Shin has been after me for a few days to take him cattail harvesting, so today he, Katrina, and I headed out to a large patch of Cattails to harvest the rhizomes. We started by collecting a rhizome from a plant that was on mostly dry land, but quickly discovered that they were much easier to extract from completely saturated, submerged soils. We picked for about an hour and then sat around in the sun and cleaned the spongy outer layer off from the hard starchy cores. Just as we were finishing up, Kenn Marr, a Botanist for the Royal BC Museum stopped by to collect a specimen of the Cattails for the herbarium. They are
Typha angustifolia, an invasive species. They are the tallest cattails I have ever seen and some were more than 3 meters tall. The female spikes are also unusually long.
Shin has been after me for a few days to take him cattail harvesting, so today he, Katrina, and I headed out to a large patch of Cattails to harvest the rhizomes. We started by collecting a rhizome from a plant that was on mostly dry land, but quickly discovered that they were much easier to extract from completely saturated, submerged soils. We picked for about an hour and then sat around in the sun and cleaned the spongy outer layer off from the hard starchy cores. Just as we were finishing up, Kenn Marr, a Botanist for the Royal BC Museum stopped by to collect a specimen of the Cattails for the herbarium. They are Typha angustifolia, an invasive species. They are the tallest cattails I have ever seen and some were more than 3 meters tall. The female spikes are also unusually long.