Nature's Aspirin

The willow tree is one of those trees that people either love or they hate.  Some people find them graceful and lovely.  In the Orient they have been found painted on thousand year old porcelain.  In many old European paintings we see country scenes and often there by the creek is the graceful willow.  Yet other people don't like how even a moderate wind can blow down many branches that they have to clean up.  They see it as a dirty tree.

That grace or dirtiness is not the willow's way of trying to get on our good or bad side.  It is the willow's way of surviving.  By having the outer branches be fragile, it lets them be broken off in a wind instead of bringing the whole tree down.  Also, because the tree can breed asexually, if these branches bend down a touch the earth for any length of time they will take root and make a young clone of the parent tree, assuring if the parent tree does fall the young tree will be there to take its place.

We can actually use willow to help us root our own plants.  Have some rosemary you want to share?  Make a strong willow tea, make a clean snip of new growth rosemary, and soak the cut end of the rosemary in the willow tea.  Let it set for an hour, then pop the rosemary into some good compost and it should grow into a whole new plant.  I have also heard of people drying and powdering willow bark, dipping cut herbs into that powered and then putting it into good compost.  I've never tried the powder but I have done it as a tea and it work quite well as long as you have the new growth part of the plant you are trying to root.

What willow, especially white willow, is used most for is the salicine that it contains, mostly in the inner bark.  When we digest this salicine, it turns into salicylic acid inside our bodies.  Salicylic acid is what the now synthetic aspirin comes from.  Willow can be harvest all year long for a quick pain reliever.  The tips of willow can be snapped off and boiled in water to make a strong, healing tea.  If they can snap off easily they can be used for pain relief at the time.  As the branch gets older, it becomes tougher, making it harder to snap off the ends.  Once this happens the inner bark can be gathered in the spring but it shouldn't be used as a year round medicine.  Only on the new growth should the twigs be used for a quick pain reliever.

The part of the willow that contains the strongest medicine is the inner bark that is gathered just as the sap is beginning to rise in the spring.  How I can tell when it is time is when I drive past the creek house of my cousin and see that yellow glow on the tops of the big willows.

The glow gets brighter the closer the buds on the tree gets to budding out (bursting into leaves).  Once the tree buds out the bark can still be harvested, but it should be done quickly because by the time the leaves are at full length, the medicine isn't as strong in the bark.  I try to harvest right at the moment the buds start bursting.  I say I try, but because I live in a busy world I don't always succeed. lol  As you can see from the picture above, the tops of this big willow is just starting to get that yellow look (actually in real life it is much more yellow-my cheap camera can't capture just how yellow it is).

Willow bark can be used in so many different ways. It can be used on its own in a strong decoction for pain relief and to take down minor swelling.  It can be used in both an oil and a liniment (soak the bark in alcohol) as a topical pain relief.  It can be mixed with other herbs such as the skunk cabbage from yesterday for tension headaches or mints for stomach aches. It has been used as a gentle blood thinner for people with heart problems.  The cooled tea can be used as a wash for sunburns.  Women have taken willow tea for years for menstrual pain and some studies show it may work better than most over the counter pain relievers for this.  In sprained ankles not only does it help with pain management but it can reduce the swelling as well.  For fever it works best if combined with yarrow or mint to help bring down the fever but singlarly it can reduce the aches and pains that come from one.

Because the willow contains more than just salicine some research seems to point out that in many cases, willow bark works better than the isolated aspirin that we buy in pill form.  On a study done on patients with osteoarthritis showed that willow actually worked better than aspirin for pain management.  Other studies show that some people (not all) who have aspirin allergies are not affected by taking willow bark.  It is believed this is because other ingredients in the bark acts as a buffer for the salicine.

A few warnings come with using this plant; If you are allergic to aspirin, this is the natural version of the same thing.  You probably should take care if you want to try willow bark.  Also, if you are going to have or have had surgery you should probably tell your doctor you have been using willow bark as it is a blood thinner.  Because of a child's undeveloped immune system, Rey's syndrome can come from taking any wild medicinal that contains salicine.  It is best not given to a child under the age of 15.

