Fire....honey?

Every heard of Rosemary Gladstar's fire cider? Oops, I think that is now a trademarked term. Anyway, she throws some garlic, horseradish, ginger root, cayenne and few other things in a jar and covers everything with apple cider vinegar and lets it sit for a few weeks. We've made it and it does help with colds and flus and such but only one person in my family likes vinegar so we don't tend to use it as much as we probably should. So I decided to try some in honey.

A favorite cough syrup around here is to cook some onion carefully in a bit of honey and then add some fresh lemon juice. It's fairly effective and tastes good, surprisingly, and it always makes the littles feel better just to get some special treatment. So, for my 'fire honey', I put in some horseradish root, some garlic, an onion, a bit of cayenne pepper and a few slices of lemon that I had in the freezer. I'd put some ginger root if I had any, but I don't. I don't know if this will work. It may ferment and work out perfect, it may turn to mead with the lemon liquid in there, although I don't think there's enough of that to make mead, or it may grow weird things. I giess we'll find out!

I'm going to let stuff settle a bit, but I think I may have to add a bit more honey. The other jar is fir twigs in olive oil. I like to use this stuff in my homemade lotion, love the smell of it!

One more use for, or from, plantain

As I believe I've said before, plantain is one of my favorite plants! It's usually considered a weed and is very fond of lawns and any other place it can get enough water. It has medicinal uses. One more thing I like to use it for, it's seeds. There's no sense in wasting a resource and it's easy pickins.

Now, the seeds are small and it would take quite a bit to get a large store of them, but in many places there are large patches of the plant so that would be easy to do. Of course, this doesn't work quite as well in lawns since they are generally mowed and so the plants don't get to make seeds.

The seeds are produced all along a large stem. To harvest, I just pinch the stem in between my thumb and forefinger, with my hand cupped to catch the seeds, and run up the stem to strip the seeds. The narrow leaf variety has less seeds per stem, but the same basic idea. I throw the whole thing my harvest container, usually a jar or large plastic tub from some sort of food. It takes no time at all. When I get back to the house I run the contents of my container through a sieve to help winnow out the hulls. Easy peasy!

The seeds can be used in any way you'd use any other small seed. I usually just use them in soups and breakfast porridges but you could put them in/on bread or anything else. They are super tiny, although they do swell a bit in cooking, at least when cooked in liquids, not sure what they'd do in bread. The hulls can also be used like psyllium husks if desired. I sometimes throw them in soup as well. If I've been very lazy and haven't separated the hulls at all, I've been known to toss the whole mix into soup.

I don't know the exact benefits as far as what vitamins and such are in plantain seeds, but most seeds are quite nutritious so I'm sure these are as well. At the very least, we haven't died yet. :)

Elderberries, yum!

Well, we just got back from a vacation to the Oregon/Northern California coast. Despite the smoke, it was awesome! I've forgotten how green and wet it is there! I really miss the nice swimming holes with clean water. Best of all, though, I found some elderberries! I haven't really had any since we moved away from that part of the country. I'm growing some, but they're young and have only just started production.

These ones are sambucus cerulea,

Dandelion Salve

I love dandelions!

They have got to be one of the most useful plants around, in spite of their reputation. You can eat the whole plant and use it medicinally. This post is about a salve made from the flowers. Yes, the flowers.

Homemade Hair Detangler

I've never really been into hair detanglers, but if my little one even thinks you might be thinking about brushing her hair, she has a fit. She has one of the most tender heads I've ever seen! I went looking online and found several recipes for homemade ones using marshmallow root. The only marshmallow root I have is powdered and, while it worked well, the little grains that I just couldn't filter out really did a number on the spray nozzle. The key seemed to be the mucilage so I figured I'd try oatmeal. It works very well! I just make more of an oat water vs oatmeal.

As usual with me, no measurements.

Here's my oats and water.

I made this batch a bit thick, so I had to strain it through an old milk filter. The thicker stuff works great, but tends to clog the nozzle and also makes a mess of everything it hits.

Here you can see the thicker stuff separated from the thinner stuff that I'm after for the spray bottle. After straining, if necessary, I just add a bit of apple cider vinegar to it. It doesn't last very long with my kiddos, but it probably should be kept in a refrigerator if you are going to keep it more than a couple days. I've also been using some of my hydrosols as the base water and it makes the hair smell sooo nice!

