Stalking the wild grapes

Oh lordy I love fall, it can't come fast enough for me.

Summer this year - with its extreme heat and humidity but lack of rain (with the exception of those damaging storms) - sucked, to put it bluntly. But it did, at least, produce a bountiful crop of wild grapes. And apples.

And the rest of this post is on my other blog. It's a long 'un, so if your attention span is short, feel free to skip it. I'll have other, more succinct posts coming up here in the near future.

Or not. I haven't yet decided if this blog will live or die.

Warning!! Be careful where you gather your dandelions!

You could be tasered for your troubles!

Wolf Medicine (Agrimony)

"Totem" animals - Wolf, Badger, Eagle, Rabbit, Mouse, Mole, Ant ..

Many of us - modern White folks - who have probably never met a wolf or badger or any other truly wild animal, let alone shared an environment with them all our lives, have nevertheless found ourselves drawn to the idea of Totem Animals as our companions and teachers. Never mind that our understanding of the true nature of these animals in the wild can only be, at best, on an intellectual level.

We seem to have a yearning. A longing. An ancestral memory of the time, many many generations ago, when our own forefathers and foremothers lived perhaps not so differently from the way that the Native peoples of North America were living when European explorers "discovered" them. After all, in the distant past, long, long before those explorers set out, even we Europeans were once "Native peoples" in our own lands. We once knew our own animals intimately - and they knew us. Do we not have the right to rekindle that old understanding that lies hidden in our genes?

Because this post fits into both categories - herbal medicine and spirit medicine - the rest of it can be found on my other blog, here

The many moods of monarda (beebalm or bergamot mint)

(click to embiggen the pics please)

I can't think of another plant that has as many names hung on it as this one. But then again, it's a plant that has more uses than most, too, so I guess it's fitting enough. I like to call it "sweetleaf", most Canadians and British types call it bergamot mint, or just plain bergamot, Americans seem to call it bee balm .. which is confusing, since we Canadians sometimes call lemon balm bee balm .. see? It's crazy!

Monarda is in the mint family, but it's not a minty mint like spearmint or peppermint. While it shares the minty mints' nifty combination of heating/cooling sensations, it often has a spicy taste that is more akin to that other cousin in the mint family, oregano, and in some cases, monarda has a buttery feel to the leaves that as far as I know is all its own.

Take no prisoners

Ah, my faithful readers, your writer rages on. Against the machine, against its insidious tentacles that ensnare and enslave and pick our pockets and pick our souls to pieces like crows over a corpse. I rage against the insanity of our commodity culture, where we - our body parts and our sickness and our vulnerability - are one of the most profitable commodities of all.

To read the rest of this post, head on over to my new blog - The Angry Herbalist

The tribe

I'm supposed to be making strawberry jelly right now, from the berries we picked yesterday from our favourite "I don't spray" strawberry farmer's fields. I simmered them down - with some of last year's (frozen) apple peels and cores so I don't have to use commercial pectin - last night; the gorgeous red juices have dripped into a bowl and are waiting for me to get off my butt.

I also have to make a big batch of chilli, get that huge tray of chicken thighs in the fridge marinating for the chicken marbella .. oh, and I kinda have to make some extra bread to freeze, too. There's a heat wave coming our way in a few days; a week long, highs in the 100's, nobody-wants-to-cook-in-that-kind-of-weather heat wave. I have to get ready, or at least as ready as I can, with at least some pre-cooked meals. It's not like we have restaurants up here!

But what am I doing instead of all that? I'm contemplating making yet more coffee and thinking about tribes. Actually, I'm thinking about the tribe I know is out there but I'm unlikely to meet - my tribe. Those who, like me, don't see a mass of green when they see a forest or a meadow, they see individuals, they see 'the standing people', as the First Nations peoples call them.

Tincture of Rice Krispies - (Pine Pollen 2)

It's a drag being trapped in the house in the winter time, but trapped in the house in summer is painful. It's so green and lush out there but we can only look and sigh ..

Why are we trapped in the house?

BUGS!!

In some ways, this being a peak year for insects is a good thing. Those goddamn blackflies and horseflies and deerflies and mosquitoes don't just get by on a steady diet of blood, they're also pollinators. (Well some of them are, I don't know if they all are). And they're food for birds and other critters. Circle of life, and all that. I certainly don't begrudge the frogs and swallows their due.

But this year, by some cruel (to us and the other mammals) twist of fate, these bugs that usually come in stages - first one evil blood sucking, itchy welt producing menace and then the next - are overlapping, God help us.

Right this minute, they all lurk outside our door.

Pine Pollen Ponderings (1) - gathering information

I'm kinda kicking myself here - this was supposed to be the year I get into working with pine pollen and I didn't even think about it until the last possible moment. Grrr! That's probably the trickiest part of working with nature, getting the timing right. Blink and the season for (fill-in-the-blank) is over; you have to wait another year.

Up until the last couple of days I didn't know a whole heck of a lot about pine pollen. I've never used it nor spoken to anyone who has, which leaves me only the literature to go on .. and since pine pollen is right up there in hype-ville with chaga, the "literature" consists mostly of the questionable ravings of body builders and other testosterone addicts and of course page after page of advertorials.

