Herbal Recipes for Tea and Medicine

Part 2: More Herbs and Their Uses

Part of homesteading in the country or in the city is to become familiar with the land and make it work for you. We grow as much of our own food as we can, and many of us will also (attempt to) grow as many useful plants as possible for various medical and/or income purposes. In the two terraces beneath the grape vines at the top of my garden we grow culinary herbs. The perennials have their beds and spots, the annuals are usually scattered in amongst the vegetables farther down the hill.

But there are other useful plants growing elsewhere on the property. There is blue flag growing at the edge of the driveway and bordering the disc golf fairway (orris root). There are large thickets of wild roses above the cabin and trained to a welded rebar ‘tree’ in the back yard (rose hips). There are small flower beds sporting yucca and yarrow, joe pye and wild sunflower. Our forest is thick with dogwood, tulip poplar and maple, growing in the shade in rich forest loam are ginseng and goldenseal and black cohosh and Mayapple. I can gather purslane and chickweed and cleavers galore, all are great in a muslin bath bag for a hot soak, soothes and moisturizes skin.

Becoming familiar with the useful plants that grow on your property - whether they grow wild or are managed, or you plant and tend them in beds, is a long-term project. You should know how to identify them in all stages of their growth through the year, as well as what parts are most useful when, and for what. For instance, the poplar buds in spring are known as “balm of Gilead” and make a fine ingredient in skin salves for cuts, scrapes or just dry, itchy skin. The winds of March blow them down by the basketful from the tops of 100-foot trees, I gather them as soon as the wind stops blowing. In fall the dogwoods sport bright red berries that are excellent tonic ingredients, rich in vitamins and flavinoids but only available in the fall. The wild rose hips have to freeze before they finally turn red and are ready to harvest, usually in November. Mayapple roots are best gathered in May, they’re pretty much invisible and impossible to find after that, once the above-ground plant has died back to nothing.
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Herbal Recipes for Tea and Medicine

Part 1: Who Needs the Knowledge?

I’ve been drying some herbs my youngest daughter requested from me to make some good-for-breast feeding tea when she was here with hubby and 2-month old daughter Sunshine for the Memorial Day weekend. Seems she’s tried to stay as ‘natural’ as possible while living in the city and being a new mother, and has been steered a bit astray by the not-so know-it-alls at her local herbal/natural food store, who have supplied her with some useless, some highly questionable, and some downright dangerous herbal teas that have of course had their poor effects on the baby’s digestive system. She named a few, I was horrified!

She doesn’t need milk thistle or motherswort or black cohosh or rue. My goodness, don’t these herb dealers have to do ANY homework before prescribing? A couple of these are downright dangerous to hormone levels, and because Sunshine’s a baby girl, will of course affect her as well. I tut-tutted and promised a nice batch of dried herbs that will actually work to help the quality of her milk as well as her (and Sunshine’s) digestion and sense of calm.
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Water As Precious Resource

People used to think about water as an infinite resource. They could use it, abuse it, pollute it and sink their garbage into it with impunity, it would never run dry and would somehow clean itself of sewage and chemicals and industrial waste. This short-sighted view of life’s most precious and necessary resource justified the great post-war “turf boom” expansion of the population into designed suburbs of cookie-cutter houses with neat green lawns and homeowners’ associations that decided they could dictate what residents were allowed to plant, whether there could be a few weeds in the mix, and how often those green expanses of useless grass had to be watered and dosed with chemicals in order to maintain the cookie-cutter expanses of identical expanses of useless grass.

Now that we know water is a lot more precious than we thought, that climate change is imposing long-term droughts on entire swaths of the earth, that unwise allocations have drained ancient aquifers, and that a lot of the water people have to drink is polluted by things nobody really wants to know about, it’s a good time to re-think our entire approach to water. This is yet another necessary change in humanity’s relationship with the natural world that must start in the countryside and outer ‘burbs with motivated individuals who will commit to doing things differently, and educate their neighbors about how it’s done and how great it can be made to look.

Most of the surface and groundwater on the planet is salty. Shortages of fresh water have led to conflicts and open warfare through history. In Bolivia the American corporation Bechtel has attempted to corner the water market in order to privatize it, even making it illegal for individuals to harvest rainwater from their own property. Their model for this ridiculous legislation comes from Colorado, where it’s also illegal to harvest rainwater (because it diminishes downstream supply).
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Algae Biodiesel Steals the Show

Will bee offers a very cool post today on his blog RideLust, Solazyme’s Algae-Derived BioDiesel Passes Defense Department’s Cold Weather Testing.