Many plants contain salicine; your birches, poplars, cottonwoods, wintergreen, and meadowsweet.  It was meadowsweet that scientists used to learn about salicine and how to isolate it in the lab.  When you hear that salicine is aspirin-like, it's actually the other way around, aspirin is salicine-like, because salicine came first.   Out of all these plants, the three that are most used for pain relief are wintergreen, meadowsweet, and willow.

Pain management is an important step in any healing process.  A tense body simply does not heal as well as  a body that is relaxed and has the ability to rest and sleep.  Study after study after study shows that pain management allows the body to heal itself in a shorter period of time, with less permanent damage than a body that has no pain management.  The ancient and natural way of doing this has been with plants, and willow bark tea is one of the oldest cures of mankind.  As willows grow all over the world, people from many different continents have been using this pain relief plant for centuries.  Now science is beginning to show that in some cases, the people of old had better pain management tools that we do now.  Pop a pill or spend some time in nature gathering our own medicine?  The choice is simple for me.

This is my attempt to create of post for Wildcrafting Wednesday from the Wood Wife Journal. To see other very wise people's posts follow this link.

Wild Medicinal: Skunk Cabbage

• Phenology is the study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events and how these are influenced by seasonal and interannual variations in climate.  From Wikipedia
  
   As a forensic meteorologist, my work's study of seasonal changes tend to be atmospheric changes.  A biologist would probably watch breeding times, migration patterns, and hibernation schedules.  We homesteaders tend to know last frost days, earliest frost days, when our animals give birth, harvest times.  Botanists tend to know when certain plants come up, when they flower, and when they go to seed.  Then there are the general phenologists, which most people are.  Every person has something that tells them the seasons are changing.  The first blue bird of spring, the geese flying south in the fall, when we see the first fawns... For many nature lovers, there is the one flower that burns its way through the snow to be the first flowers of the spring.  The only thing is you have to be willing to slosh into the deep swamps to find it.  
  
  

  

  
  

  Skunk cabbage is a perennial plant that stores its energy in its roots through the winter so it can get an early start in the spring.  Because it usually grows in deeper woods, the flower comes early before the trees leaves can shade it out.  Its flower literally burns its way up through the snow.  It is a plant that produces heat so that it can get an even earlier start than most plants.  It get its name from the scent its very primitive flower gives off.  The flower comes up too early for the normal nectar eating insects to pollinate it so it tries to attract the only pollinator that is around, the fly.  Skunk cabbage smells like rotting flesh because that is what flies like.
  

  
  

  

  
  The nice thing is if you process skunk cabbage correctly that smell isn't there.
  
  

  

  
  
  The part of skunk cabbage that is used medicinally is the root.  It is white, bulb-like and shallow.  If the ground isn't frozen, it is quite easy to harvest by simply pulling on the flower itself.  The root is best gathered as early as possible in the spring with one exception...in its very young stage, skunk cabbage can look like the poisonous black hellbore.  Most people wait until the flower opens and then they harvest their skunk cabbage.
  
  Harvesting is only half the battle with skunk cabbage though.  Fresh skunk cabbage contains calcium oxalate crystals, which, as long as there is a hint of moisture in the plant, will burn you like you're eating acid.  It's not really poisonous when fresh, but that may be because no one would have the strength to eat such a painful plant to poison themselves with it.  Skunk cabbage must be completely dried before use. And when I say completely dried, I mean not like dehydrated but having not a drop of its original moisture left in it.  Then it can be powered and let dry some more.  Skunk cabbage medicine will only last about a year and then it needs to be replaced.
  
  What I do is dry it in a warm, dark place.  Because I harvest it this time of year the wood stove is still going. I have shelves set up behind the wood stove for drying skunk cabbage.  I slice it really thin and let it set until it breaks not bends.  Then I grind it up, spread it on cookie sheets and let it dry again.  Once the powder is completely dry I put it into jars and either vacuum seal the jars or put in a handful of rice to absorb any remaining moisture.  The rice can be sifted out of the power when it is needed to be used.
  