Here's some of the mess from using the thicker stuff in the spray bottle.

As I said, the thick stuff works very, very well, but the thinner stuff works as well. Especially if you spray it on the hair and let it set a minute before brushing. Oldest child absolutely loves what it has done for her hair. It's not near so rough as it used to be and it's much more manageable.

I still use the thick stuff as a hair rinse in the shower. I make up a strong tea with horsetail, comfrey, calendula, nettle and sometimes rosemary. Then I soak the oats in the tea for a bit, strain and bottle with some apple cider vinegar. I just keep that in the shower and use as a final rinse after washing hair. I just leave it in, don't rinse it out.

It does seem to help with dry hair and split ends. Not as much as a good oil treatment, but I rarely actually get around to one of those.

Distilling Hydrosols

This has been sooo much fun! I love putting together new projects and all the new stuff I learn whilst doing so! This time, I made a still to distill herbs/plants into hydrosols and/or essential oils. I probably could have bought something off ebay cheaper than this, but wouldn't have had near as much fun. :D

I started with two stainless steel stockpots. These aren't the good ones, just thin, pressed sheet metal.

 The bottom pot is where the water to be boiled is to go. I cut a hole in the lid a bit smaller than the bottom of the smaller pot. That black thing is a gasket to help with steam escaping.

 Next I drilled holes in the bottom of the smaller pot (forgot to get a pic) this is the chamber where the plant material will go. That will allow the steam to come up through the plant material instead of being boiled. Different plants seem to have different outcomes on being boiled vs steamed with some doing better with one method and some better by the other. I figured this would allow me to do both as needed. I can put plant material in the bottom pot with the water when needed, no problem.

I used those rubber rings that are in a lot of 5 gal bucket lids for my gaskets. Cut them to length, the ones on the edge of the pot itself area also split down the middle.

Then I added a copper funnel I acquired on ebay and attached a copper fitting to the top. Then another fitting that necks down to 1/2", that's what size the copper tubing for the condenser is.

The condenser coil sits in an old 20 gal plastic tub that I used to use for rabbit water, it already had the hose inlet and outlet doohickies (yes, that's a technical term). And, yes, it's a redneck operation. :)

The bottom pot with water.

The top pot full of catnip.

This lid ended up being cut out, too, since the funnel was exactly the same size as the pot and I couldn't get it to sit right. Using the lid, flipped upside down, allows a platform for the funnel to sit on.

The finished product.

Yes, it is held together with rubber bands. Hey, it works. There's also a couple of those big, black paperclip thingies on there as well. The steam goes up through the plant material and out the top of the funnel into the condenser coil and the condensed fluid comes out into the gallon jar.

It worked very well for a trial run. I do think I should get another 10 feet of copper tubing so I can have more distance between the distiller and the condenser. I didn't even fill the blue tub halfway since I don't have that much confidence in the hoosier standing up to that much weight. I'd like to be able to lower the tub a bit onto something more substantial and fill it all the way. Even better would be to fix up the 2 burner propane stove and do it outside. That would avoid heating the house and allow easier filling and draining of the blue tub. I could hook a hose to the inlet and refill as needed with no trouble.

I also need to do something better for gasket material. My husband says I should try some sort of silicone engine gasket stuff/thing that he uses at work a lot (I forget exactly what it was). Says it'll stand up the heat better.

But still, not too bad! So far today I've made some catnip distillation and am working on some fringed sagebrush (artemisia frigida). It smells very nice in here! I'm hoping the catnip distillate will work just as well as the catnip tincture as a mosquito spray. We'll see.


.Fringed sagebrush ready to go.

A bit of the finished catnip distillate.

I can see that this is going to be way too much fun and I will end up with way too many jars of various distillates laying around the house!


ETA: Here's the sagebrush distillate. You can kinda see the essential oil floating on the top of the water. Not much, but you can see it.

 You can barely see it in the pic, but there is oil floating on the top. You could really see it quite well when looking down in real life.