I particularly enjoyed the lede…

In a recent news release from Solazyme and as reported at this years Worldwide Energy and Trade Show yesterday, their algae-derived biodiesel has passed its Department of Defense cold weather testing. To demonstrate the performance and readiness of their product an unmodified Ford F-450 diesel was driven to the conference fueled by Solazyme’s biodiesel by former Director of the CIA, James Woolsey.

Hahaha!!! Man, I’d have paid real money to see that! There is a real future here, and some folks have been putting in some serious R&D to make it happen. Go on over to RideLust and read the whole thing, it’s definitely worthy!

Paint-On and Print-Out Solar Cells

Great news this week on ScienceDaily, picked up by Nanotechnology News and other outlets that researchers from Swansea University have developed a paint coating for steel buildings that will generate electricity even in low light situations.

Note that this isn’t solar panels on the roof, but the enameled coating on the siding itself. Meaning that metal buildings - including garages, barns, equipment sheds, airport hangars, outlying megachurches and community buildings could all be generating electricity (some from the infrared spectrum current solar cells cannot capture) while they’re just sitting there enclosing space. Put a few regular panels on the roof too and it could be generating more than it uses on a regular basis.

But when I went looking at just how innovative this development is in the overall scheme of things keeping affordable alternative energy options safely insulated from regular people who might just put them to work, I found that the idea isn’t all that new, and isn’t anywhere close to being marketed to consumers of things like metal buildings (commercial or residential). Why do you suppose that is, given the sheer amount of money being funneled into research and development, as well as into actual production?

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Hemp: Our Original Industrial Crop

Back when the country was new, its beloved “father” and gentleman farmer George Washington advised…

“Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere.” [1794]

It was the #1 cash crop in the 13 new states just as it is the #1 cash crop in 50 states today. As a fast-growing “weed” that requires no pesticides or herbicides and very little fertilizers or irrigation, the close-packed stands of 8-9 foot tall plants provided more biomass per acre than any other crop ever discovered, bred or engineered. Its fiber content is 2 to 3 times as great as cotton per acre, and is both softer and stronger than cotton. Hemp paper lasts hundreds of years and can be recycled more often than tree pulp papers.

Hemp’s high cellulose content is a fine base for plastics - composites made with hemp are now used by Mercedes Benz to produce auto bodies and dashboards. Hempseed oil is both more nutritious and more economical than soybean, peanut, sunflower or canola oil. It burns brighter than any other plant oil, and can be used to produce non-toxic diesel fuel, paint, varnish, detergent, ink, home heating oil and lubricating oil. It is as easily converted into ethanol as corn, but can be grown in a much wider range of climates and conditions.

News organizations warn that we are facing a worldwide food shortage in part brought about by the diversion of staple food crops to ethanol and biodiesel fuel production, worsened by reliance on unsustainable agricultural practices and chemical pollution of once-rich “breadbasket” farmland. Our reliance on foreign oil has caused 2 wars in this first decade of the 21st century and killed more than a million people with violence. America alone has sacrificed more than 3,000 soldiers and left some 30,000 returning veterans with life-crippling injuries. Pollution from fossil fuel burning contributes to another few hundred thousand premature deaths worldwide every year. Global warming, if unchecked, will eventually kill tens or hundreds of millions more.

The answers we seek for the future may require a re-examination of our past. Perhaps George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were right. What might be accomplished if we did NOT spend 4 billion dollars a year trying to prevent farmers from growing industrial hemp?

Links:

Fossil Fuel Cuts Would Reduce Early Deaths, Illness, Study Says
1997: Canada Repeals Hemp Prohibition
Energy Farming in America
Hemphasis: Hemp as a Fuel/Energy Source
Vermont House Approves Hemp Bill
Hemp-based biodiesel, NOT ethanol

25 Alternative Energy Strategies - 5

In this, the last five items in the list of 25 strategies, a look at community efforts to become self-sufficient is in order. While an energy self-sufficient homestead can exist in any rural environment, the more neighbors (no matter how spread out) who catch the bug, the more resources are available to be developed for the good of all. It’s the natural ‘next step’ in extending the idea of energy self-sufficiency toward the broader society.

