Roy Edward Long

r ranson wrote:Would love to see a picture of that.  Sounds amazing.

I don't have any pictures of it and I don't feel like setting it up at the moment to get one.  

But if you can imagine..  You have the main setup that you assemble and then slide it into your drive unit it has the drive piece that turns inside the grinder.  Mine was a hexagonal hole that the motor end slid into.  I just ground a round piece of metal into a hexagonal shape with tight fit and drove it into meat grinder body.  This left me a half inch round piece of metal sticking out an inch and a half.

The lathe had a half inch drill chuck that can be fitted on it, I just simply opened the chuck and stuck that into the chuck and tightened it down.  Then I run the lathe at my lowest speed, all you have to do is keep the body of the meat grinder from spinning with the work of grinding the meat after that.  So I have a 1 hp meat grinder running that way.

That was my second evolution on that, first setup I took a log round and cut out a plus sign into the top leaving 4 big stubs on each corner and the plus sign cut out about 3 inches deep.  I just set the grinder in that and wired it in place between two stubs.  Then I chucked it up into my old Makita gear drive drill and placed the drill between the other two stubs sticking up and wired that in place.  Zip tied the trigger down and away I went.  Worked well, though even my powerful Makita half inch drill was a little shy on power.  I also did not want to burn up my drill, I have been using it since 1992 and I got it used and un-working from the garbage can at a construction company I worked for.  The drill is about 35 years old so using it hard for grinding in the long term wasn't going to work.  That and it is still my best most powerful drill and removing from the meat grinding setup was not the easiest feat so I went in search of another more feasible way to power the unit, which led me to the lathe setup.

I bought an electric grinder in 2012, it passed away 2 years ago.  But I was able to remove the housing and motor and all and now I can chuck it up in my Shopsmith lathe and run it there, I just have to block the grinder body from spinning which I do with a piece of wood.  You wouldn't believe the power it has hooked to the lathe..

I picked up another electric grinder about a year and a half ago at a local thrift store for $5 and I have been using that ever since.

I also have 4 old hand powered meat grinders as well.

I found a video where burdock was grown in 4 inch diameter x 4ft long plastic bags, the harvesting of the roots was amazingly simple and easy.  I like that method other than the fact that you would have to manually water each unit.

The thought occurred to me that a system similar to that but allowing water to flow through the containment system would be a handy setup.  Then you plant the units directly into the ground and allow them to grow naturally with no watering or anything and then come back later and pull the entire unit out of the ground.

My thoughts are to use 4 ft weed fabric and cut it into 16 inch wide pieces.  Sew the cut ends well, sew the bottom together, add four rope handles to the top and use some of my 1/8 inch electric fence wire to join the two ends together up the side. ( Years ago I used old dog food and animal feed bags cut and sewn to make 20 pound sand bags that I used as sound proofing for a small recording studio on my farm, the sewing of these should not be any more difficult than that I don't  imagine.)  

Then use either my post hole diggers or get one of my sons to help me use my gas powered auger and dig my six inch diameter holes.  Throw 4, 1/2 inch x 2 inch slats into the sides of each hole with the planting unit inside of them.  Fill each planter with soil/clay/sand mixed.  I should be able to pull those up out of the ground fairly easily for harvesting.  Then simply pull the wire holding the side together and roll out the soil and root. (Theoretically the wood slats would help to reduce friction a bit when it comes time to pull the planting units out of the ground.)  I can buy a 100ft roll of 4 ft weed fabric for $25 and make 70 units from it.  This would put me at less than 50 cents a unit.

My natural climate and water situation grows Burdock extremely well here so keeping the natural growth conditions I have seems as though it would improve my likelihood of success.  I was thinking of using hay to grow roots in, but I have some concerns as to how much moisture the hay will retain and whether it may become a root disease vector.

For overwintering the holes I can drop 6 inch diameter x 6 ft wood posts into each hole so that I do not have to keep re-digging them each spring.

Oi.!!

