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Farm Friday, August 9th, 2024
Lessons from burdock
Burdock is a plant that grows on our farm all around the barns and pastures. I consider burdock to be a weed because it is often growing in places where we don’t want it to grow.
This time of year we put “burdock patrol” on the farm to do list and we try to clip the plants and stop them from making the dry burs that can get into the sheeps’ wool or stick to children’s clothing or hair. A few of those burs in a fleece mean that the mill will reject our order and send us back a bunch of wool to try to process by hand.
It is a battle that we never seem to win. But we keep trying to remove burdock from places where the sheep or children go the most.
The sheep love to eat the leaves, and we tell the students to gather the leaves to give to treats to the sheep. They can gather as much as they want. I suppose it is ironic. The plant that we actively try to keep out of the pasture is one that the sheep like the most. The leaves are fine until they start to make the bur seed pods.
Once we had a psychic visit the farm. I don’t know if I believed him at the time, but he said that the burdock was a healing plant. It does have deep roots (prized by certain cultures as a food source called gobo), and those deep roots pull up nutrients from the subsoil. Burdock is…
