Tea vs decoction (and everything in between)

Some of us been talking about burdock root in the comments section at Tim's veggiepharm blog and in background emails, too.

But we're getting a little mixed up in our terminology about how we're using it, so here's a quick rundown of the 'official' terms for the various kinds of hot water methods used in herbal medicine.

These guidelines apply to most herbs, not just burdock. And yeah, there are exceptions of course.

A crockpot decoction experiment

This post isn't strictly about mullein, but it begins there.

I've got my slow cooker on the counter and it's on a good simmer. After a few hours cooking last evening and sitting to cool overnight it's been humming along all day. It holds my latest experiment, a couple of days' long deep decoction of 4 or 5 quite small first year mullein plants, roots and leaves together. One doesn't usually decoct (as in simmer for a long time) the leaves of plants because they're too delicate; decoctions are for the tough stuff like barks and roots. But as I said, this is an experiment. Besides, mullein leaves are made of stronger stuff than most leaves, and I want to find out just what they'll offer up this way.

I dug the plants out of the snow yesterday as we were having a bit of a thaw - oh man, that was fun - because, well, I have lots of mullein out there and I could. It's been calling me, mullein has.