Make rope out of dead plants -- with no tools

Step 2 Harvest your fiber

The best stalks are tall (for efficiency), brown (gray is too old), and have high branches (to reduce the number of pesky branch nodes). Gray stalks are from one to two years ago, and the fiber may have degraded by now. Recently dead stalks are more difficult to clean, since the bark has not decayed as much. The happy medium seems to be one-year-old stalks. At the time I write this, new shoots are coming up, so last year's stalks are perfect.

Nothing eats the dead stalks, so feel free to take as many as you like. Be gentle, though -- they are still attached to the living rhizome, from which future stalks will grow. The lower end is brittle enough to snap with a quick side-to-side motion.

Break off the branches and top, but carefully; both tend to take fiber with them. (I define the "top" as the upper section beyond the point where the stem has narrowed by about a third. More intuitively, this is the point after which there are too many branches and not enough fiber.)