Commercial uses of processed Spanish Moss have included packing material, saddle blankets, bridles, braids, and even filament to repair fishermen's nets. Pickers harvested moss from the trees with long poles during the winter, when the plant was less subject to damage by handling. Other methods of curing included piling of moss in heaps of from five to ten feet high, soaking in water, and burying in pits. The color of the filaments would range from glossy black to light brown, depending on how much humus was present in the soil on which the curing took place. These curing processes loosened the gray outer scales of the moss to prepare it for commercial ginning.
Fans blow out the dirt, the moss is loosened up and the strands are straightened.
The moss is then baled up and made ready for shipment. A bale of moss weighs from 125 to 150 pounds. The plant has a black filament at its core which, stripped of its gray covering at the gins, became stuffing for automobile cushions and mattresses. Manufacturers were stuffing mattresses with American Spanish Moss in Liverpool in the 1840s. In the past, doctors prescribed medicines extracted from Spanish moss to treat diabetes.