Samantha Holloway wrote:Hi!
Is this thread still active? I don't have much more than muscadine grape seeds, which I don't think grow true, but I'm working on having more to trade next year!
Thanks!
S
"...he is the greatest patriot who stops the most gullies." - Patrick Henry
Carbon is the currency of life. Nature eats my "carbon footprint" for breakfast!
alex Keenan wrote:OK some people asked for something unusual so I am throwing out giant ragweed seeds!
Now I know everyone hates giant ragweed. And yes seventy percent of people allergic to ragweed react to the leaves. However, here is why I use this plant. First if you sprout it and only plant seedlings or sprouts you do not have seeds sraying in the soil. Second this plant grows over fifteen feet tall. I use it for shading. Second it produces a lot of biomass, I chop it before pollen develops for mulch. Third many of my animals will eat the high protein leaves. You can feed goats this when parasite loads are high in pastures. Fourth, bees seem to be attracted to the pollen. My plants are covered in pollen and bees in late summer. Such honey has proven useful to people with allergies because they can take some every week over the winter and summer and do not get hit as bad during ragweed season. Finally the plants produce a good amount of seed that is not hard to collect. That seed has been used as a human food in the past and is high in fat and protein. My chicken love the stuff, so do wild birds.
I have a couple of pounds of very good seeds.
Carbon is the currency of life. Nature eats my "carbon footprint" for breakfast!
Carbon is the currency of life. Nature eats my "carbon footprint" for breakfast!
Wyatt Brush wrote:Thank you for the method! I should have thought of that myself, it is simple enough. I just moved to where I live now, this last Spring, and I don't remember seeing Giant Ragweed until I moved here. It grows here wild, and the neighbor thought that the name of this plant was "Indian Paintbrush", so I Googled that name, and found that it properly belongs to a totally different plant. So I Googled "lobed leaves" and looked through the pictures until I found a match. The plants are quite fibrous, I think that I read that they can be made into fabric, but I am sure that you could use the fiber to make paper. Although the neighbor did not know that these plants were Giant Ragweed, he told me that the flowers of the plants will stain your hands red if you rub them, which he later demonstrated. So if you want, you can use the small flower heads as a red paint or dye! I tried to collect seeds this fall, by shaking the seed head into a bag, but that did not work well. I tried to pick the seeds one by one, but that was very time consuming, so I gave up. And yes, I saw the price of the seeds this Summer, when I was reading up on these plants, and can verify your statements.
By the way, the soil up here is good for growing grains, and not much else, so our Giant Ragweed only got about 6 foot tall at most. But I did read about a specimen, I think it might have been in Texas, that grew 21 feet high! Imagine the biomass crop if you had a field of those every year!
Carbon is the currency of life. Nature eats my "carbon footprint" for breakfast!