  Skunk cabbage powder is used to relax the body and as a diuretic.  It acts as a mild narcotic and I use it mostly for uncontrollable coughing that doesn't let a person rest.  It lets the muscles that do the coughing relax enough so the person can get the rest that is often the most important part of healing.  It should not be used in cases of mucus in the lungs that need to be brought up.  It is also used for arthritis more to help the person relax through the pain instead of as an actual pain killer.  It can be mixed with willow bark to help heal tension head aches. I have also used it when a filly broke my collar bone a couple years ago.  It broke on the left side and when I was healing I kept trying to do things with my right side.  Those muscles became sore and tired.  Skunk cabbage powder helped relax those over used muscles.
  
  While there are easier diuretics to gather and use, many people still use it especially if they need to lose water weight for their heart or during menstruation.  It helps the body relax as well as get rid of extra water weight.
  
  For me gathering skunk cabbage is part of the fun.  You can't get into much wilder places than into the deep dark swamps where they grow.  I was once out gathering up roots and scared up a mink less than a foot away from me.  He stared at me with his beady little eyes for a moment before he inched to the creek to continue his hunt.  It was an amazing, wild moment that helped heal me just as much as  the skunk cabbage.
  
  It takes a bit of work to collect and process but its relaxing effects are well worth the trouble.  

Spring fever is really setting in today.  I want green plants and gardens and new calves and goslings and baby chicks and...  So I went down to the apiary and checked on the bees.  They are all doing really well except this one.  I could see the frost before I even opened the hive.  I thought, no way did they make it.  Frost is a death sentence for bees in the winter.  But there they were, buzzing around lookin' good.  I cleaned off the frost and hopefully they didn't get too wet.

I lost some hives to a late season bear earlier in the winter.  It was totally my fault.  I left the gate to the pen open because I thought all the bears had to be in hibernation by then.  Nope, there was one left.  A late season bear is usually a sick, old or under nourished bear that can't go into hibernation because they don't have enough fat stores.  It is the only time I ever worry about them because they are desperate for food at that time.  I never saw the bear though, just the damage he did to a couple hives.

Besides that it looks like all my bees made it through winter with flying colors.  Yay!!!

Onion Syrup and Garlic Salve

One of my neighbor ladies has this medical issue that she seems to get at least once a year.  Either in the spring or the fall she gets pneumonia in her right lung.  The weather changes and she starts having chest pains.  The scary thing is there has been four times now that the doctors couldn't see the pneumonia on the x-rays right away.  

Just a quick lecture here, if you are having chest pains and the doctor's can't find the reason, ask to see someone who is trained exclusively at looking at x-rays, a radiologist.  Sometimes pneumonia can hide in a way that a general practitioner cannot see.  You are all too important for us to lose you and your wisdom.

Okay, so my neighbor lady once again called me up and said, "guess what..." 

I didn't have to guess.  I just started up some onion syrup for her to take.  Onion syrup is a great medicine to loosen up the phlegm in the chest.  It is often called a cough medicine but it's more of a lung medicine as it can actually make you cough more once all that mucus in your chest is broke free and you start coughing it up.  Yes, I know this sound gross, but if you have gunk in your lungs, you want it out. 

I make my onion syrup with honey, just because I have bees and plenty of honey.  But it can be just as easily made with sugar.  In fact some people say you get more medicine out of the onion if you use sugar.

To make it with honey just slice the onion, break the slices apart in a bowl and pour honey over it enough to cover.  Then take something and mush down on the onions.  I usually use the bottom of a clean canning jar.  Let this sit for about eight hours (overnight if you can spare the time), mushing down on the onions every now and again.  Strain out the onions and bottle the syrup in a sterile jar.  Take two Tablespoons three times a day, or more if you want, it won't do any harm besides give you onion breath.

