posted: Jan 27, 2010

This week we borrowed a belt thrasher from Crites-Moscow Growers to thrash our Missouri goldenrod (Solidago missouriensis) and Western Aster (Aster occidentalis).  A belt thrasher is used by feeding the plant material in between two conveyor belts.  The two belts sandwich the plant material and create friction on the materials.  Ideally this friction will be satisfactory to remove or separate the seed from the rest of the plant material.


 
With the Missouri goldenrod and western aster, we used the belt thrasher to remove the seed from the fluffy pappus.  The pappus on these seeds are a miniature version of the fluffy portion on dandelion seeds.  The pappus helps these seeds disperse with the wind.  When planting and selling these seeds, the pappus is best removed.  The pappus on the Missouri goldenrod seed needed to be run through the belt thrasher 3 times to obtain good separation of the pappus from the seed.  The western aster however only required one run.  Now that these two plants are thrashed they are ready to be cleaned on one of our Clippers.  The separated fuzzy material sure flies everywhere and it's easy to see how these structures help move these seeds around. 



We'd like to thank the folks at Crites again for allowing us to use their equipment.  It sure was a great help to us!