The message of prickly plants

I'm particular to prickly plants. And thorny ones. The bristly-er the better. I like a plant with attitude.

Wild rugosa roses - the best roses for medicine - have extremely bristly canes that fight back ferociously whenever it comes time for me to trim them, unless treated with the utmost deference; meanwhile, their cousin hawthorn's thorns are lethal weapons that can literally blind anyone who blunders into them.

Stinging nettles, there's another one that will inflict pain to the unseeing; and burdock with its velcro-like burrs won't let you pass without something to remember it by.

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.

oh f@ck off (a series)

As I peruse the interwebz, I come across articles - and entire websites - that infuriate me.

Sometimes it's medical research articles, sometimes it's snake oil salesmen hawking harmful products.

Behind all of these lurk ideas that - I believe - endanger all of us.

I think it important, maybe essential, to keep an eye on the enemy, so to speak. If you'd care to have a peek at what I'm finding, I'm keeping track in a running series, the "oh fuck off" series, over at my other site, the angry herbalist. 

I'll be back here with more Medicine Chest posts shortly.

Stinging nettles as a houseplant?? (and pics of glorious chaos)

Why not?

I've grown dandelions in pots on my kitchen windowsill - and let me tell you, a bitter/sweet fresh leaf to nibble on was a very welcome gift in January, (and February, March, and most of April) while I waited for spring. So why not nettles?

I can't imagine I'll get enough nettles for eatin', but that's not why I'd be growing them anyway. What I want them for is this:

little hypodermic needles of joint pain relief!!

Medicine chest - wild lettuce (Lactuca spp.)

Whenever I try to write about wild lettuce (the various Lactuca species) I find myself getting all tangled up in myth-busting. There's a lot of b.s. questionable information floats around the interwebz when it comes to how and why and when to use wild lettuce, and while that may be true of most herbal medicines, I find it particularly annoying in this case. There's so much more to this plant than most people know! The preppers (and stoners) seem to have embraced wild lettuce in a big way and there are scads (scads, I tell you!) of youtube videos about it. And if anyone tends to be - shall we be charitable and say "shortsighted"? - about medicinal plants, it's your average youtube prepper (and stoner). There, I said it.

"Legal opium", they call it. Or they go the other way and call it a "wild edible". It's neither - and yet it's both, if you insist on using it that way. But there are better (legal) ways to get high - wild lettuce is definitely not a 'party drug'. And there are definitely tastier wild edible leafy greens!

In the interests of my sanity (and yours) I think I'll just draw a line under any discussion of its "popular" uses and have a go at telling you about how and why and when I've found it useful over the years. So useful, in fact, that I've come to consider it an essential part of my medicine chest. Remember, this is my experience, yours will probably be different according to metabolism and, as we will see, intention.

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.