Tag Archives: herbalism

around the farm ~ heart salads

Posted on by
2

the bees have moved on to this new favorite attraction. golden-chain tree. fixes nitrogen, makes bees very happy and lights up the yard with bright yellow blooms.

another corner of the yard is painted purple.

one more nice surprise in the shrubbery department is the tall oregon grape (Mahonia aquifolium) at the foot of the driveway. this is our state flower, and our local medicinal substitute for the endangered antimicrobial/antiinflammatory goldenseal.

speaking of grapes (actually i wasn’t- oregon grape is unrelated to grapes), my sweet wild grape seeds have finally sprouted!

goji and passionflower (maypop) seeds have also germinated. i got my goji seeds out of the dried goji berries in the bulk section at the co-op. i’ve read that if you order them from a seed catalog, you’ll get them the same way, stored inside their berry, which protects them until you are ready to extract them and plant.

the garden began providing actual food this past week, and we’ve been enjoying super fresh salad greens and radishes. i found a mutant heart-shaped mustard green, and tossed it into the mix, figuring whoever got to eat it could use a little extra love.

it might even have been this character who ingested the heart. participating in where your food comes from makes you want to eat your food. even salad. even if you’re five.

lettuce is so pretty.

 

pac choi is, too. we’ve had a few good days of soaking rain, and i love the way each plant arranges droplets of water along its leaves in its own unique way.

the timing of the rain has been good. the earthworms and i could sense it coming and the evening just before the sky opened up, i scurried around putting seeds directly in the ground using steve solomon’s method of creating little seedling “pots” right in place. make a small depression with a pot or jar, add potting soil with amendments, seeds, and a little rain. this section will hopefully sprout lots and lots of dill in between those lettuce transplants.

the next big task will be to transplant lots of tomatoes, many of them into these ghetto sub-irrigation planters made from 5 gallon buckets. that is how i grew most of my tomatoes last year, but this year i have more plants than buckets, and more garden space than i’ve ever had, so some are going to go straight into the ground. not all of the planters will fit inside the greenhouse, so those will be split up,  as well, and i imagine we will spread out our tomato harvest over several months this way.

 

whatcha got growing around your farm?

simple poems

Posted on by
12

mama, addressing sick boy while administering herbal remedies of some sort: “blah blah blah blah blah to help you heal.”

sniffly boy: “i like the word heal.”

10-30-11

“what is fire?”

10-30-11

“the letter E has 3 crossbars and 2 canoe cracks!”

11-4-11

“i’ve got tiger spirit helpers, sabre-toothed tiger spirit helpers, woolly mammoth spirit helpers, bear spirit helpers, and wolf spirit helpers.”

mama, thoroughly humbled: “wow! tell me more!”

more of the list: “owl, crab, sea lion, lingcod, salmon, greenling, and shark. squid and shrimp. deer and elk. mountain lion. porcupine. hawk and eagle and osprey and turkey vulture.”

mama: “any plants?”

quinn: “no.”

mama: “insects?”

quinn: “sure! spider, grasshopper, centipede, ladybug, earthworm, silkworm, glowworm, praying mantis, and rooster and chicken and ‘peasant’ and goblin friends.”

mama: “trees?”

quinn:”no.”

mama: “flowers?”

quinn: “no. but i’ve got cloud men spirit helpers….”

11-8-11

“what is marrying?”

mama: (some sort of answer i couldn’t possibly repeat since i had a hard enough time answering the first time around)

“oh… well, would you want to marry me then?”

11-12-11

“it’s just that the earth that we live on keeps turning round and round like a big bus wheel.”

11-17-11

(“reading” to me from creatures of the woods book) “the east american white-heiny’d elk lives in africa, 150 million miles away…

…the italian squirrel climbs up enormous trees all the way to the top and eats acorns!”