I separated out a few seeds from the seed heads manually to get some average numbers and get some seed for my wife's wound care nurse who wants to grow Burdock on their farm.  No big deal to do a few seed heads by hand and get 500 seeds, but there is no way I am doing thousands of seed heads that way, especially considering that I appear to actually be a tad allergic to something in the seed heads.

I decided to try some other methods today and so far the best way appears to be to lightly pound the seeds on a board with the claw side of a small hammer then rub the rest of the seeds out of it.  This releases the seeds and all the dander as well so the seed then needs to be chaffed more or less.  I used a hair dryer with no heat on low and was able to separate the chafe easily enough but that still a fair bit of time, work and itchiness separating the seeds out by hand.

I have been trying to look up how it is done commercially but I am unable to find "anything" on the subject.  Anyone have any knowledge base on this?

I was thinking that with some pressure and grinding movement the seed parts separate out fairly easily so my first thoughts were to set up a small cylinder at an angle on it's side and drop in a few decent sized river rocks and a bunch of seed heads and simply rotate the cylinder kind of like you do in rock tumbling.  Then just dump everything out, remove the stones and use air to clear out the chafe from the seed.  No big issue to design and build something that would work but it would be very informative to at least "see" how commercial operations are doing this.  

Doing this on any scale by hand would be amazingly labor intensive.  I worked for about an hour to get around 4,000 seeds freed and cleaned.  I didn't even make a small dent in the top of my dog food bag of seed heads.

Any links, info or ideas would be quite welcome...

I will likely be starting late March next year with this.  I will go ahead and start the plants in my porch 4 -6 weeks before our average last frost date May 28 here.  So gearing up about Mid March seems the most likely scenario and beginning of posts.  

I will try to see if I can get five or six tons of rotted hay this month and clear another 10 yards of forest humous from my southern forest this month to use in the burdock garden setup.  If I can get the garden setup done this fall it will get a nitrogen boost from the 105 inches of winter snow melting onto it.  This will also give more area of cleaned ground in the forest, for planting the seed burdock, my garlic patches, leeks and the Canadian Ginger root I have ordered.  Kill three birds with one stone so to speak.

From more reading last night I ran across information talking about growing Burdock from the top root cut as it is tough and not worth eating.  People were apparently cutting off at the harvest of the root and using it to grow a new plant.  

Has anyone done this and had experience with it?  If I could harvest plants and return the top six inches of the root into the plant hole I could harvest in rounds and maybe get a couple harvests per hole each year.  Then one could potentially replant the second topping of the root into the ground to grow a plants for seed collection in the second year like I do with my leeks and carrots.

I found a couple posts on the internet last night that talked about Burdock being able to grow in hay bales making it easy to harvest the root.  I was thinking maybe some pallets set up in a drainage area I have between my big pond and two other of my ponds.  

Set the pallets up 4 feet high and fill 2 to 3 feet with hay and top off the rest with good soil.  Make the structure 10 feet x 10 feet maybe and one burdock to each square foot for 100 plants.  Make a 5 foot long 3 inch diameter sharpened wood pole and drive through the soil/hay to make a 4 foot deep hole and fill it with some loamy soil/sand mixed.  Plant my burdock in the tops of those soil filled holes.

My theory is that I should be able to remove a bunch of the hay between the plants and pull the root without too much removal or trouble.  Watering should not be too much issue as the spring water should wick into the lower half of the hay and slowly dry out as the summer goes on.

As for seed I harvested 8 plants from beside my front porch and beside my house that were all 9 to 10 feet tall and 5 to 6 feet wide.  I have about a 25 pound bag of seed heads at the moment a 50 pound dog food bag 4/5ths full and packed.  I collected roughly 3,500 seed heads and still have another 500 to 1,000 or so seed heads that still had slight green to them so I will wait to harvest those.  I have found an average of 91 seeds per seed head so far so I should have just over 360,000 seeds collected or about right about 8 pounds of seed at the estimated 45,000 seeds per pound.

