Medicine Chest: Prickly ash harvest, learning from the plant ..

I've already written a post (it's here) about my personal experiences using prickly ash for pain. Might be useful to read that first, then read this one.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - I particularly like prickly or thorny plants. Hawthorn, rose, nettle. Motherwort with its scratchy 'crown of thorns' seed heads. And, of course, prickly ash. (Interestingly, all of these have pain relieving qualities - here we have the Doctrine of Signatures in action again ie what a plant can cause, it can treat.)

These plants also make us pay attention to where we are and what we're doing when we hang out with or harvest them. I like that singular focus required for the work. And I don't mind a bit when one of them pokes or scratches me back to the task at hand if my mind has wandered. In this world of multi-tasking as a way of life, it feels good to have hands and mind working together as one.

Medicine Chest - birch bark (saves the day)

Don't read this if you're squeamish about feet. 'Cause this is (partly) about feet stuff. Winter weary feet, to be precise. It's about hair, too. Winter weary hair.

But if you have feet, or hair, or even both, and they're troubling you at all, you might want to read on.

Underground Medicine 2 - practical first steps

You just have to start where you are.

So, where are you?

How do you even figure out where you are?

Medicine chest - combining herbal medicines

The most sensible approach to combining herbal medicines?

Don't.

Unless ..

Medicine Chest - gaining strength and clarity with burdock root

Burdock is a big subject, and I've had a hard time getting started on writing about it.

I've read a shit-ton of articles, book chapters, blog posts and summaries of science-y articles concerning burdock (summaries because I ain't forking out 40 bucks for the full study) in the last couple of days, so many that my head is over-full with other people's words.

My plan is not to offer you a synopsis of those, mind you, I read them just to jog my memory, so as to ensure I don't leave anything out. But - as happens so often - all I've done is clog up my brain with 'information'. What I aim to do when I write about the plants is to share my on-the-ground experience. That's a different thing altogether!

So I walked over to my china cabinet, grabbed the small jar of late summer burdock root tincture I made, shook it well to get the white, creamy stuff that sinks to the bottom mixed in with the dark amber stuff, dipped the tip of my finger in and licked it.

There. That's what I know about burdock.

With the bitter/sweet/vodka-y flavour on the tip of my tongue, up rushes my own relationship with burdock.

Now I can begin.

Medicine chest 5: herbs that reduce tension

I've written about the physical/emotional feedback system elsewhere, in a post I called "Got inflammation? Maybe you're angry."  You might want to go and read that post before you read this one ..

Essentially, the idea is that the effects of stressful emotional states aren't limited to the psychological, they reach into the body, too. The psychological signs of overload bypass our notice because we're just too focused elsewhere to pay attention; when that happens tension can settle into a joint or an organ or a system. It's a bit of a clusterfuck, too, because physical tension anywhere in the body can be so damn stressful!!

Relieving physical tension has the nifty side effect of helping us to think more clearly so we can get to the root of the problem, be it a physical or psychological issue (or both, it's often both). Herbal remedies really shine here because (for the most part) they're curative rather than palliative. I've never found that a steady diet of tylenol cleared anyone's mind .. lol.

Anyway, here are the allies I've found most useful for myself (and other people I've used as guinea pigs) ..

Medicine chest 4(c) - the infused oil that isn't an oil after all (comfrey root)

Okay, well this could be embarrassing - if I embarrassed easily. Which I don't, so we're cool, right? Right.

My plan when I sat down to write section 4 of the medicine chest series was to cover the infused oils in one post and slip the real deal about comfrey in at the end. We all know how that turned out, thanks to my extreme wordiness. And I don't even have a whole lot to say about comfrey root infused oil except ..

Medicine chest 4(b) - the 2nd bark (alder) as infused oil and tincture

I'm still just getting to know the tree medicines. Up until the last couple of years I've spent most of my time looking down at annuals and perennials, those green jewels that grow in my yard and in the many wild meadows in our rural area (including hay fields, there's a lot grows on the edge of a hayfield besides hay and hay fields aren't sprayed).

I wander into forests plenty often (with permission from the landowners) (mostly ..), but I do very little harvesting there. Many of the plants that grow on the forest floor of a mature hardwood forest tend to be rare so I leave them be. Mature trees are not easy to harvest from, they're just too damn tall for me to reach their branches!

But on the edges of forests, along streams, along bike paths and trails, there are trees young and small enough that I can (respectfully, carefully) harvest a young branch or some twigs. Young trees are often plentiful in cities, too, and if the area isn't a manicured park, there's no reason why urban folk can't branch out (lol, sorry) into working with bark. Wildcrafting in cities is perfectly acceptable practice.

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.

Medicine chest 3 - Slippery Elm - the safe and the not so safe.

Here's a surprise for you all, I do some of my foraging in the retail environment! Ha!

Slippery Elm Bark - While we do have slippery elm trees in our neck of the woods (and I'm pretty sure I have a couple of weedy youngsters coming up in the wilder edges of our yard) I have yet to experiment with making my own slippery elm bark powder.

Medicine chest - 2nd instalment (hair tonics and dizzy spells)

This looks to be turning into a series of posts, and the plant descriptions seem to be getting more rambling as I go .. typical me. Don't take any of this as comprehensive, these are snap shots only. And remember, this 'list' is in no particular order of importance, I'm just writing them as they pop into my head. The idea is to throw a few bits and pieces at you that you might not read in "typical" plant monographs elsewhere, things I've learned by experience.

In fact, just pretend you're sitting at my kitchen table listening to me yabber, rather than reading anything authoritative, okay?

Medicine chest - the first 5

Someone was asking me for a list of the herbs I have in my medicine chest .. ho boy.

Seeing as how I've been obsessively collecting and messing about with just about anything that grows in our area for a couple of decades now, there's a lot of stuff in my 'medicine chest'. I've filled the shelves and cupboards of an oversized china cabinet with various sized mason jars, jam jars and tincture bottles and another, the one that officially is supposed to hold the good china, is starting to see more than just my Grandmother's dishes.