Rushes, rushes and more rushes

[Toddy]

Rushes are the wet ground weeds. They self seed themselves in my flower beds having escaped from around the pond.
Thing is though, they're unharmful and very useful so I always leave some to grow.

I generally use mine to make baskets, but they make decent cordage for weaving not just kishies but chairs, baskets, mats and the like too.

I came across a couple of videos to two ladies showing how the rushes were traditionally used, in two very different cultures. The first rush I can replace with our own little green field rush, and the second on is using the Loch or Lake rush, the one that has to be cut from a punt with a sickle on a long pole.
The field rushes are pulled one or two at a time. Laid flat to dry off then dampened before use.
The loch rushes are dried and then soaked, and squeezed along their length as they squeak and squeal. The resultant rush is almost leathery. Lovely stuff to work

This lady is using the fine sides of the leaves that wrap around the stems of the bullrushes/ reedmace (cattails) to make really lovely string.
I grow the mini version of the reedmace in my garden, but you can grow any of them in a bucket of water. Edible too.
This string is the kind of quality that I use to make little straw decorations, tie off bunches of lavender, etc., Makes really nice woven bracelets too.
It stays remarkably flexible and hard wearing. Doesn't do so well for stuff like boot laces though; stick to nettle for that.

This lady is using the centre of the reedmace the same way that we use the loch rush.
It's called cattail in the video and it's too pale for our loch rush, but it seems to be handling the same way.

 

[Pattree]

I worked for a while in the highlands of Ethiopia where wood is very scarce. Grass is used to make all sorts of things:
Circular coffee cup holders and pot stands (a coffee pot has a round bottom.)

Mats for sleeping.
Fans both for cooling and cooking - to fan the leaf and twig fire under the stove plate (called a mitad)
It is also used to make furniture: storage baskets for clothes and non edibles - not rat proof. The traditional communal table is also woven from grass.

The ones that I saw weren’t that decorative. The top is either a huge brass or enamel plate and occasionally the mitad stove plate itself.

My point is that the grass used is injera grass, grown as a cereal crop, with nothing like the strength of a rush.

If you’ve lots of it and you enjoy a challenge . It’s one hell of a laundry basket - same height as your kitchen table!

 

[Toddy]

I was once given a piece of 3,000+ year old Scottish pottery to have a 'look at'. The man who dug it up in the hebrides knew that I made 'stuff', and would most likely have an idea of what the 'strange regular' marks on the bottom of this little rice bowl sized pot were from.

To anyone who makes grass or rush basketry, the marks were utterly unmistakable.
Whoever had made that pot had used a grass/rush mat to hold the clay pot while it was worked and dried. It had been fired in a normal hearth and though one edge of the bowl had broken off, it was still a beautiful little thumb pot.....with the marks on the base of someone's basket work too

I love that kind of detail, those little snippets that fill out the picture of our ancestors and their lives.

M

 

[Tengu]

I know those pots...Craggan ware.

No thumb prints?

 

[Toddy]

None that we could see, and this one wasn't black. It was red/brown clay with very fine shell inclusion.
I don't think it'd been done in peat. In Latvia I watched a 'burn' of pottery. They just piled it up and built a ring of timbers around it and set that on fire. As the ring burned down they pushed the embers closer to and then over the pots. The finished pots weren't black, they weren't hard fired, but definitely fired. Hotter than we'd get with a peat fire anyway. I reckon that when that little pot was made there must still have been more timber around. Even if it were dwarf willow kind of stuff.

Craggan ware is good, easy to make and demonstrate, but it relies on the lipids in milk to seal the pottery because it's not fully ceramicised. This little pot was ceramicised.

M

 

[Pattree]

Clay that includes coal particles can sort of fire itself. There used to be a field drainage pipe maker - I think it was “Oaklands” they had a branch in Yorkshire and another somewhere in Scotland. The Scots factory only used two thirds of the fuel that the English one did to fire the same pipe because the local clay had coal inclusions.

There is no soot or black traces in the fired clay, sometimes there are white flecks.

 

[Toddy]

Funny you should say that; where I live in Lanarkshire our land is layers of coal, sand, clay, sandstone, repeat for untold millenia.
If I dig through the clay in my garden then eight feet down there's a shallow coal seam, then more clay.
The clay makes the most beautiful pottery. The fancy tiles that line the closes (common stairwells) in Glasgow's tenements were made not a mile away from here.

