posted: Nov 3, 2008

The nice weather last week gave us time to harvest the remaining western aster. 
First, we used vacuums hooked up to a generator to collect as much seed as possible.



 Then we used a power scythe to mow down the remaining plants. 



Next we carried the plants into the shed and laid them on a tarp to dry for several days.  Once completely dry we stuffed the plants into bags in preparation for thrashing and cleaning.  During the drying process lots of seed fell from the plants onto the tarp which we vacuumed up.  After all of this there is still a lot of seed hanging on to the stems.  The thrashing process should separate these seeds and allow us to clean the seed.  Another challenge of this plant is that each seed has a feathery awn attached to it which aids in wind dispersal of the seeds.  This pappus must be removed in order to clean the seed.  Vacuuming the seed sometimes thrashes the seed enough to remove this awn.  The material that has not been vacuumed will be thrashed in a modified chipper which will hopefully remove the seeds still attached to the branches and remove the awns form the seed.