The real “trick” in items 21-25 are the collective will to work together and agree upon sustainable agricultural, building, energy production and distribution practices.

Part 5: Collective Strategies for Communities

When FDR was elected President in 1932 - in the midst of the Great Depression - he addressed the awful situation by means of the “New Deal.” Tucked away in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 which established the huge public works programs, was the Subsistence Homestead Communities project. The plan was to relocate some of the idled workers from over-populated industrial areas into planned subsistence communities they would build for themselves with government money.

Read about the Cumberland Homesteads project for yourself, it gives a rough idea of the rewards community development can reap, even if the whole thing is privately financed by the motivated homesteaders themselves (as it must be today). Sure, there are many grants available for rural community development (such as state agri-tourism initiatives) when there is someone skilled in applying, from all sorts of government agencies federal and state. And some resources available from corporate largesse these days as well.

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25 Alternative Energy Strategies - 4

For homestead and/or community independence

We’ve looked a bit at on-site electrical generation, transportation fuels and building technologies. In this installment we’ll look at some ways of putting things together into overall strategies for homestead independence.


Part 4: Hybrid Energy Systems

In a previous post a short video was offered about as small, 1Kw hybrid energy system using solar and wind offered by a company in Canada. Whether you’re planning to go off-grid with storage batteries or negotiate a price for your excess production with the local utility (and get a “backwards meter”), the same thing is true of energy supplies as is true of general homestead success - diversify. So Here are five hybrid systems, some good links and some cool ideas for planning your alternatives…

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25 Alternative Energy Strategies - 3

For homestead and/or community independence

A Happy Solar Homestead

When we discuss alternative energy strategies, any able homesteader is going to be concerned with building and various secondary retrofits to homes, barns and outbuildings. The more energy the homestead can gain passively - or conserve passively - the less energy will be required to supplement.

In these strategies 11-15 of the series, we’ll look at some of the ways a homesteader can use smart, green building practices and technologies to lessen their dependence on supplied energy sources.

Part 3: Building Technologies & Alternatives

11. Passive Solar Siting and Construction

Whether you’re building a new house or barn, or simply retrofitting to what’s already there, strategies for making the most of nature where you live will help to save on energy inputs.

To make the most of passive solar, consider how much direct sunlight falls on your homesite throughout the year. If you get ample sun (have a site that has an ample southerly exposure), plan accordingly. Big windows (with no significant overhang) can provide direct solar heating in the winter. Dark stain or paint on the south wall will also absorb heat from the sun. Conversely, walls that are mostly or entirely shaded during the day, plus the north wall, should have as few windows as is reasonable.

Limit heat gain in summer by planting deciduous trees (apples are good) fairly close. Also bear in mind that any south-facing roof is a good place to put solar panels or solar collectors for hot water (or both). If you do install these, you’ll want retractible awnings for your south windows because you don’t want any summer shade trees interfering.

Green Building Basics

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25 Alternative Energy Strategies - 2

For homestead and/or community independence

In the first installment of this series we looked at 5 technologies for generating electricity - solar panels, other solar (thermal for heat differential mechanical energy or steam generation), micro-hydro power and wind. This post is about alternatives for basic transportation, motorized equipment around the homestead and in rural cooperative communities.

As the series is about all the alternatives, these transportation-related alternatives are numbered 6-10 out of the 25.

Part 2: Transportation & Motorized Equipment

In 1893 Rudolph Diesel published “The Theory and Construction of a Rational Heat Engine” and was eventually granted an American patent on his invention. His first models operated at about 26% efficiency, which more than doubled the efficiency of steam engines. By 1897 he’d achieved an engine that ran at 75% efficiency. Diesel demonstrated his engine at the Exhibition faire in France in 1898, and the fuel that powered it was peanut oil. It was Diesel’s vision that the engine could be used by small business owners and farmers and run on vegetable oil rather than then-expensive petroleum.

Then petroleum became so cheap that the entire transportation and farming equipment industries went with that fossil fuel instead. Now petroleum is once again becoming very expensive, and the air pollution problem from the burning of fossil fuels has become increasingly dire.

Most transportation - and some electrical generation - still uses the diesel engine. That’s some cars and light trucks, most all heavy trucks, city buses, heavy farm equipment (tractors, combines), railroad engines and ocean shipping. The gasoline engine, which uses a more refined petroleum based fuel, accounts for most of the private cars and trucks. What are the best present and upcoming alternative fuels?

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