12-7-11

around the farm

Posted on by
2

my brassica leaves are all holey and bitten, but after several weeks of relentlessly drowning green caterpillars, there are still some leaves, and more importantly, the prize in the middle. my first cauliflower! we’ve been harvesting broccoli galore as well- eating lots of it now and putting some in the freezer for later.

pink pearly cherry tomatoes grown from seed…

black cherry tomatoes grown from seed (oh how i love them. the color, the flavor, they are by far my favorite cherry tomato ever.)

i grew one brandywine tomato plant this year, and just as the autumn skies are starting to open and dump rain on them, they are all on the verge of ripeness. this was the first fully ripe one, and only one munch by a slug, huzzah! i am eating a lot of fresh tomatoes right now, and even canned a few pints of chopped tomatoes that i grew my very own self (i can a lot from the farmer’s market for all our winter tomato needs, but having enough at home to can is a milestone for me.)


there they are on the windowsill (background), awaiting their eventual demise in a tuna melt (foreground), pizza, tabbouleh, salsa fresca, or open face goat-cheese-tomato breakfast sandwich.

we’ve also been “farming” the wild edibles lately, foraging for elderberries, rosehips, early apples (only the early ones are ready at the  normal time this year… we’ll make another trip for later varieties), and lots of other goodies. i gathered some hawthorn berries, just to see what they are like to eat, in case i ever need to rely on them as a survival food, and just read in some herbal references that they are a tonic with specific benefits for the heart. interesting! i knew they were edible from the peterson guide, and i found a place where they are incredibly abundant. they are bright red, but when cooked you get a tan colored goo, tasty but could use a little elderberry juice for color appeal. 😉 i’ve also been gathering herbs and preparing to make some tinctures and oils and salves. however, the main “medicine” for us right now is a spoonful each of rosehips and elderberries each morning. vitamin C, iron, immune-booster and yummy! quinn is pictured above demonstrating how he cranks the food mill faster than the speed of light, and i will not for the last time sing the praises of the foley food mill, it is oh so handy for removing seeds and skins from tiny seedy berries.

we gathered some rosehips earlier in the season at a friend’s house, and the other day scavenged a good 6 pounds from near the crab dock. we happened to be there because we had a perfectly good tuna carcass that we were not inclined to waste, from the 26 pounds of tuna i had bought to can, and so we turned it into a tiny bit more protein in the form of a crab. i felt pretty proud of quinn and myself that day, as old timers were walking by us noting our catch after almost everyone was skunked, and we had the one keeper on the pier. for us, of course, it is mostly the being there and the doing it, for crabbing is quinn’s favorite thing ever, but the added delight for him of a successful catch was an added bonus. tuna carcass, by the way, makes excellent crab bait. and the hobbit is very good reading for in between sets. (this is still around the farm, because i figure if you can buy your tuna within a quarter mile radius of your home, it’s pretty much part of the farm.)

“roly-poly fish heads…..”

birthday 33

Posted on by
9

the most special young man in the world made my coffee on birthday morning.

then, after we dined on oatmeal, he accompanied me on a satisfyingly long hike in cummins creek wilderness. he was a reluctant hiker at first, asking to ride in the carrier on my back nearly immediately, and i had a moment of discouragement that we had driven so far to hike so short.

but after snapping a few frames with mama’s camera, he opted to get down so he could take more pictures with the phone. we have some awesome thumbprints to show for that exciting endeavor…

but also a few really nice ones, like these fiddleheads.

some of these trilliums were taken by quinn as well.

trilliums seemed especially appropriate for my 33rd birthday on the 3rd day of april. 3 petals, 3 sepals, 3 leaves, they are so freshly new on my birth day each year. i just love them!

holding hands with my boy got him a little farther up the trail- i’d hold his hand any time.

but then…. what really sold him on this hiking business was when i suggested we collect some elk poop. i just sort of casually mentioned that i’d been thinking of maybe doing that, and that it might just possibly be a good thing to help the plants in our garden grow, and mr. garden himself was suddenly the world’s most enthusiastic hiker! who knew poop could be so motivating?!

