Plants have many uses

Tag : Rape Seeds


Congratulations to the agricultural students at the new LincolnCounty High School. With the guidance of their teacher, Mr. RyanSaxe, they've made diesel fuel from used cooking oil. They expectto make enough this coming year to power one school bus, saving theschool board about $32,000.

This is only the first step; in phase two, they'll plant crops suchas: corn, soybeans, canola and sunflowers, so they can compare theyields from each. Mr. Saxe said that canola plants produce a lot ofoil from their seeds, and they plan to plant some this Fall, onschool property. After all, they've many acres of farmland aroundthe school. No other high school, in the eastern US, is doinganything like this.

I first saw the canola plant more than 50 years ago, growing in ourneighbor's garden. He had planted it over the entire garden to useas a winter cover crop to be turned under in the spring. The leaves

make excellent greens, very much like mustard; and he let us pickwhatever we wanted. Back then, it was called rape plant, but I'mnot sure why.

About 20 years later, we saw large fields of it in North Dakota,covered with yellow blooms in the summer. A beautiful sight! Ithadn't been turned under, but it was allowed to bloom and makeseeds for the production of canola oil. Up until then, I didn'tknow that it was made from rapeseed.

My dictionary says this "rape (brassica napus)is of the mustardfamily, grown as forage for sheep and hogs and for its seeds usedfor bird food and rapeseed oil". The description for the wordcanola is "a rape plant of an improved variety, having seeds thatare the source of canola oil".

So the word canola refers to both the oil and the plant. I think Iwill use that word in the future, instead of rape. We decided toplant some this Fall, but we couldn't find the seeds listed in anyof our catalogs. The Southern States' store in Hamlin haddiscontinued it this year, but the nice, young ma there orderedsome for us. Maybe the name of rape had turned people off, but thatshouldn't stop gardeners from planting a crop that's easy to grow,is good to eat, and improves the soil, when it's plowed under. Ihope more people will try it now that it's called canola.

Thank you, students and teacher at LCHS for reminding me of thisplant. And again, congratulations on what you're doing to makenon-polluting fuels from plants. Everyone knows there couldn't beany life on Earth without plants of all kinds, but we're justlearning even more uses for them. Using them for fuel makes a lotof sense.