YOU CAN DO THIS!

I'm in a mood, folks.

It could even be said I'm in several moods at once. I was in a real snit, earlier (you can read this post over on my other blog if you want to know just how snitty I was).

There are still vestiges of that snit, but at least there's now a healthy helping of humility to balance it out.

If you were one of the dozen or so people to actually watch the video in the last post here, and if you've been a regular reader, you know that some of us are pretty concerned (putting it lightly) with the problems inherent in commercial herbalism. As far as I can tell, Big Herb has a lot to answer for. Not only is it responsible for the decimation of medicinal plants in the wild all over the planet, it's also guilty of gas-lighting the public about how, when and why to use medicinal plants in the first place.

Think wildcrafted herbs are the better way to go?

Think again.

More pics from the half-wild apothecary garden

This post is brought to you by this guy, who was kind enough to wait for me to run back into the house for my camera:

And then, of course, I started snapping pics of this and that ..

The half-wild apothecary garden - with pics

I was just telling someone about how so many of the Medicine Plants that grow in my garden do so without any input from me, the supposed gardener. In many if not most cases I just stand back and let them do their thing. Whether birds bring in the seeds or they've lain dormant in the soil just waiting for permission and the right conditions, who knows - but the ones that just come up of their own accord are some of my favourites.

The story of my cannabis "allergy"

This isn't really just a story about cannabis per se - which I'll probably refer to as pot or weed for the rest of this post, seeing as how I'm Canadian and to my mind "cannabis" just sounds pretentious - so much as it's a story of discovery. About what works, and what doesn't, for my particular allergy symptoms, and about how I figured that out. (hint, painfully).

For you see, although "they say" that an allergic response is a matter of histamine, that's actually kind of meaningless information when you're going through it. When one person gets runny eyes and nose, another will get dry sinuses and headaches. Where one will have a wet cough, another will get a swollen, dry throat. And if, as happens to me, antihistamines only make you feel sick and spun out and the symptoms don't abate under the influence of the drugs, the point is moot.

And no, I haven't been tested to see if this is, in fact, a true allergy. It might instead be - as many so called allergy symptoms are - a healthy response from my body to get rid of an irritant.

A very strong response that if I I ignored, it would be to my peril.

Spring tonic herbs - getting rid of the grunge

Spring has finally sorta kinda sprung here, touch wood; Paul (my husband, hibernating partner through this long awful winter and faithful keeper of the fire to the point I think he deserves a medal) still has the the wood stove going at night and again in the morning to take the chill off, but the days are far, far better than they were. We had blizzards and ice storms in April! No fair!!

Anyhoo -

There's a blog I pop into once in a while where they're currently discussing the idea of cleansing toxins while losing weight. Because we store toxins in fat cells, when we lose weight, that crud all goes back into circulation; that can be nasty, and it's a very good reason NOT to lose weight too quickly. As I've been offering my 2 cents worth in comments there it's twigging my memory of all the really great options that we have available at this time of year for getting rid of what I like to call the grunge ..

Checking in, briefly.

It's still very much (goddamn) winter here. It's sunny, so that's nice, but it's been really freaking cold lately (-20C at night ffs!!).

The last few weeks of winter can be hard to take.

click to embiggen. or not.

So although I've got my kitchen table writing space back, I haven't quite regained the headspace, so to speak, that I need to write about "heartled wildcrafting, gardening and medicine making". When the world is one big glacier, writing and thinking about green things can set off some downright painful longings!

I'll probably be back at it when the river ice breaks up and the geese start to come back. Late April, maybe? We'll see. I'll still check comments and answer emails, of course. And those of you who follow my other blog might see me there once in a while.

Later, gang!

Pain relief, the doshas & lymph

It's a long story, but the short version is that I temporarily lost my writing space at the kitchen table. That's been resolved (inshallah) so let's get back on track, shall we? I missed you, did you miss me? When I don't write here, the emails dry up. I gets lonesome! 

lol.

This is a post I found half written in draft and finished today .. 

Here's another example of how different the treatment of pain from the herbalists' perspective is from what we're used to; there isn't really such a thing as an everyday, overall pain reliever - that I know of - in herbal medicine. It seems there's no equivalent to popping a Tylenol.

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) ..

Want to see what winter looks like where we live?

A few days ago, this weird winter of ups and downs we're having provided us with one gorgeous day. The sun shone, the temperature shot up just past the freezing - well, melting - point and so of course we headed out for a ramble. Two rambles, in fact, with a gourmet lunch of poutine at the local general store cum diner in between. This post is about ramble #1.

The winding back roads through the hills and forests around our village are our favourite places in the whole wild world, bar none. Just for fun, Paul handed me his camera and I shot a few short videos as we drove. Now these are not in any way professional, so be warned. For the first one I didn't have my reading glasses so I couldn't see what I was shooting. You're looking through the filthy car windshield half the time (hey, it's winter, the car just will not stay clean, okay?). You're hearing the sound of the auto-focus on the camera. And the bright sun and snow make for some overexposure here and there. But there's some of our favourite tunes for you to tap your toe to, and a whole lot of fresh snow and forest scenery.

So if you like that kind of thing, have fun with these.