Turns out the wife is not a great fan of my burdock being next to the walkway and house and I was wanting to expand my project anyways, so the obvious next step is a small garden for them.  For my future seed needs I am going to go ahead and plant some burdock in my South Western forest where it is well away from people and animals.  That will be more popular with the wife.

Most of my wild plants I have generally just allowed to exist and grow naturally, but I would like to move to farming Burdock  rather than just using what grows naturally here on our place.  I have all but given up on trying to dig volunteer Burdock roots from my yard and whatnot.  You need to ge a first year plant which is hard to guess for sure what is what growing naturally and my yard soil is about like concrete when it comes time to harvest.

I want to actually farm burdock root on a small scale.  I found that Burdock is grown commercially in Japan and many SE Asian countries, but I cannot find any pictures of these farms or how they go about farming Burdock.  I did find a few pictures of growing systems that allow you yo get to the roots much more easily.

Anyone have any experience or information on this?

I don't actively forage for much any more as I have most of what I used to forage for growing right around my house now.

I d o still forage for mushrooms in my forests and fields.  
I forage for my rose hips.
I forage for my Oregon grape berries and the roots.
I forage for huckleberries in my northern forest.
Apples and plums along the former railroad tracks.

Plants that I now grow around the house that I no longer need to forage for..

Dandelions, I have about half an acre of nearly 100% dandelion now.
Dock
Burdock
Mullein
Yarrow
wild lettuce
queen Anne's lace
lemon mint
peppermint
mint
cherries
service berry
apples
plums
clover
St Johns wort
Purslane
grape hyacinth
thistle
linden tree leaves/flowers
Catfish
large mouth bass

I just harvested 7 pounds of burdock seed today from the front yard along with some dock seed and wild lettuce seed.  I am going to set of a garden area for the burdock so that I can more easily get to the roots.

Benjamin Abby wrote:The sugarberry leaves weren't sweet but are neutral to me and I've started eating the leaves with each meal.  I wanted a short post but it doesn't seem like I can do that lol.  
I wasn't going to try the roots because I had only found 2 small trees in my yard and I feared killing them but after exploring my little forest I have found many more.  I'm new to this stuff so I have the fear that taking up any root would kill a tree lol.  I know it isn't true but still.
Isaiah and Coydon, great points!  Does anyone know if this is the reason for all the fear pushing over things like oxalic acid and other antinutrients?  Similar to cyanide in apple seeds; an expert said you'd have to eat the seeds of about 200 apples consecutively to have an issue lol.  I planted blue flax this year which says to cook because the seeds have cyanide.  But they don't say how much cyanide and I believe in "dose is the poison or the cure."  It is like when places say don't eat large amounts but don't define it in any way.  Is "large amounts" more than any sane human would eat or something normal like a cup or even two?  Comfrey and so many others that have been used safely for thousands of years.  I think Comfrey had 4 or 5 bad cases they point to and these were extreme which is just like the fear over kale where the woman ate more kale than anybody would ever normally.  And it usually wasn't just the plant but supplements and comfrey oral supplements are banned due to this.  Comfrey is apparently one of the few plants that take up Vit B12 also.  

Specifically regarding oxalic acid, the biggest problem with it is that it interferes with the digestion of iron and calcium.  For most Americans and their horrible nutrient deficient diets that could be a problem.  For those of foraging and eating healthy diets we actually have the concern of too much iron and calcium intake which becomes dangerous.  My cousin Jon is unable to get rid of iron and he has to give blood several times a month to keep his iron levels where they belong.  Too much iron is slowly causing him to become  schizophrenic due to iron buildup in his brain.  Too much calcium leads to more calcium in the kidneys which then reacts with cystine kinase, potassium etc which then crystalizes into stones inside the kidneys.  Oxalic acid helps to protect us from these issues.  In a very natural diet oxalic acid is a life saver.  Why do you think so many of our leafy veggies bred by our ancestors are high in oxalic acid?