If you want to make it with sugar, put a layer of broke apart onion slices down at the bottom of your bowl.  Cover with sugar, then another layer of onions, then another layer of sugar, and so forth until you have covered all your onions with sugar.  Again, mush the onions to start them releasing their juices.  Let set for eight hours, again, mushing the onions ever now and again to keep their juices coming out.  This way of doing it though allows you to decant the juices as soon as they come out.  So if in a half and hour you have a tablespoon of syrup, you can carefully drain this off, take it and let the rest sit longer.  You may need to add a bit more sugar after you have done this, but you can get that medicine in right away.

Cathy (the neighbor lady) has been taking onion syrup for years and she says it works better than the antibiotics.  I won't say that myself, but you can use it with the antibiotics because they won't interact and it will help speed up the loosening of the mucus in your chest.

The other thing I make for her is garlic salve.  Again, pretty easy to make and you can use it right away.  The main problem with garlic salve is that it will make your breath and sweat smell like garlic.  But to be able to breath without hurting most people don't mind that little inconvenience.

I make my garlic salve with coconut oil for the most part now, but for a long time I made it with simple Crisco.  If you can't get coconut oil, use Crisco, it works fine too.

Take 1/3 cup of coconut oil (or Crisco), 2 tablespoons of olive oil, 10 cloves of raw garlic, and if you want to keep it awhile 5 drops of lavender oil.  You don't need the lavender oil for the medicine, it just makes it last longer.  Put all this into a blender and blend on high until it is all liquid.  Pour it into a wide mouth jar.  Some people strain it, but I never have.  This must be stored in the refrigerator, so don't whip it up until you need it.

This works on many things but for pneumonia you rub it on the chest, the back, and the soles of the feet.  Yep, put it on your feet and put on some cotton socks to keep yourself from smearing it all over the bed covers.  Within an hour you should be able to start tasting the garlic and those around you should be able to smell it on your breath.  Your body will absorb it and you'll start sweating garlic in a few hours.  Apply often, once an hour if things are bad, once every three hours in the beginning of a not so bad pneumonia episode and then you can slow it down gradually to 4 times a day.

Garlic salve is one of those things you have to try to believe how well it works.  It's amazing stuff.

I'm not saying don't go to a doctor, if you suspect you have pneumonia, getting on antibiotics can save your life.  Jim Henson, the guy who created Kermit the Frog, died from walking pneumonia that he didn't even know he had until it was too late.  If you think you have it, get help.  Still these are two things that can help speed your recovery or get you through until you can see your doctor.  I live in the middle of an Amish community, and these are two cures that they "doctor" themselves with all the time.  Onions and garlic are great healers for all of us English as well.

A good Sunday

Sunday is usually my day to catch up on everything I didn't get done during the week.  Funny how the last few Sundays I didn't even touch the things that didn't get done during the week.

This Sunday I was suppose to go out and gather skunk cabbage with friends.  Starting last night all but one started calling with reasons they couldn't come.  So we decided to try again on Wednesday.  Which was fine because my talented nephew invited me over for lesson on the forge.  When I was younger my father use to work with me on the forge almost every weekend.  He passed away when I was 17 and I lost interest in blacksmithing.

Come along my nephew, Hawken, (yes, we are rednecks, we name our children after rifles lol), and he just LOVES to work with the forge.  If there is such a thing as a metal whisperer, my nephew is it.   A couple months ago he volunteered to start re-teaching me how to work the forge.  Forty six is a long way from seventeen though and I find I have a lot to re-learn.  We had a good morning and Hawken and I made four hinges for my new summer kitchen that I will start building in March (hopefully).

We spent the afternoon gathering sap and on our way over the creek we found an area where the snow had melted and left a muddy mess.  There, in the mud was a bunch of sunchokes or Jerusalem artichoke tubers.

Sunchokes are native to the tallgrass prairie and our farms are right on the edge of the taiga (big northern forests) and the tallgrass prairie.  So while many people plant sunchokes in their gardens for an easy starch source, we just gather them out of the mud in the fall and spring.  They are sweeter in the spring though.   Here they are almost considered to be a weed plant.