Nowadays mostly the clay is used for brickmaking. A field across the river was bought by a brickmaking company, but to get to the best layer of clay they had to remove a three foot coal seam.....which they made rather a lot of money from, since unusually they could open cast the site since they were really after the clay.
Not surprised that some coal ends up in amongst the clay.

 

[Toddy]

I'm sort of in the notion for this stuff just now.
It's a very good time to pick, gather, collect such grasses.

The following video was made by a young Archaeology student. In it she demonstrates how to make reedmace (cattails/bullrushes) mats, like the ones used to make small homes that shed water.....so like a 'bushcraft shelter' type thing.

Much under-rated and often overlooked skills, but really approachable by pretty much any of us
She even demonstrates how to make nettle cordage by rolling it on your thigh

 

[Colinski]

Rushes are the wet ground weeds. They self seed themselves in my flower beds having escaped from around the pond.
Thing is though, they're unharmful and very useful so I always leave some to grow.

I generally use mine to make baskets, but they make decent cordage for weaving not just kishies but chairs, baskets, mats and the like too.

I came across a couple of videos to two ladies showing how the rushes were traditionally used, in two very different cultures. The first rush I can replace with our own little green field rush, and the second on is using the Loch or Lake rush, the one that has to be cut from a punt with a sickle on a long pole.
The field rushes are pulled one or two at a time. Laid flat to dry off then dampened before use.
The loch rushes are dried and then soaked, and squeezed along their length as they squeak and squeal. The resultant rush is almost leathery. Lovely stuff to work

This lady is using the fine sides of the leaves that wrap around the stems of the bullrushes/ reedmace (cattails) to make really lovely string.
I grow the mini version of the reedmace in my garden, but you can grow any of them in a bucket of water. Edible too.
This string is the kind of quality that I use to make little straw decorations, tie off bunches of lavender, etc., Makes really nice woven bracelets too.
It stays remarkably flexible and hard wearing. Doesn't do so well for stuff like boot laces though; stick to nettle for that.

This lady is using the centre of the reedmace the same way that we use the loch rush.
It's called cattail in the video and it's too pale for our loch rush, but it seems to be handling the same way.

If you are refering to Cattails like these https://pixels.com/featured/cattail-rushes-peter--mcintosh.html You can eat the roots but you have to cook them. Roasting them are very nice but like with any vegitation they are only as healthy and safe as the enviroment they grew in. If in doubt don't.

 

[Toddy]

Ah, no, those are the cattails, which are edible, nutritious, etc., and yes, you must take care of where they are growing. They can accrete heavy metals in their roots.

The wee rushes I was talking about are the field rushes, the short ones that grow almost like chives.
See this thread....

Making rope from rushes

Juncus effuses, the soft rush, the little field rush, the common clump that you see on damp untilled fields and waste ground. This is the rush plant that I pulled three weeks ago. It's growing in the snarled tangle of the overwintered pond in the back garden. I generally don't tidy too much so...

bushcraftuk.com

 

[Colinski]

Ah, no, those are the cattails, which are edible, nutritious, etc., and yes, you must take care of where they are growing. They can accrete heavy metals in their roots.

The wee rushes I was talking about are the field rushes, the short ones that grow almost like chives.
See this thread....

Making rope from rushes

Juncus effuses, the soft rush, the little field rush, the common clump that you see on damp untilled fields and waste ground. This is the rush plant that I pulled three weeks ago. It's growing in the snarled tangle of the overwintered pond in the back garden. I generally don't tidy too much so...

bushcraftuk.com

Gottcha, I asked because to make clear to people that some can be toxic. We used to use Cattail as part of our 8 month survival trek in Sweden in the deep forests. At school our teachers taught is how to detect bad or poisoned water, berries and fungi and what not to eat and how to cure any poisoning especially with fungi. We treked 4 months in one direction built natural shelters along the route carying only an SAS survival laminated book and returned as the snow started to fall but we gathered berries, and roots and dried fish so we could have been a month late at most. It was a good experience for two 15 year old boys. 4 months in the woods and we didn't cross a single road and in all aincient pine forrest.