i’ve already heard the whole range of remarks about the elk poop, but i am not the first one to have done this. come on people, manure! from herbivores! it’s so completely benign. leave me alone, okay? 😉

they’re just such nice little packages of fertilizer. your hands don’t even get dirty picking them up! (oh, yes we did. about three pounds worth!)

nope, not chocolate covered espresso beans for my birthday….

this picture warms my heart. cedar is such an amazing being, and has been revered by people of this land since long before this tree stood here. we like to surround ourselves with cedar. we have a small cedar tree growing on our front steps in a large pot, to plant on our land one day (all our potted trees are hopeful like that :)), and we also like to have the boughs around us at holiday times. we burn them slowly throughout the year once they are dried out, to let the smoke cleanse our space. it is said that cedar is a guardian against bad spirits. untold superpowers are bestowed upon tree huggers, too, of course. (we are thinking of backpack camping to this spot just to spend more time with this tree!)

my goal was for us to feel refreshed by the time we left and we were successful! we were in the zone, not thinking about what’s next, or whether we want to walk farther, but just being where we were, immersed in the deep green humid mossy womb of the earth, contemplating it all.

we foraged some birthday nettles for mama’s herbal stash on the way back. we also discovered that although the vitamix is reportedly good at eliminating the stingers from nettle in a green smoothie, our kitchenaid does not do quite as thorough a job. we both had minor owies, but i tell ya, it’s a different kind of sting. in the same way women talking about what labor pain is like are quick to qualify the pain: “but it’s productive pain” or “it’s not so much pain as it is hard work”. yeah, there is something different about the sting of a stinging nettle. i don’t recommend going out and doing it to yourself on purpose, but i have to be honest, i expect to sting myself at least once each time i go collecting, and it’s almost a comforting feeling. oh and by the time we got them home they had wilted quite a bit, so i know the stings we got on the roofs of our mouths were much less intense than they would have been if we smoothied our harvest within the first few minutes. that might have been more like birthing a twelve pound baby, which according to my midwife constitutes an “unusual amount of pain” compared to normal sized baby labors. anyway, i’m sticking with nettle infusion, and then adding either “used” nettle from the infusions, or otherwise cooked nettles, to smoothies. nettles are such a tasty cooked green (once cooked even just briefly they are harmless), i use them in anything i’d use spinach or kale in. and i use a green in almost every meal i cook, so it’s always fun to have the variety an edible wild mystical superfood plant can add.

on the drive back home, we made a token stop to look for whales on mama’s birthday, as is becoming tradition. some years we actually spend my birthday weekend doing some quality coast-based whale watching during the migration of the gray whales northward to their feeding grounds in the bering sea. we didn’t stay very long this time and didn’t have any whale sightings, but these two corvid messengers hung out beside me the entire time we were there. (i’m still wondering what they wanted me to know?)

we spent the afternoon getting dirt under our fingernails at our community garden plot, for the group spring cleaning effort. we did a teensy bit of work on our bed, but mostly weeded between beds, and other “community” work of that nature. i scored a bunch of volunteer garlic chives that had sprung up in between some beds, and stuck them in my own so they could actually mature. quinn kept wanting to replant each dandelion anyone would uproot. there were philosophical conversations on the topic of “what is a weed” and he may be four, but he can hang with that kind of discussion. makes me proud. our friend (and community garden coordinator) brought me a bouquet of early spring flowers and made me an amazing upside-down rhubarb cake which we all shared.

later in the day, other dear friends brought us lasagna and brownies! i didn’t even have to make dinner! it was glorious.

quinn loved every minute of the day it seemed, as well. since he hadn’t napped, he went to bed early and i had time to just reflect. i don’t know what i reflected on, and it’s only a week later, but i know that time is so, so necessary and often so rare and fleeting. i was just so grateful for it to happen on my birthday. perhaps i reflected on pulling the proverbial weeds from my life (i’ve been meditating on “pull your weeds, plant good seeds” a lot lately), or maybe i reflected on whether or not something that appears at first glance as a “life weed” really is weedy after all?

