Catnip Galore

Lucky me, lucky cats! For years, I've been prowling the countryside for wild catnip and this year I found a motherlode. Snipping the stalks, hanging them to dry, stripping the leaves off and setting aside the flower heads has been a real labor of love.

Finding wild catnip can be tricky. It favors well-drained soil on a sloping incline and is often over-shadowed by wild berry shoots or wild geranium. But once I found one of the hearty perennial plants, it became easier to discover more catnip nestled among the other plants. Every few days, I would check the plants and when they were sufficiently tall, I'd cut them or uproot them and hang them upside down in the mud room to dry.
The problem with the mud room soon became apparent...too much humidity and the leaves weren't drying properly. So I moved everything inside the house to a storage room. Of course, the cats could then smell the catnip and they clustered around the door. Every time I passed that room, they would start parading around, as if to say "C'mon! Open that door!" I finally gave in and tossed them a few fresh cuttings. Big Barney was such a hog, sprawling across the catnip.



From that point on, the catnip dried very quickly and then it was on to separating the leaves from the stalks. Talk about a time-consuming task! I snipped all of the flower heads and put them in a separate container, and then stripped the leaves with my fingers, starting at the top of the plant. My back condition has also affected my left arm and hand, and since I'm left-handed, it took nearly a week of on-again, off-again activity to clean all of the stalks.

I had to figure out how to chop the buckets and buckets of dried leaves. Hmmmm. Cuisinart made the most sense, but after whirling and whirling, it wasn't working. On to the blender. Oh yeah! The blender does a great job, even if takes alot longer. Two handfuls of dried leaves, dropped in loosely, and it ground up to a nice fine powder.

So, the net yield from the leaves is 3-1/2 lbs. I'm thinking that some of the stems are narrow and soft enough to also be ground up and added. When I break them, they're incredibly fragrant, so they should add a little bulk without diminishing the strong scent. Now it's on to making up some catnip-filled toys. I always keep a good stash of various fabrics, so now it's just a matter of making a pattern, getting out the sewing machine and getting busy. The other thing left to do is get all of the seeds out of the flower heads and store them for planting next Spring.

This will make nice gifts for all of my cat-loving family and friends. It's got me thinking, too, about catnip and catnip toys being a nice item to add to the little business I'm thinking about...Goatessa's Cottage.