Plants 101(a) - annuals vs biennials vs perennials

High school was a long time ago, I know. And unless you're a gardener, you've probably let everything you might have learned about plant reproduction slip out of your head.

But if you plan on growing or foraging for your own medicine (or food), you need to know this.

Today I'll cover the basics, including examples, and in the next post I'll cover the practical applications for growing or foraging; i.e. why any of this matters.

Hopefully, this won't be too boring .. it certainly isn't complicated.

Hands-on how-to: making your own tinctures

Although I've made reference here and there on this blog to throwing together tinctures, it seems I've never done a dedicated post on the subject before.

What was I thinking??

Actually, what I was thinking was that anyone could find the information pretty easily out there on the interwebz. Thing is, turns out the instructions 'out there' are often needlessly complicated, incomplete or downright wrong .. sigh ..

So today's post, like so many before it, is in answer to some of that nonsense. Hopefully I'll be able to clarify some details, clear up some confusion, dispel some myths and help you to see that you, too, can make far better quality tinctures at home than you can buy anywhere - and do it on the cheap, too.

Like cooking or baking, making your own herbal remedies is about following a basic recipe, learning the ratios, then, as you gain experience, winging it according to your best judgement. There are - of course - exceptions to some of the rules, and I'll cover those too.

What follows is my own experience, based on about 2 decades of tincture making.

The TL;DR version of this post? Plants + booze x time = tincture. But there's a little more to it than that, so read on ..

Learning to ID plants: the tried and true vs apps & the internet

'Apps' for everything, even meditation .. follow the link if you dare. I don't think I've ever seen a a sillier insult to the ancient wisdom of meditation - or to the intelligence of the 'consumer' (there's that word again!) - than that one.

And people who should know better, like the ever-annoying "functional medicine" guru Chris Kesser, actually promote such nonsense with a straight face.

When he links to that (particularly hateful) meditation app even as he recommends that his readers reduce their usage of technology, should we take it as irony? Or lip-service? I can't tell the difference any more.

The prune rant.

An advertisement along the side of my email says "Healthy meals delivered - as low as $4.95 a meal."

Um, no ..

How fucking stupid are people, anyway? Excuses, excuses.

"but I'm too busy to shop/cook/pay attention to the fact that I have become a fucking mindless sheep .."

Medicine Plants and why they're dangerous

Trigger warning - Here is another post that veers into the woo. And it's long. And it's even a little preachy towards the end. Ha!

There's medicine - that which helps us recover, physically, from illness or injury.

Then there's Medicine, that which supports us through life's transitions and stages of growth.

Most people, when ill or injured, simply want to be able to return to their "normal" state of health. But in the Medicine tradition, it is understood that to return to how - and who - we were before the illness or injury is impossible, and to try to is unwise. We are changed by each of these events. They are - or at least should be, from this point of view - opportunities for growth.

Underground Medicine 2 - practical first steps

You just have to start where you are.

So, where are you?

How do you even figure out where you are?

Underground Medicine - part one - Big Herb is a jerk

First, a riddle -

What is the one thing that God lacks?

By definition, God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. So what's the one thing God could possibly lack?