zero landfill cup of tea

Posted on by
15

it can be paralyzing to think of the damage our daily actions do to mother earth, and instead of motivating us to change, it can numb us into inaction. in order to move forward, taking one small step at a time is the best way to make real, lasting change. i find sites like one small change and sustainable baby steps to be very inspiring, sparking ideas of tiny little positive changes i can make, that when added up over days, weeks, months, years, actually make a dent in my impact on mother earth.

my latest change towards reducing my footprint involves transitioning away from drinking packaged tea. babiest of baby steps, to be sure! i have always kept some loose leaf tea on hand, but i didn’t have the right equipment to make this kind of cup of tea as enjoyable as one made with a teabag. i also have favorite tea flavors not sold in the leaf, such as tazo passion, which i drank every morning with breakfast. that meant at least one teabag (filter paper, string, paper tab, metal staple) went into the compost every day, and one plastic-coated paper wrapper went into the landfill every day… and having reduced my purchasing of disposable packaging in other areas so much, the tea bag packaging actually stood out to me.

i started by branching out on tea varieties. i got some loose leaf organic rooibos and honey bush teas, and also wild crafted several types of tea leaves by drying nettle leaf, thimbleberry and skullcap, and my own garden provided small amounts of lavender, mint, lemon balm and chamomile.

then i added to my equipment collection a little screeny-ball thingie that opens on a spring handle (here’s a picture because i have no idea what they’re called!) i also sewed some small reusable cloth tea bags from cheesecloth (butter muslin is a good weight/weave). the bags work better for some of the smaller-ground leaves like honeybush and lemongrass.

while i was at the serger, i also made a coffee filter out of the cheesecloth, and began using that instead of the unbleached paper ones. while i had been composting the grounds and filters, it still felt too disposable for my liking, and it will be a cost savings, albeit a small one. (small changes add up…)

finally, i tackled the task making my own blend of passion tea (i think i’ll call it “inspiration” :)). it was actually a process that took a few months of tinkering. i had been saving citrus peels since last winter, when i decided i was only going to buy organic clementines and not conventional ones- steep price hike, but i knew i could feel better about the tripled cost if i was using the whole fruit, including peel. often i throw a teaspoon of the dried, ground peel into berry muffins, or other baked yummy things, but we weren’t going through it very quickly. i gave it a try as tea, adding in various other ingredients (citrus peel and chamomile is amazingly tasty!) and then i realized that orange peel is a major ingredient in tazo’s passion.

the ingredients in passion are “hibiscus flowers, natural tropical flavors, citric acid, licorice root, orange peel, cinnamon, rose hips, lemongrass, and fruit juice extract (color)”. i dropped the “natural” flavors and colors (doh! those are almost always code for something less than desirable for our bodies) and my blend looks more like this: clementine peel, rose hips, hibiscus flowers, lemongrass, licorice root, cinnamon, and citric acid. i’ve also thrown in some nettle and thimbleberry leaves for added nutrition- it’s a high vitamin C beverage, so why not absorb some iron while we’re at it? (iron and vitamin C go hand in hand.) i kept the citric acid, but reduced it to a minor character- it does give it that tangy zing, so i felt it was worthwhile. the hibiscus flowers are delicious and colorful (they make it red, so that part of the passion experience is still there) but they are also far from a local ingredient, so i reduced their prevalence and deferred to the rose hips that can be obtained locally (and some of mine were ones i’d dried myself). we have lemongrass growing in the living room, so that moved up the list- if you can buy it fresh from your local asian market, you can try soaking the stalk and then sticking it in some soil- we had incredible success with this method. licorice and cinnamon are flavors i appreciate in tea in only very small quantities, so i went light on them. our food coop has every single one of these ingredients in bulk, so i was able to supplement what i hadn’t grown/peeled/dried myself. the cost comes way down, as i’ve made it in quart jar quantities for about the same or lower cost than a box of 20 tea bags. one cup takes about 2 teaspoons, so one quart holds enough tea for 96 cups!

