Where to find snakeroot

The leaves are dark green and lance-shaped and coarsely toothed. The flowers are cone shaped disks with purple, pale pink, or rarely white.

The flowers bloom from June to July and they droop around the center cone. The plant has one or more stems that are mostly unbranched. The Echinacea pallida is an elegant sweet-scented cone flower with long spidery petals. These plants can be found through out the Midwestern U. Echinacea augustafolia grows more to the north and pallida grows more to the south.

While these plants are similar they each have a separate market value. Your local root buyer can give you pricing details for these two wild plants.

Echinacea augustafolia and pallida are more often found growing wild in open woods, fields and prairies. Echinacea plants tend to thrive in large patches throughout dry prairie land with more sun than shade. Parts Used: herb and root.

For maximum potency Echinacea should be harvested in the late summer and fall after it has time to form mature seed. Both the plant root and herb have market value.

Gather the larger more mature plants, leaving plenty of smaller immature plants to seed the area for future harvest. After harvest, separate the herb from the root where they meet at ground level. The roots should be washed in cold water and foreign material rocks, dirt, and other roots must be removed.

The herb should be kept dry and place out of the sun in a warm area with airflow, such as a barn loft or attic Unless your buyer is purchasing fresh dug roots which they often do the clean roots need to be dried.

Senega snakeroot is found in the wild in open woods, along roadsides, and in prairie areas. It is often found in disturbed areas. It prefers good soil with rotted manure or leaf litter and a neutral to slightly alkaline pH, and full sun or partial shade.

Its natural distribution is from southern Alberta across the southern half of the prairie provinces and eastward into New Brunswick, southward into South Dakota, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Georgia. In Manitoba the largest populations are in the Interlake area of MB, but it is also found quite commonly throughout the southern part of the province. Senega snakeroot takes 4 years to produce a marketable root. The seed requires cold stratification for 60 days before planting, and shows a 60 - 80 percent germination rate.

Young shoot cuttings can also be propagated. Harvesting is usually done in the late summer or early fall. The roots are dug, washed and dried in the sun or with low heat.

The roots lose two-thirds of their weight with drying, and it may take roots to yield one kg of dried material. Wild populations of senega snakeroot in Manitoba and Saskatchewan are currently the major sources of supply for the North American market, and a large tonnage is also being exported to Europe.

Demand is estimated to have an annual growth rate of 5 percent. Because of over-harvesting in the past years, there is a great need to cultivate the root.