Starry False Solomon's Seal

So, since I have a hard time growing the more standard medicinal herbs, I've decided to really start trying to learn how to use the native plants and non native weeds such as dandelion. Well, actually, I already use my weeds, dandelion, shepherds purse, plantain, lamb's quarters, etc., so I'm going to focus on learning a few of the native plants that grow on my place this year.  One of them is Starry False Solomon's Seal. This plant has been through several latin names but the current one (I think) is maianthemum stellata. There's a huge patch of this in the largest gully we have.

So I did some research and then went harvesting. The leaves are supposed to be useful as a tea for coughs and colds. The rhizomes are supposed to be good for certain lung and heart issues. I think they help improve circulation and remove excess water. It's also supposed to help with sore joints and arthritis. The powdered rhizomes are a nutritive that's supposed to help tone the stomach among other things. I didn't dig enough to be worth drying and grinding. Instead I'm tincturing most of the rhizomes and infusing a small amount of them in honey. Hubby has sore joints sometimes, so I may try that out on him. I'm also drying the leaves to try when someone gets a cold. I'll just have to play with this one a bit throughout the year and take lots of notes.




Here's my harvest.

The rhizomes separated from the upper parts.

The washed rhizomes.

 

The leaves hanging to dry. There's a dandelion flower oil and a cottonwood bud infusing in oil in the background.

The big jar will be filled with alcohol to make the tincture and the little one is getting filled with some of my honey from my bees to make an infused honey.

Here's the little jar full of honey and chopped rhizome.

A dog, a wound, some silver and some honey

A couple of our dogs got into a scuffle Friday night. Why do they always do that sort of thing on a Friday night or Saturday morning when you can't get to the vet? Anyway, it wasn't really a big deal as there was only one wound, a small puncture on a foot. The only real danger was from infection. I just washed it off, saturated the area with colloidal silver and then put on a pad with honey and wrapped it up. I did that all weekend and it's healing beautifully!

I've just recently started experimenting with colloidal silver and so far I'm impressed. I've just used it topically so far, but in every case, it's been impressive. They've only been small things, but infected hangnails or scratches and such have always cleared up with an application of silver. I usually spray some one and then cover with a bandaid overnight but even  the longer scratches that aren't covered by a bandaid have done well. I figured between the silver and honey, infection didn't stand a chance, and so it was.

Here's the wound after 2 days. I wish I'd thought to take one at the first, but I was busy getting it taken care of and didn't think of it.

It's looking good enough and healing up so fast that I think I'll leave off bandaging it anymore. Although this dog has been pretty good, there's always the risk of the dog chewing the bandage off and ingesting it or causing more damage. I've had that happen before. The dog is walking on the foot and keeping it pretty clean so I think it will scab up shortly and do just fine. I'll just keep her inside mostly til it does scab over.

While I try and get animals to a vet when possible, sometimes it's not possible and it's good to know a few things that can at least help til I can get to a vet.

Mullein

Today I got a small harvest of mullein root to experiment with. I've used tincture and teas of the leaf for respiratory issues before, but that's all so far. I've made oil from the flowers as it is supposed to be unexcelled as treatment for ear infections, but have never had an infection in the house to try it with. That's ok. :)

I have read that tincture of the root is supposed to be helpful in treating back pain, especially if it's because your back is out of alignment or have disc issues. My husband has some of these issues and an old dog as well, so I'd like to experiment with this aspect of mullein. We tend to be annoyingly healthy overall (knock on wood!) which makes getting firsthand experience with some of these herbs kinda hard! We just tend to bumps and bruises for the most part, with a couple of fairly spectacular lacerations a couple of times. So, I'll make a batch of this stuff and play a bit.


My mullein fresh from the field

Washing the roots.

 A nice pile of leaves for drying as I already have a fair bit of leaf tincture this year.

 Leaves drying and tincture 'tincturing'.

Shepherd's Purse

Another one of those useful weeds, although I had to help this one along here. Our first summer I broadcast a packet of seed all over. It apparently was happy with the accommodations and decided to stay and multiply. Which is good!


Shepherd's Purse, botanical name Capsella bursa-pastoris. The seedpods make identification fairly easy.

