How NOT to Be Poisoned By Your Food

As we homesteaders begin to rake in the summer produce (while planning for yet more), it may be time for some good advice on how to make sure that the produce you’re buying at the grocery store, at the farmer’s market, and off that farmer’s truck by the side of the road fully safe for your family to eat in this age of imported food, bad farming practices and bacterial contamination.

I am presuming that homesteaders know enough about the critters in the soil (and compost) to be regular produce-washers and cooks who know how long to cook a hamburger or egg so as to preclude any possibility of e.coli 0157:H7 and Salmonella poisoning. But with recent news of e.coli contamination of fresh produce - everything from “pre-wahed” lettuce and spinach and scallions to tomatoes - it’s good to review the basics.

Most of us who can our own produce as well as cook our own food also know that contamination like Salmonella and e.coli can be easily transferred from one food to another if we’re not very careful with the cleanliness of our working areas, cutting boards and utensils, and equipment. Sure, we can kill the critters with high enough heat and processing times, but as a semi-vegetarian, who wants to eat dead bugs either?

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The Most Refreshing Summer Tea

During the very hottest portion of the year I get really very sick of lemonade and regular old iced tea. Worse, I find that I can’t actually drink iced tea after noon if it’s been brewed honestly because it has even more caffeine than coffee. Plus, I live in the south where “regular iced tea” comes complete with about a full cup of white sugar per glass. I don’t like my drinks to be sugary, but I get pretty sick of plain old water too, despite having the Planet’s Best Mountain Spring Water right here in the tap.

So I make some cool summer teas from the first plants in the garden and the last to die out in fall - the mints. In fact, cool summer teas are the #1 thing to do with all those exotic mints - like apple mint, pineapple mint, chocolate mint and lemon mint (as well as good ol’ peppermint). To these I like to add a bit of rose hips, just for the tart flavor and excess vitamin C. I harvest those when they turn red in the fall, then freeze them in a jar for later use.

Now, the very name of the mints tells you all you need to know about the specific taste undertones you get out of them. I like to make my tea fresh, as making it of dried herbs requires less material and no simmering (I use the dry for hot wintertime tea). So in the following recipe, use your mint of choice!

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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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Spring Tonics Present Themselves

Vitamin-Packed Goodies are Popping Out All Over!

I’m sure most people as as glad as I am that “Standard Time” was shortened significantly this year, having never quite made the adjustment to early darkness in the first place. Springing the clock forward early just puts us back where we were anyway all the dark winter long. Easter’s early this year too, and as my mother used to say, you can’t be sure it’s really spring until Easter.

Of course, last year we suffered a hard Easter freeze in mid-April that ruined the fruit and mast crops irreparably - even fooled the dogwoods that were in full bloom! So while garden preparations are proceeding apace with the march of March, and potatoes, lettuce and peas have been planted, we’re not ’safe’ to really get things in the ground until late April.

Despite this, the daffodils are in glorious bloom along with forsythia, the crocus have come and gone, the lilies are growing fast and everything’s budding. All I can do is hope the fruit and mast aren’t ruined this year by another late freeze, but there are many things growing right now that a homesteader can make good use of just because it’s there. All of these goodies are packed with vitamins and serve to help prep the system after a long, slim, dark winter.

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Yet More Pharmacopeia

Links to the Series:
The Homesteader’s Medicine Chest
Homesteader’s Medicine Chest II
More From Nature’s Pharmacopeia

In this post I’ll offer some actual herbal remedies that some have found useful in treating specific ailments. There will be some herbs mentioned that haven’t been listed thus far, but they are all readily identifiable and available at natural food stores or herbal apothecaries if you don’t have them in your garden, on your property or in nearby woods.

High mallow (malva sylvestris), a.k.a. French hollyhocks. Garden hollyhocks may be substituted. Mallow is used to calm indigestion, heartburn, ulcers, gastritis and sore throats. Mallow is high in mucilage, roots can be crushed, boiled, folded into a damp cloth and applied to boils, sores or ulcers of the skin. For a medicinal salve powdered roots can be added to olive oil and warmed before applying.

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More From Nature’s Pharmacopeia

Sassafras Leaves

We’ve already covered wild medicinals like black cohosh, ginseng and goldenseal in The Homesteader’s Medicine Chest, and got the run-down on elderberries in Homesteader’s Medicine Chest II, so in this post I’ll round out with more useful medicinal herbs from forest and garden.

Leaves - I pick a sack full of raspberry, blackberry, goldenrod and sassafrass leaves in the fall to dry and put into tea. The berry leaves are good for colds, tonic, stomach aches and menstrual cramps. Goldenrod is also good for digestion and is useful to treat kidney and bladder problems, coughs and colds. It’s also anti-inflammatory and mildly sedative, good for the aches and pains of rheumatism and arthritis.

The dark red and gold fall sassafras leaves are dried and ground to make the Cajun spice (red) filé. Filé is used to thicken soups and gumbo and to tenderize meats by rubbing. Early spring leaves are dried and powdered for green filé.

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Homesteader’s Medicine Chest II

Nothing So Fine as Elderberry Wine

“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of Elderberries!”
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

In The Homesteader’s Medicine Chest we broached the subject of cultivated and wild medicinal herbs like black cohosh, ginseng and goldenseal. In this late fall period it’s time to harvest one of the most useful medicinals that mother nature offers for free… Elderberries. Sambucus canadensis.

Elders are shrubby trees that grow to about 12 feet tall on the edges of rural clearings and farm fields. They produce flat sprays of lacy white flowers in the summer, sometimes a foot across. In the fall these bear clusters of deep purple berries that are hard to miss. Also called the “country medicine chest,” elder flowers and berries have a history in folk medicine and folk lore going back to the Stone Age.

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