Utilizing Wild Oat Grass, Part 1: The Plan

From what I could gather on the internet (please correct me if I'm wrong), wild oat is the primary grass responsible for California's "golden hills." Unfortunately, wild oat grass is an invasive plant around these parts, spreading its seeds much more easily than most of the native grasses that populated the once green California hillsides. The only way to repatriate the soil and sunlight to the native grasses is by first ripping up the roots of those wild oats and destroying (or somehow getting rid of) the seeds so they can't plant themselves. This is exactly my plan, to be followed with planting of native grasses if I can do so in a helpful manner, and I encourage other Californians to do the same. This grass is a danger both to native wildlife and to crops.

But why just get rid of a plant when I can also cut down on my consumption and waste by using what I took? I've gotta say, cooking and eating the oat seeds is one way to make sure they don't germinate! And the reason so many storebought oats have gluten in them is just that they were grown and processed near wheat, so these oats should theoretically not hurt me to eat.

You might be wondering why I didn't specify that I'd be eating the oats in the title of the blog post. It's because I don't plan to do only one thing with these oats, so I couldn't specify one craft! With the other parts of the plant I plan to make paper and *potentially* even fabric if I can figure it out and afford it (note this will all probably have to wait until I move in August or September). There are so many things that can be done with plants, so I figured I want to use the plants I weed in as many ways as possible to minimize both what goes in the bin (although as far as trash goes, the non-seed parts of this plant dead certainly aren't the worst thing for the environment!) and the amount of labor and money I have to expend to get materials for my crafts and food.

I think it actually seems like a cool business idea for me to weed invasive plants and use them for free materials in the things that I make. If I can find a local invasive plant that I can make good fabric with, I definitely want to do that for my fiber crafts, and paper making with invasive plants is definitely an option--although I would probably mostly do mixes with both recycled fibers and the virgin fiber from the weeds. This will hopefully both lead to paper that is strong/durable and reduce waste.