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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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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Home Grown Revolution

Here is a wonderfully entertaining and inspirational video about “urban homesteading” and modern Victory Gardens, brought to us by Peter Seller’s cultural arts class at UCLA using clips from Treehugger TV’s Path to Freedom. Sit back, relax, and enjoy!

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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The Excitement of Discovering an Endangered Species

…right there in the yard for all to see!

I visited the daughter of a dear friend of mine last summer. It was her 12th birthday party, which I wouldn’t have missed for the world - I’ve known and loved this young lady since before she was born. The party was held on a stretch of flat lawn below the house, which is a ~70-year old timber frame atop a tall knob in Asheville, North Carolina.

There’s a path with timber-crossed bark-backfilled steps winding down the hillside from the house to the lawn. At one point along the path there’s a little grove of tall hemlocks, blue spruce and Frasier firs with a rhododendron mid-story boundary that’s cool even in the heat of summer. An old rope swing that doesn’t look strong enough to hold anyone anymore dangles from a lone oak’s limb, a little shady clearing off the main path. There, blending unobtrusively amongst the firs and hemlocks was a different kind of tree - different enough to catch my attention sharply that day. So I collected a needled twig hoping to identify it when I got home.

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The Homesteader’s Medicine Chest

People who choose to live close to the land, to do for themselves as much as possible, and to learn to live in harmony with nature will also tend to want to assume some responsibility for their own health maintenance whenever they can. This commitment may play out in the garden by growing a variety of healthful foods and culinary herbs, and many homesteaders will also cultivate a variety of useful medicinal herbs while they’re at it - because they can.

Those who have chosen a rural environment and have managed to gain control over several acres of land will also want to become familiar with the many useful wild herbs that grow in their region and perhaps even on their property. Some of these are endangered in the wild due to over-harvesting (ginseng roots, for instance, are worth their weight in gold in the medicinal market), so you’ll be happy to learn that a good many homesteaders are making good economic use of their patches of shady woods and forested acres to cultivate these wild herbs as cash crops or homestead medicines.

There is a good deal of information out there about cultivated garden herbs, some linked below. Here I’d like to talk about the usually wild, forest-grown offerings, particularly Mayapple, goldenseal, ginseng and black cohosh.

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More Living With Living Things - Part II

The Kitchen, Porch or Plot Herb Garden

In the last post I talked a bit about planning to use your yard space in such a way as to minimize expanses of lawn that serve no purpose other than making you mow them regularly. Before getting into the fine points of ‘naturalizing’ your yard space, I wanted to talk a bit about planning your herb and kitchen garden.

This is the most fun and useful bit of growing green things any homesteader can do, and it will add a great deal of pleasure to your living space with wonderful scents, beautiful plants and flowers, and the tastiest fresh herbs for your cooking that you could ever find anywhere.

In addition to culinary herbs that you’ll use a lot of, there are some handy medicinals that can also be grown in a yard-based herb garden, and more herb seed and plant suppliers are offering these usually wild-growing seeds, roots or plants for home gardeners and yard ‘naturalizers’. Which means you won’t have to displace any wildings in your area in order to grow your own supply conveniently to your kitchen.

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Living With Living Things - Part I

Planning Your Homestead Landscape

I’d like to take a bit of a break from the hard (and not hard) physical work of basic carpentry, plumbing, maintenance and repair around the homestead. We’ll get back to these subjects often enough over time, as there is always work to do. Let’s talk about living things, because one of the very best parts of choosing where you live is choosing the living things you’ll get to live with.

There are other aspects of how one chooses to live that are important if you’re planning to have a happy life without trading a majority of your time for money you have to pay to other people to keep your own life going. Ideally a committed modern ‘homesteader’ has been smart enough to seek his or her ’stead well away from the gated communities of Yuppie retirement dreams, farther out in the ‘real’ countryside where land is still reasonably cheap and little old ladies on some zoning board aren’t spending their lives making yours miserable.

Even a single acre of land is easily 4 times the space of your typical suburban development lot, offering a considerable amount of room for growing herbs, vegetables, fruit and nut trees, a few grape vines, even some useful wildings to encourage birds and which can produce useful products for the family. The very last thing you want is an acre of boring lawn to mow once a week when you could be doing something fun - or just relaxing in your hammock in the shade of the grape arbor, drinking lemonade.

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