I use the whole, fresh plant and make an alcohol tincture from it. Some sources say it can be dried and some say it loses it's oomph quickly when dried. Even the tincture has a pretty short shelf life, a year or less, so I make fresh every year. It's main use seems to be hemorrhage, specifically for the uterus. That's how I generally use it. I used it on myself after my stillbirth as I was bleeding more than I was comfortable with. It worked very well there. I have also used it if I have too much bleeding when castrating, as can sometimes happen with older animals. It also works well in that application. It's one of those plants that doesn't seem to have a wide range of uses and doesn't get used a lot, but comes in very handy when needed.

The basal leaves of Shepherd's Purse

Some Shepherd's Purse in with a mess of other weeds.

Catnip

Catnip is a very sensual plant. It's soft in a velvety sort of way, has an intriguing, pungent scent, is mildly narcotic for many cats, has many uses and grows like a weed. And it's just pretty to look at. The bees also like it when it flowers.

Not everyone likes the scent, but I do. It's just.................herbal. When I see products that are scented 'herbal scent', catnip is the plant that springs to mind. Although I don't think many of those products actually use catnip. Anyway.............

Catnip is mildly sedative and mildy diaphoretic, making it especially useful for children. I use it as a sedative every so often, but I find it especially useful when I have a sick kiddo. It helps them sleep and sweat through a fever. If drunk cold, the tea acts more as a diuretic, not so useful in the sleeping department. :) Being a mint, catnip is also useful for indigestion. Combined with the sedative effect, again, it's very useful for children. Oldest child likes to just chew on a leaf every now and then, I don't know why.

Cats, many of them, find it mildly narcotic. I've had enough  cats to have seen quite a variety of reactions. One cat I had would get high as a kite on it, but the low afterwards must have been pretty bad because after a hit, he wouldn't get near the stuff for months. Eventually he'd forget about it and do it again. Another cat just seems to find it mildly pleasing. She just rolls in it for a bit and the curls up somewhere and goes to sleep. Some cats don't seem to get anything from it at all.

Catnip, for me, is extremely easy to grow. In fact I can't not grow it. That stuff reseeds itself like nobody's business. I not only have seedlings coming up in the herb bed, I have them coming up in the garden aisles, several beds surrounding the herb bed and in the grassy area 50 yards off. I have to say, looking at where the seedlings appear, you can definitely tell the direction of the prevailing winds around here. It does seem to like a fairly fertile soil that is well drained. I didn't have much luck with it in poor clay soil and when I lived on an alkali flat. Here, though, well.............


And my very favorite reason to love catnip................mosquito repellant!! I make a normal alcohol tincture and dilute it 50/50 with water, then put in a spray bottle. Works very, very well for mosquitos!!. The main disadvantage, to me, is that it doesn't last very long. I just carry a spray bottle with me and reapply as necessary, but I do want to experiment a bit with it. My husband says the main disadvantage is the smell. What does he know? :D Anyway, I've though of maybe mixing a light oil in with the tincture and seeing if that helps with longevity. I also want to try catnip essential oil and see how that works. It would probably last longer. Anybody else tried anything along those lines or have any ideas?

Garlic!

If I could only have one herb, it would be garlic! It's one of the most versatile herbs I can think of. It's great for cooking and has many medicinal uses. Reading about it, you find out that it's good for infections of all sorts, can help with cholesterol, good for the immune system, good for yeast infections, is antifungal and can help with fleas if you're a dog.

I don't have personal experience with all that, but we do use it quite a lot around here. We take it raw at the very first sign of a cold or flu and, 9 times out of 10, it knocks it flat. If we wait a day or two, it doesn't knock it down, but it does drastically shorten the duration of the illness. I generally take 2-3 cloves throughout the day, chopped fine and taken with water. I do have to take it with food or it can make my stomach upset. For the little ones, I chop it very fine and mix it with a spoonful of peanut butter. My husband likes to take it that way as well. I can't stand chewing raw garlic, though, so I just swallow mine. Garlic is one of the immune stimulants that won't incite a cytokine storm, those are what killed most people in the Flu of 1918-1919. Many popular immune stimulants/flu remedies will/can incite a cytokine storm. Plus garlic is easy to grow here and stores well.

I have also used it successfully for fungal infections. A little garlic oil on athlete's foot usually clears it right up. From personal experience it's also very helpful in yeast infections and is supposedly helpful in several other vaginal infections. I also put it into my general purpose 'wound/cut/scrape' ointment, along with several other herbs.

