PaperMaking from Plants:

Goldenrod Paper

There are some 432 types of goldenrod, so if you're in the northwest hemisphere, there's probably one growing near you. I'm enamored of the USDA site for plants, http://plants.usda.gov/ showing locales and pictures and providing this chart:

Kingdom
Plantae - Plants

Subkingdom

Tracheobionta - Vascular plants

Superdivision
Spermatophyta - Seed plants

Division
Magnoliophyta - Flowering plants

Class
Magnoliopsida - Dicotyledons

Subclass
Asteridae -
Order
Asterales -

Family
Asteraceae - Aster family
Genus
Solidago L. - goldenrod

Here are the kind of goldenrod in New York State :

Solidago squarrosa- stout goldenrod
Solidago arguta- Atlantic goldenrod
Solidago xasperula
Solidago bicolor - white goldenrod
Solidago caesia - wreath goldenrod
Solidago canadensis - Canada goldenrod
Solidago cutleri - Cutler's alpine goldenrod
Solidago xerskinei Boivin - [canadensis x sempervirens]NY only
Solidago flexicaulis - zigzag goldenrod
Solidago gigantea - giant goldenrod
Solidago hispida - hairy goldenrod
Solidago juncea - early goldenrod
Solidago latissimifolia - Elliott's goldenrod
Solidago nemoralis- gray goldenrod
Solidago odora - anisescented goldenrod
Solidago patula - roundleaf goldenrod
Solidago puberula - downy goldenrod
Solidago rugosa - wrinkleleaf goldenrod
Solidago sempervirens- seaside goldenrod
Solidago simplex- Mt. Albert goldenrod
Solidago speciosa- - showy goldenrod
Solidago squarrosa- stout goldenrod
Solidago uliginosa - bog goldenrod
Solidago ulmifolia - elmleaf goldenrod

First Try:

I cooked a steel pot full for 5 to 6 hours with washing soda. It was surprisingly tough to cut and I blendered it to rough straw-like bits. Now I'm debating whether to cook it more or to put it in the beater. The cooked fiber, hand squeezed of water weighs about a pound and 1/4-- a dense yield for my steel pot full of plant.

I used everything, flowers, stalks, leaves but I did not unroot them.
These plants were tall--- some of the goldenrod was at my head,
the rest at least chest level--- so they were 4 to 51/2 feet tall.
Goldenrod with more leaves, had no green stuff after cooking and rinsing. I tried processing it and re-cooked the blendered pulp to work it into some pliancy. It still resisted processing

One *can* make paper out of Goldenrod --- you need to use lye.
Big props and shoutout to Gin, as I've conquered my fear of lye.

I cooked one pot of the whole plant in lye and it seemed that the long cooking in lye was cooking some stuff away. Then I did another pot of just the upper two feet and all the leaves. I have the two- to three- foot stripped stems set aside for separate processing.

This paper is the whole plant pot plus a bit of the flower/leaf tender stem batch. It took intense ( 2-3 minute) blendering for the whole plant parts. Less time for the top/leaves and flower batch. I added a bit of methylcellulose to the vat. I pulled the paper thick, but the resulting sheet is not "thick" but it is heavy/stiff.







Lye cooked Goldenrod can be processed in a blender.... but... you may want to mix it with something else. It makes a marginal paper blendered.
Beating improves it. A bit of cotton helps (I pulled sheets t of it beaten with matboard and abaca, and they pulled like a dream).





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