I planted about 30 feet of sweet grass (buffalo grass, Hierochloe odorata) plants last summer, and I'm excited to be cutting my first harvests of sweet grass this summer.
This grass is beautiful in bright sunlight because the blades are unusually shiny on one side. A row of sweet grass glitters silver in the sun. Sweet grass is also unusual in that the longer blades bend over in a graceful curve, and eventually trail on the ground, rather than stand stiffly upright like most grasses. It's been used for centuries to make baskets, incense, and sachets in North America (US and Canada) as well as Europe.
The whole house smells like sweet grass when I'm handling the dried sweet grass. The odor is a warm "green" smell something like cut hay or dried grass, but the scent is much stronger than normal hay or grass. And the scent is laced with a good dollop of vanilla. Very distinctive.
The picture shows braids from my first cutting in late June and weighed hanks of loose grass (for braiding) from my second cutting a few days ago.
The large jar contains vodka infused with sweet grass. It's a homemade version of a Polish vodka called Zubrowka. Vodka is normally water clear, but just 0.1% of sweet grass added by weight quickly turns the vodka pale green. I took a small taste and the sweet grass flavor is coming through loud and clear.
The dish and smaller jar contain meadowfoam oil infused with sweet grass. I wanted to show how deep green the oil has become just by sitting a week with the sweet grass. I mixed about 20 grams of grass in 300 g of oil and pulverized the grass into small shreds with a Blendtec blender.
I want to use infused oil in lotions and ... here's the soapy part ... I'm hoping to test the infusion in CP soap in the next few weeks. Supposedly the scent does survive the lye monster, but people who use sweet grass are a wee bit cagey about the details, so I don't have a lot of hard evidence to know this for sure. I suppose an experiment is in order.
