My wife informs me that someone in this forum inquired about Tobacco. 1. yes, it is too late this year to recover a crop from seed. I start seed in January in a "water warmed greenhouse". Tobacco likes bad soil and is hearty after plants reach 3 inches in height, before that they are "weak". I grow "aromatic" tobacco. or the common use is pipe tobacco. Most cigarrette tobacco is grown in South America and shipped in ---- this allows them to control the nicotine genetically. Please ask me more--I'm sorry I disgarded the message in my state of fatique.

-- Joel Rosen (Joel681@webtv.net), June 10, 2000

Answers

What are the medicinal properties in tobacco?

-- sheepish (rborgo@gte.net), June 10, 2000.

I remember reading some time ago that goats can be wormed by feeding them a plug of chewing tobacco. Any truth to that???

-- john leake (natlivent@pcpros.net), June 10, 2000.

Joel -- Just the man with the information I need! My mother in law grows a beautiful plant in her garden called Nicotania. She told me that it is, in fact, tobacco. Is this true? The flowers on it are gorgeous.

Also, someone once told me that a great outdoor mosquito repellent can be made by burning tobacco leaves in pots around you patio (Kinda like those coil things). How true is this?

-- Tracy (trimmer@westzone.com), June 10, 2000.

Once upon a time, long long ago - yes children, even before I was born - there used to be a sheep-drench called nicotine-bluestone, made from - yes - nicotine and copper sulphate. Still got some of the old bottles with labels floating around the shearing-shed on the old original property. That would have been seventy or more years ago - used for worm drenches - quite poisonous, but an adult sheep could withstand a dose without coming quite as close to dieing as most of it's worms did. My grandfather used to say that he wouldn't dose his stock with anything he couldn't take himself. Demonstrated it too - impressed the heck out of my father and his other sons, but they wouldn't follow his example.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), June 11, 2000.

GM everyone ! The medicinal quality with pesticide laced tobacco is--you'll never have the stress of filling out a SSI application. LOL I'm not sure about others except the drug companies do buy some tobacco. Phillip Morris has a lot of shares of Eli Lily Pharmacutical. I think the plant you mentioned may be ornamental tobacco and is very pretty and a natural insecticide as is most tobacco. Field tobacco would have beautiful flowers also but we pluck them off for crop versus seed. Yes I heard of making sheep dip with it and wrapping wounds with whole green tobacco leaves. Unless you grow your own tobacco and pick the bugs off instead of drenching it with pesticides, than--if at all possible--Quit Smoking !! I'd rather go broke than to lie to you, we are forced to drench crops with deadly chemicals to stay in business. Your government however, doesn't give a #$@% about your health, they saw an opportunity to snatch wealth from both ends of tobacco and they siezed it. Phillip Morris alone has more assets than the whole country and this struck fear into the hearts of government. Quit Smoking and have a great day !

-- Joel Rosen (Joel681@webtv.net), June 11, 2000.

I grew a few rows of Tobacco last year here in Michigan. Started the plants really early indoors. I plucked the big bottem leaves off when the plant got to about 2 feet tall and dried out the leaves, ground them up and use them for a insecticide on other veggie plants (NOT tomatoes or peppers).

We chopped down the plants when they started turning yellow (a few weeks after de-flowering them), hung them upside down in the sun to dry. Then, took and hung them in the greenhouse to finish drying. I'm not sure what we did wrong but, the stuff wouldn't stay lit (when smoking it). We ended up mixing it with store bought stuff and that seemed to help some. What did we do wrong?

-- Peggy Adkins (adkinsonthefarm@hotmail.com), June 11, 2000.

Tracy, I'm sure that burning tobacco leaves would make a good mosquito repellent. When I was a kid and the whole family would go fishing at a slough a few miles from here, the men would all go buy the cheapest, stinkiest cigars they could find and smoke them while fishing. Everyone else stayed close to the smokers. If we didn't the mosquitos would just about carry you off. Some of those mosquitos were easily one inch long. The smoke kept them away though. HOWEVER, any smoke from a fire will deter mosquitos. One of my uncles routinely built a smudge fire every time he went fishing from the creek bank. When he wanted to fish somewhere else, he just picked up a burning stick, scattered the rest of the fire, and used the stick to start a new fire when he got to his next fishing site.

-- Carmen (logcabin_now@yahoo.com), June 11, 2000.

You did nothing wrong, Peggy. You must learn to spear it for nicotine retention. You can learn this easily in a book. Cigarette companies "wash" the burley in additives and re-dry it as they add menthol and the like to aid in burning. The crinkle cut is very effective. Cigarettes use the glue and paper to burn. Pipe tobacco uses additives. I use lighter fluid, What I mean is I just keep relighting it and I keep my tobacco under 4% humidity. The more it goes out the less you smoke. The less you smoke the better you breathe. So what is the downside to this problem ?

-- Joel Rosen (Joel681@webtv.net), June 11, 2000.

On using tobacco to worm goats. We have neighbors who had (thank god its had) goats. They used to worm their goats with cigarrets, I wrote to Joan Bowen and very well know small ruminet specialist, and she published an article on this very thing in Dairy Goat Journal. The amount of nicotin that it would take to kill a given amount of worms in the goats system would also kill the goat. They ended up getting out of goats because their property was "poisoned" seems that all of their kids died off at about 2 to 3 months from nasty diarrhea. You just can't tell some folks anything! Vicki

-- Vicki McGaugh (vickilonesomedoe@hotmail.com), June 11, 2000.

Sheepish, I finally found my big, high-priced herbal book and looked up tobacco. It says that the Mayans used tobacco to treat convulsions and asthma, but that there were no longer any recommeded medicinal uses for tobacco.

-- Carmen (logcabin_now@yahoo.com), June 15, 2000.