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.

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.

Garbling the mullein

I love this time of year.

We're not quite in autumn weather yet, but here and there one early scarlet or golden tree stands out on the green hills. We're hearing a few geese gathering on the river below us where they chat all night long. They sound like people from a distance. The nannyberries are ripening, too. So we're getting close.

The purple ones are the ripe ones. There's not much to a nannyberry (Viburnam lentago) but they're a great little nibble. (Don't believe what you may read on the internet about slicing them or putting them in smoothies. If you meet one in person you'll see how silly a notion that is.) They're maybe the size of an egg shaped blueberry and half their volume is a nice flat stone that's fun to kinda 'worry around' in the mouth while wandering down a gravel road. The taste is oddly reminiscent of banana.

Meanwhile on the ground the herbaceous perennials and the first year biennials are putting on a rush of growth. Mullein is looking like it is getting ready for bed in its flannel pyjamas.

This first year mullein rosette is a good 2 ft across. Those ratty leaves nearby are a pathetic, slug-eaten comfrey.