woops - monkey wrench in the works

Well, we had a good run for a while there, didn't we?

It looks like circumstances will be keeping me from posting here for a bit. Please take advantage of the index on the side bar if you're hankering for my writing (ha!) and I'll be back .. eventually.

What the heck is the Doctrine of Signatures? (link fixed)

Woops, little blog-hiccup there. The post you're looking for is on the top bar.

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.

Tigers don't make good house pets

(Wherein she starts out on a philosophical bent, then gets pretty real about horsetail herb and does a little pep talk at the end)


There's a 'trend', you may have heard of it, known as 'rewilding'. It seemed to come out of something like the same place as the paleo movement; from the idea that we're in an evolutionary mismatch, both with our food and our disconnection from 'nature' (whatever that means) .. and so in one way or another people are reaching for ways to re-establish that connection, or eat and live in ways that are more evolutionarily appropriate. (It's been a 'thing' forever, of course, just by different names.) I'm on the tail end of that hippie, back to the land generation so I've lived that way a bit, and my somewhat older husband, a bit more (he actually lived on a commune in the wilds of British Columbia for a while in the 60's!).

The funny thing is that when people really do put themselves into a position where they are 'living off the land' they discover what humans have known all along; that it's really fucking hard to do. From 'here' it looks noble and romantic, and I suppose we could say it is .. but it's life-threateningly difficult too. Not only that, but when done authentically, it can/will often suck out any and all energy that might have been used for other purposes beyond hardscrabble survival.

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.

What you'll learn here - and what you won't (plus bonus rant)

I dunno if it's there's something up with the planets these days but I'm feeling particularly unencumbered by the need to treat anyone's feelings delicately right now.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still plenty smiley.

I'm just not in the mood to put up with falsehoods, excuses, wilful blindness or learned helplessness. In other words, the norms of society.

10 crazy ideas for better living ..

Here's a post for those who are using the New Year as a launching point for -

A New Way of Doing Things (lol)

It's especially for those who have

Tried Everything 

yet can't seem to shed weight or stop snoring or get it up or get things right in the bathroom. Actually, no matter what annoying/scary/disgusting little health issue is driving you to change things up, these are some thoughts that you might just want to consider.

You know what they say, trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results is the definition of insanity (and it doesn't work, either). Why not try something crazy instead?

The wisdom of Native American Medicine

The mystique of the wise Indian Medicine Man fascinates many of us, especially in contrast to our materialist culture. From Hollywood movies to the "shamanistic" practices taught on the internet, we may be offered tantalizing glimpses into the spiritual basis of these practices but rarely are we given anything like a realistic portrayal of what real Native American Medicine might entail.

Today I happened to trip over this moving video on youtube (of all places!). In a mere 3 minutes or so, it reveals an aspect of Native medicine that I consider to be one of the most wise I've ever seen. If we adopted this into our own health care systems, be they standard medical practice or alternative healing, how much better off could we be?

Taking requests

Winter - for most of us - the time of year we read and plan and read some more and plan some more.

I know there are several of my readers who've already branched into growing/wildcrafting and making their own remedies, and others who are considering doing so.

Mad as a wet hen

Mass production of remedies is antithetical to natural medicine just like mass production of food is antithetical to, well, food.

Do I even have to write the rest of this post? Have I not made my point?

Is it not the height of irony - or perhaps the term is lipservice, or even hypocrisy - that those in the throes of all natural this or organic that or "Paleo" (hahaha) still take nutritional supplements in capsules? While I agree wholeheartedly that it is, in fact, difficult to attain all the nutrients one needs from today's depleted foodstuffs, it's not impossible. Maybe these people could just fucking try harder.

And what of their medicines?

A ranty piece on subtlety in herbal medicine

(Okay, it's not that ranty. But this is a passionately written piece about concepts I consider essential to the understanding of what's behind herbal medicine. Good herbal medicine.)

I call myself a slow learner. I'm not being derogatory, I choose to learn slowly.

I learn best intimately. I don't do well with facts & figures and nomenclatures, they just sit there on the surface of my brain. I need sensory experience of what I'm learning, that's what gets new ideas down into the interior regions where they can hook onto similars and stand facing opposites and sometimes sing harmony with whatever tune's been popular in the play list of my mind that day.

Mixing metaphors may be grammatically verboten, but, well, fuck the grammarians. If they can't follow a thought through all the twists and turns it might take that's their problem. Tidy, linear, quantitative thinking is well and good if you're looking to corral a concept, and tame it. So you can bob its tail and braid its mane and show it off. Me, I like my thoughts free to get into trouble, raid the neighbour's cornfield.

And I wonder, what are students of herbal medicine learning when they're taught along the lines of "berberine is the active ingredient in goldenseal"? Does molecular weight teach us anything we can use on the ground?

Really?

Tea vs decoction (and everything in between)

Some of us been talking about burdock root in the comments section at Tim's veggiepharm blog and in background emails, too.

But we're getting a little mixed up in our terminology about how we're using it, so here's a quick rundown of the 'official' terms for the various kinds of hot water methods used in herbal medicine.

These guidelines apply to most herbs, not just burdock. And yeah, there are exceptions of course.

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.

Chaga is quieting

Chaga - ah, chaga. Just for the moment, forget anything you're ever read about it boosting immunity or fighting free radicals. Picture, if you will, a forested hillside. Birch. It's winter, the sun slants on an angle through the trees. The air is crisp and all is quiet. Very, very quiet.

It's been my experience - and that of one other person that I know of - that when I take chaga on a regular basis, quiet comes over me. I just don't want to speak. I also really want to be outside, in the sun, and when winter comes I especially want to just stand still in the winter sun and the cold wind feels good to me. Odd, eh?