Alienweeds: The Invasive Plant Harvest
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Art from Aliens
Our efforts at processing local invasive plants have yielded a variety of materials used for making art: Paper, printing blocks, pigments, pens and brushes. (Visit the Web site: www.alienweeds.com )
We seek to develop a sustainable economic engine that would reap a bounty of weeds while clearing space for the return of native plants and animals.
Please contact us if all or part of your business is to harvest--but not to cultivate--invasive flora or fauna. We would like to profile and promote your efforts.
"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
PROFILE: A World of Kudzu
Nancy Basket makes paper, food, baskets . . . and a studio out of Kudzu.
Bales of Kudzu (Pueraria lobata) form the walls of the art studio of Nancy Basket, an artist-in-education in basketry, papermaking and storytelling in Walhalla, SC. Of Cherokee heritage, Nancy makes Kudzu art cards with Native American stories printed on the back. She seeks to alter opinions about Kudzu "from a maligned and laughed at weed into a new and inexhaustible source of tree-free paper."Visit her Web site: "http://www.nancybasket.com/gpage9.html
(Photo from nancybasket.com)
PROFILE: Weed Wood
Ed Irvin takes down invasive trees for their lumber.
Outside of Shirleysburg, PA, Ed Irvin picks his way across a ceiling-high pile of rough-sawn lumber at his sawmill to fetch several planks of Norway Maple (Acer platanoides).The boards were sawn from a tree whose ancestors arrived from Eurasia, brought to North America for duty as a shade tree. The species has escaped, hogging space that might normally be filled with native Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum).
"I'd call this a hard maple," Irvin says of the light blond wood, which Stradavarius used for the backs of his famous violins. "Some pieces have a nice figure in them," he says, "and work up very similar to Sugar Maple."
Ed ships his lumber to as far away as California.
He also sells boards from Tree-of-Heaven (Ailanthus altissima; also known as Stink Tree or Ghetto Palm). We declined to purchase any of that, as it was riddled with powderpost beetles.
Visit Ed's Web site: http://www.woodfinder.com/listings/008301.php
Burning Weeds to Process Weeds
An invasive tree's firewood cooks its own bast.
White Mulberry (Morus alba) was brought to the eastern US in the 1800s to supply leaves for feeding the mouths of silk worms. The silk industry never took off (too labor-intensive for Americans), but the trees did. White Mulberry is now the dominant mulberry species in many areas.If a tree falls, or is cut for its excellent firewood or lovely yellow lumber, vigorous suckers shoot up the follow year. These can be harvested, steamed and stripped of their bark, which is scraped of its outer brown bark, cooked in soda ash (NaCO3), washed and beaten into a pulp that yields a fine, strong, white paper.
Pictured: White Mulberry wood fuels a portable wood stove that brings water to boil in a large pot used to steam and loosen the bark from cut-up mulberry branches.
Human-powered Pulping
Cooked bast fibers are mashed with Piston Beaters.
After mulberry bast is cooked and rinsed, the papermaking process continues as fibers are beaten into pulp. An alternative to expensive Hollander beaters, Piston Beaters (photo) use an unorthodox method of hand-beating fibers suspended in water. Heavy hardwood bats are lifted and dropped in rapid succession in a deep cooking pot, without allowing the base of the bat to leave the water, which avoids splashing. The piston action of the process is more ergonomically sound than the traditional method of whacking a damp lump of pulp on a table top. WANTED: Adventurous Spinner/Weaver
An invasive plant fiber is beckoning.
We are seeking the help of someone eager to experiment with a novel plant fiber gathered from a highly invasive plant. If you've had experience spinning and weaving plant fibers, and would like to give it a whirl, please contact us. The Weed Awareness Survey
An abundance of reading
Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
Amazon Price: (as of 07/11/2009) 
The Complete Book of Papermaking
Amazon Price: (as of 07/11/2009)
Wild Color: The Complete Guide to Making and Using Natural Dyes
Amazon Price: (as of 07/11/2009)
The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Amazon Price: $10.88 (as of 07/11/2009)
Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places
Amazon Price: $14.93 (as of 07/11/2009)
Feedback, please.
ss834 wrote...
Very neat lens! It's good to see someone focusing on actually *using* these plants but not seeking to cultivate them. I have researched some of my local invasives to see if they are edible or can be used in other ways-- this inspires me to experiment further.
Posted May 29, 2009
treehugger wrote
I like Trees of Heaven, I have two in my yard and have had them for over ten years. If you keep trimming them down they don't get too big. They have that exotic look, especially in the cold climate I live in. I have used their small branches for cute fences for my yard (internal fences around my garde plot, and have been drying some branches to make a garden bench. I am also experimenting with making wooden bead bracelets and a bead curtain out of the stems of the "leaves." I have found that ALL trees can be invasive if you let them; if there is a tree seed to be found in my yard sooner or later it will pop up. This includes my chokecherries and seeds from the neighbor's elms.
Posted November 15, 2008
kathysart wrote...
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I live in Hawaii where fibers and frond are used for a variety of things. Nice lens, 5 stars
Kathy's ACEO on Squidoo:
http://www.squidoo.com/kathysaceo
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Posted July 20, 2007
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Posted May 21, 2007
Visual Evidence that pulling weeds is fun.
Flickr's eye of volunteer weed whackers.
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The VolunteerMatch staff volunteered to pull weeds at Chrissy Field in San Franc...
