaves before as you can see the tangles of leftover vascular bundles. From a cell culture point of view, the microbes were in the decline phase so I added some sunchoke leaves to get them back to the log and stationary phases. The heat wave helped a lot to speed things up too. You can try whatever leaves available as long as they are thin, papery and fuzzy.

See what else I put in there to skeletonize.

May, is there more information on how you use and fuel your bioreactor? It sounds amazing and deserves a thread of its own!

The setup is mainly for making nitrogen-rich liquid fertilizer and the carbon-rich solids are byproducts. If I am going to process large amount of plant fibers I would use a long tank and also use separate container for the cell culture, adding only supernatant from the culture to the retting tank.

This article showed how to isolate and screen bacteria from the environment for better and speedy jute production. We can do it in the backyard by enriching and culturing bacteria too by soaking plant materials with low cellulose content. Falcutative microbes already dwelling on the leaf surface with flourish under the anaerobic condition and secrete enzymes to break down the cell walls. Microbes with high xylanase and pectinase activities will have more advantages and become dominant. Some may have higher cellulose activity but this property is not selected towards. The microbe population will follow the typical bacteria growth curve.

Many broadleaf plants can be used and the microbes will be diversed too. Whatever plants that are abundant and easy to grow locally are good candidates. I usually pick 50g of clean, healthy, young leaves from each species and stuff each bundle into a 64 oz (1.89l) glass jar for a small test. Pictures below was taken in June, in one day, waterlogged lesions appeared on the leaves and the liquid started to turn cloudy. In three days the leaves are totally dismantled. The liquid is then used to inoculate subsequent bigger batchs and speed up the process. Discard and start from fresh leaves whenever the culture turns smelly or sticky, an indication that it has been contaminated with nonspecific microbes.

This retting solution alone can't make skeleton leaves due to the strong waxy cutin layer. I pretreat the leaves by boiling, sometimes with baking soda. Different tree leaves can be screened in a similar way to find microbes with high cutinase activity. When I was a kid, I made perfect skeleton Michelia leaves simply by soaking them in water for a few weeks.

Thanks for that explanation, May!