Garlic can also benefit the animals. I have used it successfully on turkeys, goats and dogs. I've had a couple of turkeys come down with some sort of disease that, for one reason or another, I wanted to save. Usually I just put them down, survival of the fittest kind of thing. Anyway, I have had very good luck with catching a turkey and shoving a clove of garlic down it's throat 2-3 times a day for as long as needed. They really don't like it, though. I assume the same thing would work with chickens, but you'd have to have smaller pieces. It has also been a lifesaver with the goats a time or two when I was out of antibiotics and couldn't get anymore. Depending how sick they are, I'll give them up to 5 cloves a day. I think they could maybe handle more, but I'm not sure. Some goats really like it and will eat it out of your hand. Some goats really DON'T like it and then it gets interesting! Same sort of uses for dogs, but you have to be careful with the dose and length of time given as they can develop Heinz body anemia from it. That's why you're not supposed to give dogs garlic and onions. I've only done it twice and was very careful with it.

I'm sure garlic can be used in many other ways as well and I'm always open to experimentation. Anybody else have any favorite garlic uses?

Thoughts on the Physical Aspects of a Stillbirth

Well, it's been a week. It seems like soooo much longer! This post is going to be somewhat special interest, but that's the way it goes. :)

While I've been laying around and recovering, I've been trying to research a few things and really couldn't find what I wanted. Most stuff I found had to do with the emotional ordeal of having a stillborn. I totally get that, but I don't really want to put that out for everybody to see yet. I may not ever, I don't know. But, since I was looking for more physical stuff, I thought I'd put some of that down in case someone else is also looking for that info.

I had never realized how much a nursing baby plays a role in my physical recovery.

I don't know if it was having a dead baby, and so therefore presumably a dead placenta, or not, but with this birth, my placenta took a long time to come out. Normally it takes about 15 minutes, this time is was closer to an hour. I normally am able to nurse the baby right off, though, and, obviously, I couldn't do that this time. I also bled a bit more and a bit longer right after the birth that I was comfortable with. It wasn't really hemorraging and it was easily taken care of, but it was more than the other births.

Another thing I've noticed is that I seem to bleed more with activity. Again, maybe a baby helps here, both because it is nursing (therefore contracting the uterus) and because one tends to spend a lot of time sitting still while nursing, holding and cuddling the little one. Once I got to where I could walk comfortably, I really wanted to be doing something. It's very hard to just sit there and do nothing. All I would do was think about the baby and get depressed. I needed to be up and doing something distracting, but I couldn't. Still can't really. I can do some, but I still have to be very careful not to overdo things.

 After losing the baby, I was really dreading my milk coming in. If I was a cow, I'd be a Holstein. I usually have problems with engorgement and infection while nursing, so I was really scared about how all this was going to go without a baby nursing. Since I really prefer herbal medicines when possible, that's what I went with here. I decided to go with sage tincture and cabbage leave poultices. I started that day, hoping to get a bit of a jump on things. I took the sage, 1 dropperful, 4 times a day and put cabbage leaves on every 3-4 hours, depending on how fast they dried up. Cabbage leaves are nicely shaped for this purpose and fit in the bra quite well, but I really don't like walking around smelling like coleslaw. I don't even like coleslaw. I did the last of the cabbage yesterday. I had run out and since things were feeling ok, I thought I'd try going without and see what happened. I'm still doing the sage, though. So far, so good.

I have to say, things went much better than anticipated. Milk did come in and things did get kind of swollen and most definitely painful, but no infections. It's been a week and I can now, almost comfortably, hold the 2 year old again. I also haven't felt a let down in two days. That is a rather weird and painful sensation with no baby nursing. So, I'm hoping I'm on the downhill slide as far as that goes. I even got brave enough to take a nice, hot shower today. After reading about how that can encourage breastmilk production, I was scared to take one. I've been making do with baths, kind of sponge bathing the upper part of me.

This was also the most painful delivery I have ever had. I have a fairly good pain tolerance and have had all natural births, but this one stepped over the threshold. I have never felt pain like that!! And I don't ever want to again. I don't know how much was because he was stillborn or how much because my labors are getting shorter and shorter. This one was only 45 minutes. It's intense. He was also a face presentation which may have contributed.

This was some stuff I was looking for and couldn't find. Anybody else want to contribute thoughts or experiences?