[bregma]

There was a selective breeding program during World War II to make rubber from the milkweed latex. I swear the annual crop from my back forty could have supplied the entire allied war effort but evidently the quality of the rubber was poor and alas the effort was abandoned.

The fiber on the silk from the mature pods is too short and lacks the scales that cotton has to make it useful for textiles. It is the bast fibers from the stems that make fairly good fiber but the moisture content is very high so unlike flax the fiber tends to just rot during retting.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah the QC company is using the silk for stuffing for mittens, as a kind of down replacement: https://lasclay.com/en/products/mittens

Which seems promising to me, at least.

Again it seems like a plant that with some smart old fashioned selective breeding could be made a lot more useful. But that kind of horticultural work has on the whole fallen out of fashion, it seems.