Growing and Harvesting Your Homegrown NW Sweet Grass. 9-3-2024 Melinda West
Not everyone is fortunate to have there own land to cultivate, or even a place to call home, but perhaps you have a balcony on your apartment, or a friend with space in their garden, or access to a public Pea Patch? That’s all you need besides a large pot without holes in the bottom, some good compost soil, and a few Schoenoplectus pungens rhizomes for starts.
First of all, let’s establish that the basket maker’s sedge I’ll be referring to here as NW Sweet Grass, Schoenoplectus pungens, is not the same sweetgrass that Robin Wall Kimmerer teaches us about in her beautiful 2013 book BRAIDING SWEETGRASS. You can find out oodles about Hierochlore odorata and it’s relatives here: (https://plants.usda.gov/DocumentLibrary/plantguide/pdf/pg_hiod.pdf) I also won’t be talking about the sweetgrass that grows along the Atlantic coast used by the Gullah Peoples in the lowcountry to make distinctive coiled baskets. (https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/plant-materials/news/sweetgrass)
The NW Estuary Sweet Grass I’m growing at home in my “bog pots”, is a salt tolerant, water loving, three-sided sedge that Coast Salish basket makers have used in their traditional basketry for a very long time. (https://courses.washington.edu/esrm412/protocols/2014/SCPU10.pdf) I’ve learned to value this plant from the Coast Salish teachers. In the Pacific Northwest, where I am fortunate to live, this plant still grows naturally in protected estuaries and wildlife sanctuaries, where the rivers meet the sea. Ninety percent of these life-giving wetlands along the Salish Sea have been disturbed, filled in, or altered by development over the last two hundred years. My hope is that basket makers will protect and preserve important Native plants and the natural places they thrive in by propagating their own materials.
I’ve been growing a cousin of NW Sweet Grass now for several decades. I’ve learned that it doesn’t compete well with other plants when put out into the garden, but when planted in large bog pots, that is pots with no holes in the bottom so that the good soil stays wet like in a bog, the plants would flourish and spread. I was able to order my starts from a nursery selling aquatic plants for attracting wildlife. I found that starts are available here: (https://www.kestersnursery.com/plant_price_list.htm). On the price list for Kester’s Wild Food Game Nurseries, INC, the plant is listed as Three Square Rush.
Misc. Notes on planting and transplanting. If the roots get crowded, they get all coiled up and it’s time to use a bigger pot. The plants will die if a freeze hits them and they don’t have enough good soil to insulated them. The roots will be so happy if you spread them out over a tilled area that is easy for you to keep watered, or in larger pots without holes in them, and cover the roots with about 4-6” of soil. Just keep them well watered and weeded once they start growing in early spring & they will multiply like crazy. Harvest in late June/July and consider cutting them with scissors for the first 4-5 years. By the 5th year or so, you’ll be able to harvest them as you would be in the wild, by pulling gently on each stem until you feel them release from the rhizome, which makes a little ‘pop’ sound.
