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.

Garbling the comfrey roots & a couple of nifty examples of the Doctrine of Signatures

There's a lot to squeeze into this post!

Early spring and late fall are the times we go after root medicine. Right about now, still early spring where I live, while the leaves of herbaceous perennial plants like dandelion and comfrey are still small their roots are still fat and full of stored goodness.

This is one of my many comfrey plants:

This is what happens when you drop ONE comfrey leaf on your lawn.

Moldy oils, invasive sunchokes and other stories

Just so you don't think it's all fairy dust, all the time ..

As much as I love sunchokes (aka jerusalem artichokes) - for example they were very tasty indeed in last night's spicy coconut milk chicken dish, simmered for over an hour, alongside carrots and new potatoes - last week I became positively irate about how much of the garden they had taken over.