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The wild part of the garden.
Well .. one of the wild parts..

That's a blanket of Self-Heal, the blue you're seeing in the photo.

 I learned, in that moment, that it's true what they say about mosquitos being pollinators as well as bloodsuckers. I reached down to pluck a leaf and up from the blossoms came a cloud of thousands of them - and straight for my tender hide, of course. I was forced to flee the area. Ha! 

We're having the perfect spring. Granted, there's been some Weather, ie an ice storm that was, okay, a bit dramatic in terms of power outages from falling trees. But it came before the leaves were leafing or the crops were cropping so no losses there. And it has meant a plethora of material for those of us who make use of such things as downed branches. I've got jars and jars of aspen oil and a particularly fragrant pot of poplar buds. Yum.

Medicine chest 4(a) - infused oils, two barks and a root

Since the first two items up today are made into "infused oils", I'll start by describing the method for making them in your kitchen. This will be review for some of you but review never hurts!

It's a pretty straightforward process, especially when working with materials that are fairly dry to begin with, like the barks, and they're unlikely to cause you much trouble. But whoa nelly, it can go really wrong, really quickly with other parts of a plant, in which case it's still simple but not necessarily easy. With moisture laden materials like juicy leaves or gooey roots (I'm looking at you, comfrey!) you have to be on the ball or can go all south pretty badly.

But I was thinking about that not long ago and it strikes me that it's kinda cool that an oil can become so riddled, so quickly, with slimy, scary looking mold; I take it as an indication that the stuff we're working with is teeming with life on the microscopic level.

I'm always comforted to know that life on a microscopic level is teeming somewhere nearby. We'd be in a mess of trouble if it wasn't.