A Bumper Crop of Common Milkweed Seeds
We had a bumper crop this year of seeds on our Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). It has been breezy recently, perfect conditions to help the milkweed floss disperse the seeds far and wide around the neighborhood.
Here is a bit of interesting milkweed history from a 2012 Washington Post article:
"As September winds down, milkweed pods dry out and split open, releasing flat, brown seeds carried aloft by a white, silky fuzz known as milkweed floss.
The hollow fibers are coated in wax, making them waterproof and buoyant, a quality exploited during World War II after the Japanese occupation of Java cut off supplies of kapok, a fluffy plant fiber used in life vests. (Today's vests use synthetic fibers.)
To fill the gap, defense contractor War Hemp Industries enlisted American schoolchildren to scour the September landscape for ripe milkweed pods, paying kids 15 cents to fill an onion bag with pods. Each open-mesh bag held about a bushel, or 600 to 800 pods. Two bags provided enough floss for one life vest. More than 1.5 billion pods were collected to make 1.2 million life vests.
Francis Joey Wilson Jr., who was 10 years old in 1944, remembers his father tipping him off about a poster promoting the pod harvest near their home in Upper Marlboro. "All my friends jumped on our bikes and took off for the post office to read the notice for ourselves," writes Wilson. Later, his bags full of pods were collected behind the post office and hauled away by a big truck. "They were paying about 5 cents a pound," says Wilson.
These days, milkweed pods are worth about 55 cents a pound, and they are still collected by people toting onion bags through the North American countryside. The floss is harvested to help fill pillows, comforters and stuff into jackets.
Milkweed floss is best used in combination with goose down. Floss by itself clumps together after being washed, but when mixed with down, floss smoothes out the texture of down without compromising down's other qualities. Floss is about half as costly to produce as down."
To read the entire Washington Post article go to:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/metro/urban-jungle/...
A Bumper Crop of Common Milkweed Seeds
We had a bumper crop this year of seeds on our Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). It has been breezy recently, perfect conditions to help the milkweed floss disperse the seeds far and wide around the neighborhood.
Here is a bit of interesting milkweed history from a 2012 Washington Post article:
"As September winds down, milkweed pods dry out and split open, releasing flat, brown seeds carried aloft by a white, silky fuzz known as milkweed floss.
The hollow fibers are coated in wax, making them waterproof and buoyant, a quality exploited during World War II after the Japanese occupation of Java cut off supplies of kapok, a fluffy plant fiber used in life vests. (Today's vests use synthetic fibers.)
To fill the gap, defense contractor War Hemp Industries enlisted American schoolchildren to scour the September landscape for ripe milkweed pods, paying kids 15 cents to fill an onion bag with pods. Each open-mesh bag held about a bushel, or 600 to 800 pods. Two bags provided enough floss for one life vest. More than 1.5 billion pods were collected to make 1.2 million life vests.
Francis Joey Wilson Jr., who was 10 years old in 1944, remembers his father tipping him off about a poster promoting the pod harvest near their home in Upper Marlboro. "All my friends jumped on our bikes and took off for the post office to read the notice for ourselves," writes Wilson. Later, his bags full of pods were collected behind the post office and hauled away by a big truck. "They were paying about 5 cents a pound," says Wilson.
These days, milkweed pods are worth about 55 cents a pound, and they are still collected by people toting onion bags through the North American countryside. The floss is harvested to help fill pillows, comforters and stuff into jackets.
Milkweed floss is best used in combination with goose down. Floss by itself clumps together after being washed, but when mixed with down, floss smoothes out the texture of down without compromising down's other qualities. Floss is about half as costly to produce as down."
To read the entire Washington Post article go to:
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/metro/urban-jungle/...