Plant of the Weekish - Cattail

Cattail

Typha, or cattails as we commonly refer to them, seem to grow everywhere there is a ditch, pond, or piece of boggy ground. In other words, Cattails seem to grow all over the Thunder Bay region.

Commonly viewed of as a weed and more of a nuisance than anything else, the permaculturist sees the humble cattail as a valuable and hard working native plant.

The reason for this viewpoint is the multiple roles that Typha plays in the ecosystem. As a fast growing wetland plant, it provides shelter for many different birds, insects, and reptiles.

This plant produces one of the largest root masses of any known plant, and that root mass acts as a huge water filter in the wetland environment.

Typha produces copious amounts of easily collectable pollen that can be used in baking, as well as a protein source for honey bees.

In fact the entire plant is edible, although chomping down on those fluffy seed heads isn't exactly pleasant! That said, the fluffy seed heads provide good materials for stuffing and insulation (During WW II, several million pounds of them were used to stuff life jackets, mattresses, pillows and baseballs) .

The greatest potential for Typha in my opinion is in it's commercial application for feeding pigs.

That root mass I mentioned is very high in starch, and an acre of cattails will yield in the order of 140 tons of root mass. To put that in perspective, cattails are capable of producing ten times the amount of edible root as potatoes.

There is enough food in the root mass of 1 acre of cattail to raise approximately 100 pigs to maturity without any other external feed inputs.

But why pigs? If there are three things that pigs just love to do, they are:

1. Eat
2. Dig
3. Roll in mud

Since cattails thrive in swampy areas, this is as close to pig nirvana as I think one can find on this earth.

Applying pigs to a Typha choked land results in a nicely cleared and freshly fertilized area ready for planting, fat happy pigs, and a handy revenue stream for the permaculture farmer.