what’s your favorite tea? can you make it a zero landfill cup? some of my favorite simple mixes are:

chamomile and clementine peel

chamomile and lavender flowers

rooibos and lavender flowers

nettle leaf and spearmint leaf

spearmint leaf all by itself 🙂

earth mama’s post today resonated so much for me, and the permaculture link within her post is where i snagged the “permaculture cup of tea” image- such a timely find, as a last minute illustration for my tea ramble- go and see the “industrial cup of tea” version for comparison, a great visual intro if you’ve been wondering “what the heck is permaculture anyway?”

informed consent and respect

Posted on by
1

i have several fun posts i want to write, but i just had a week of being put through the wringer and i am going to process this through writing.  (and show off another god-kissed ocean picture from the same day as my sunset ~this moment~ picture. that makes me feel better!)  quinn has had a few colds already this season, and this past week we started in with the tummy stuff. but the weirdest thing- no throwing up, no weird diapers… just a 101 fever, and my stoic little guy complaining of pain, even in his sleep. it worsened until friday afternoon and i was only able to call the after hours on-call doctor… and the unwanted medical interventions and interjections began.  i feel so much gratitude, on one hand, that there are people who dedicate their lives to being extremely knowledgeable about the human body. while i feel i know my way around it pretty well, i sure can’t do an appendectomy, or, at least, i haven’t done it before. it’s just that i can’t fight off this feeling that the entire medical profession is judgmental of parents they’ve categorized in a certain way, the difficult ones, or whatever we have been labeled. i’d like the same amount of respect for the informed decisions i make, that all other parents seem to be granted for just following whatever mainstream medicine dictates. being discerning about which health care choices are made, asking pointed questions, and doing things in a non-mainstream way seem to put me in that “difficult” category and therefore exempts doctors from showing me any respect. speaking with the after hours on-call doc, about, (remember?), a tummy ache that i was trying to make sure wasn’t appendicitis, i was questioned about the status of my son’s foreskin (you tell me, if you figure out the connection) and was lectured about my “risky” choice about not having given my son his “immunizations”. i didn’t even know there were still doctors under the (false) impression that vaccines offered actual immunity, but okay. i didn’t offer myself up for this grilling session, and answered simply “no, we do not vaccinate.” then was belittled (you do know what obtunded means, don’t you?), lectured, and had scare tactics performed on me until i finally asked, ” is there a particular vaccine-preventable disease that you are concerned about, given the symptoms i have described?” oh, um. no.

then the mutant virus from hades decided to go away for exactly 24 hours, then come back in full force in the middle of his nap on sunday. the pain woke him up. i needed for a physician to look at him in person, and thank you to mom, for reminding me that i will never regret a decision like that! we went to the e.r. i fended off rectal thermometers, and had to answer for slightly-longer-than-comfortable why i was declining. i fended off an i.v. because it had  not been determined that he needed it (he didn’t). and had to answer as to why i was declining, of course, though at this point the nurse had noticed that i actually wanted to exercise my freedom to choose exactly how my son was poked and prodded and she really turned out to be the most respectful of anyone we encountered. i declined  a catheter because i could not see that a urinalysis would tell us what the blood test would not (i did allow them to draw blood to check his white blood cell count, to rule out appendicitis, and he was so brave!) i got more crap for not vaccinating- the e.r. doc must have left his edit button off: ” well that’s scary!” hmmm…. he’s saying he feels scared? i can’t think why- surely he has had all of his “immunizations”? we left once it had been determined that quinn’s white cell count was “boringly normal”. phew!

