Oil from Caragana

Time to break out the Piteba oil press and try harvesting caragana oil. Cooking oil is one of the things that I found hard to source when playing with the 100 mile diet a few years ago. Hazel/filberts did fall within my my 100 mile circle and I have since planted a few trees on our property. I now also have a very nice hedge of caragana and I might be too late this year for prime oil production. It has been so hot it seems the pods are drying out earlier than usual. Has anyone used caragana seeds for oil?

Interesting project! Caragana grows here as well.

I know some people have been harvesting the seeds as a kind of pea. There were a few threads here on that subject, possibly detailing some of the negatives if memory serves.

One thing is certain: the pods are tiny and it will take a lot of pods and a lot of labour to gather an appreciable amount of seed for oil. I wonder, can you gather them in a late green stage (easier to handle) rather than ripe seed (exploding from pods), for pressing?

Once the oil is pressed, will it be suitable in its raw form? Not all plant oils are particularly nice straight from the press, if they are edible at all without further processing.

I look forward to hearing more about your experiment!

Ooh, that's a cool idea! As far as I can tell, it should neatly sidestep (at least some of) the toxicity issue with eating caragana seeds. The one toxin I'm aware of in these is canavanin, a non-proteinogenic amino acid, and since it's water soluble I imagine not that much of it would end up in the oil? Maybe?

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:One thing is certain: the pods are tiny and it will take a lot of pods and a lot of labour to gather an appreciable amount of seed for oil. I wonder, can you gather them in a late green stage (easier to handle) rather than ripe seed (exploding from pods), for pressing?  

In my experience, they don't shatter so much until they dry, so if there's a rainy day after ripening but before natural shattering, you can gather them all then and dry them indoors on a screen, maybe with a cloth on top to stop the seeds from escaping. Around here (Scandinavia) the seed pods often stay whole until late winter or early spring, but that might be because our climate is a lot more humid than in the native range of caragana.

You certainly would need a lot of seeds to get a good amount of oil, though. Plants For A Future claims that the oil content is about 12%, so way lower than hazelnuts for instance. Still, if you have a lot of bushes, I can totally see that it'd be worthwhile. Do tell us how it goes!

I harvest the pods and put them in a gallon container as they dry the twisting of the pods squirt the seeds within the container for planting. My previous open tray/box would allow the seeds to shoot all over. I planted my caragana after seeing it on PFAF years ago. It was for a just in case plant for its edible seeds. I will be honest the only thing I have eaten religiously from the shrub is its flowers in salads. I haven't put the effort into seed collection for eating . I really try to plant species that will do two things, the caragana since it is a nitrogen fixer and it produces an emergency edible seed and I wanted to use it as a hedgerow entrance along my driveway. The wife plants the understory with plants we use for salads. It is a plant we can ignore as far as irrigation, it thrives here. Deer ignore it.  We're now planting the north fenceline since it is plant and forget shrub. Bees love it and birds are always in the branches.