following up with our normal pediatrician the next day, i wasn’t feeling so on guard- foolishly thinking i needn’t be, and then found myself just plain aghast when the doctor attempted to force my son to take tylenol. he stated simply, “i willn’t do it.” (priceless.) his sense of free will is more intact than that of most three year olds she has come in contact with, i’d wager, and although she declared that oh yes he would take this medicine (before forcing open his jaws, holding his nose, and squirting it into his mouth via syringe), he swallowed not one drop of that stuff. i apologized to him later, for not seeing that coming, and told him i would not have chosen to try to force him to take tylenol if that is not what he wanted in his body. (in general, we only take tylenol at home when we really feel there is no other way to go, and we never take any of the scary red-dye version. i can’t help but think the high fructose corn syrup delivery medium does more harm than good. we opted for wet sock treatment and yarrow and lemon balm tea when we got home- no artificial colors or sugar, and he drank it right up and the fever went right down… but the bottom line is, it is his body and his choice!!!)

i kind of thought they usually let the parents handle administering tylenol….? something tells me we’ve been labeled as that crazy family, or i’m that inept mom, and they’ve got to intervene and do things the “right way” since i can’t be counted on for that. at any rate, i’m researching holistic family practice doctors in the area, since this is the one and only local pediatrician practice, and i’ll be happy to never darken their door again. they’ll probably be happier, too.

maybe there is a positive spin in here somewhere, if i look hard enough. i suppose there is always empowerment, whenever we are bullied and inspired to take our business elsewhere. i want to support healers in my community who are focused on healing, not fear.

sunday (un)school

Posted on by
4

some people think unschooling is all about getting to sleep in, but i would disagree, it is about getting up whenever you want to. yesterday (sunday) we got up at 5:30 to catch a negative low tide (when the water is below mean low water level and therefore an unusual amount of beach and tidepools are exposed). at high tide all of what you can see in this picture is underwater:

this is how much fun it is to explore “balloon algae”:

we have found that only at the lowest low tides can we reach the tidepools where the sea urchins love to dwell. these are one of my favorite invertebrates!

you get to eat snack whenever and wherever you want, in unschool. and it is almost always organic. here you can see the trash we carried off the beach with us- mostly old fishing gear:

we decided to study a little geology:

but only until we got bored. then we decided to practice tossing rocks into the water, and coiling “kelp rope”:

mama took a little detour to stalk one of her herbal interests: angelica.

higher powers did tricky things with the light, reminding us of their presence among us:

unschooling is all the things we like about church, school and all of life, rolled into one, without all the things we don’t like.

our play tables

Posted on by
2

i was inspired recently to make our dining room table more available for eating again (we rarely eat there, but it’s nice to be able to if we want to) but i needed some place for all the piles of books and random trays of drying herbs to go…. so i set up a table i had found next to a dumpster recently and propped it up using some reclaimed pvc pipes, because then i could sit at it on my old bar stool (i love to “perch” but haven’t had a place to do so since living in this house). as i worked on this, i realized that enormous amounts of intention and self-nurturing energy were going into this, and it really took on a life of its own once i started moving the piles of books around. i like to have a name for each little “nook” of the house, but desk did not feel quite right. then i thought it’s my unschooling table… then i realized, that where quinn does his best unschooling, is a little nook otherwise known as his “play table”. so i decided that this is mama’s play table:

it’s really not much to look at, not nearly as stylish as quinn’s play table (built by his dad for his second birthday).

quinn at play table age 2

play table tree legs from below

still, i am having a blast playing……

the latest addition was that i finally got my mp3 player hooked up to some speakers so we can have tunes on random all evening long while we “play”! unschool is so much fun.

magical elders

Posted on by
1



it’s been a wonderful week of hiking, tree climbing, and foraging. spending time with the elders (giant cedar trees, watchful owls, and berries of the elder variety). quinn and i were driving down a road toward the drift creek wilderness near our home and this owl was looking down at us. we spent the longest time contemplating each other.


finally she flew away, and we went about our business, collecting elderberries. the local elders here are the red variety, not the black/purple ones we know from back east. all elderberry trees have the same toxins in all their green parts (something related to cyanide) and so the only edible part is the ripe berry. in the case of red elder, it’s suggested in some places that it isn’t at all edible, but it’s known that the natives in our area depended on it heavily for food (losey 2003 in the journal of archaeological science). 


once it’s cooked and the seeds have been removed, the berry flesh is not only harmless, it also contains the wonderful immune-boosting characteristics of other elderberry cousins. even the national institute of health admits that elderberry extract is useful to deal with flu symptoms (slight pause while everyone runs away from my post to go and pick some in advance of this year’s H1N1 season….) they have lots of antioxidants, as well as more vitamin C than oranges or tomatoes. vitamin A, calcium, thiamine, niacin are also present. i also read that elderberries contain twice the calories of cranberries and three times the protein of blueberries!

some birds and butterflies depend on elder for their nutrition. and last but not least, the elder wand, the most powerful wand in the wizarding world of harry potter, was made of none other than the wood of an elderberry tree.

have a magical day!

mama unschool course; wild herbals and medicinals

Posted on by
2

one of my ongoing self-taught areas of study (i think of them as mama unschooling courses) is basically, all things plant. i have been reading widely in plant field guides, and especially focusing on edible and medicinal features of wild (i like to think of them as free range) plants. i’m putting together quite a little herbal first aid kit, and these days the hot items are all ripening and blooming all at once! here is my harvest of self-heal, from none other than the lawn in our backyard! (luckily i know for sure that the owners have not used any chemicals in all the time they’ve owned the place, and it has been that way for years! phew! free range AND organic!)

self heal

self heal will mostly be featuring in a healing oil i am planning to make, which will then become a salve for cuts and abrasions (we call them “owies” in the trades). i’ll let you figure out what special herbal magic this plant does (hint: refer back to the common name!) it is also used in teas and infusions.

stinging nettle infusion

speaking of infusions, this is an infusion of my favorite plant at the moment, stinging nettle. it has been sort of a totem plant for me, lately. the more and more i read of its amazing qualities, each and every one of the things it helps with are things that… i need help with. i have been learning that i run low on the temperature scale, which may be a sign of lowered thyroid, a problem i never would have thought to look into. some of the minerals that nettle is rich in are said to be helpful in this area. in addition, i have been running borderline anemic on my iron levels, and nettle is fabulous both for iron and vitamin C, the necessary cofactor for iron uptake. i started this week being more consistent with preparing an infusion of nettle leaves for myself, and have been really enjoying it with a sprig of spearmint added, though the flavor of nettle is wonderful on its own as well. covering the “tea” while it steeps retains the goodies that would be lost through steam, and letting it steep for a couple hours allows more of the goodies to be released into the water. i can go on and on about nettle at the moment. the only thing i’m NOT going to tell you is where my secret little patch of it can be found in the wilderness!!!

what i love most about herbalism, is that many plants are able to nourish us in far more ways than just the issue we may be targeting. i can’t tell you how many times i’ve read now of nettle that it is “a nourishing tonic” which basically means- eat and drink this! it’s just pure goodness! in addition, plants seem to work in much more subtle ways that encourage real healing, by stimulating one’s own body to do the healing itself. (“tonics” are used over the long term, to encourage this type of healing and strengthening of the body.) finally, i’m enjoying having a much more pleasant relationship with this plant that was purely a pain when i was a kid, accidentally running through patches of it with bare legs in the summertime. stinging nettle is notorious for its bristles that break off in exposed skin, and causes bothersome irritation. strangely enough, stinging nettle- as in, the actual stinging factor- has been used throughout the ages as a remedy for rheumatism. i’ve noticed that when i’ve obtained a few minor stings recently, that i could almost understand willingly bearing this type of pain, in exchange for having arthritic pain removed. i’ll certainly keep that tidbit tucked away for later in life, in case i need to give it a try! (i’m also privy to the knowledge that touch-me-nots, a.k.a. jewelweed, are a remedy for the sting of nettles! another little fun fact to tuck away, in case you or your kiddo has a run-in with nettle.)