So we gathered up a handful of them and took them back for a quick venison stir fry.  The venison we took last fall, the broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, and garlic came out of the garden,  and the sunchokes added a nice, water chestnut-like crunch.  The stir fry was served over homemade egg noodles with homemade garlic soy sauce over the top.

Now I'm sitting out in the sugar shack watching maple sap become maple syrup while typing on the lap top just to prove to myself that I still live in the 21st century.  lol  It's been a good day, though I really need to start treating my Sundays like the day I get caught up on all the work I didn't get done the rest of the week.  My basement isn't going to finish cleaning itself!

Maple Syrup Grading and the History of The United States

When I take my syrup to get judged I often get asked the question; "Why is it that maple syrup that has the lightest color and the least amount of maple flavor is graded at a higher grade?"

They are right to ask.  I mean if you're paying $55.00 a gallon for maple syrup, shouldn't you want it to taste like maple syrup?  That's not how it's graded though, the better the grade, the less maple flavor it has.  If you like a good, deep amber maple syrup with a good amount of flavor, you want to buy a lower grade.  So, why is that?

The answer has a lot to do with the founding of the United States of America and what led up to our Revolutionary War.  So maple syrup grading is a bit of history in a jar.

A few hundred years ago, before the U.S. was the U.S., we were simply colonies of England.  The ruling people of the time were basically displaced Europeans.  They really weren't out to be separate from their European roots, they weren't looking to be Americans.  Some were here for business opportunities, others because of religious persecution, still others were here because they couldn't find work or land back in the old countries.  But they still considered themselves to be Europeans.

Now back in this time there was no TV, radio, smart phones, computers...basically there were fewer ways of communications.  They did have newspapers, they had taverns for the men to get together in and they had afternoon tea.  Afternoon tea was a ritual for neighbors to come together and talk about what was happening around the area and around the world.  Tea time was a very important part of the social structure of the time. If you didn't do afternoon tea, you often didn't know what was happening around you.  So people spent a great deal of time and money to make their afternoon teas the best.  The more well connected people you had come to your tea, the more news you found out about.

Rich people had tea imported from China, they had sugar imported from the colonies on South America, they had lemons imported from the Mediterranean area.  Much of what they ate everyday could be grown on the farms and plantations of the area, but tea time ingredients came from far away.

Poorer people in the colonies couldn't afford all this importing.  They would have saved their money to buy a nice tea set, but the ingredients were usually stuff they could get from the area.  New Jersey tea is a plant that roots have a similar taste to oriental tea and it grew in abundance.  Sumac berries and lemon balm was used instead of imported lemons.  And maple syrup and sorghum was used instead of sugar.  Maple syrup wasn't as heavy as sorghum so it was used more often for tea.

Well, as most Americans know about their history, the import tax on these goods kept getting higher and higher as the King of England needed more money to fight his wars.  Most of these wars had nothing to do with the colonies and when the colonies needed help, the king would not send help.  When the colonists tried to complain, they had no voice back home in Europe.  They became tired of paying the taxes with no voice on how these taxes were spent.  They didn't mind the taxes, they just didn't like that none of it was being spent on them.

So, what the first patriots of the times did was stop buying stuff that had to be imported on English ships.  Some tried smuggling goods in, but this proved to be expensive.  But these patriots noticed that poorer people could make it quite well without paying for all these imported goods.  The original patriots knew something we seem to have forgotten,  that is sometimes we have to give something up to gain our freedoms.  They stopped buying from English ships.  Things that tasted most like tea became their tea, lemon flavored sumac berries were good enough lemon flavor.  And maple syrup that was light enough to pass for regular sugar became very sought after.  The closer it was to sugar, the higher its grade would be.

We still carry this grading system today.  The lighter the color of the syrup, the less maple flavor it has, the higher the grade is on the syrup.  It is a nod towards our freedom fighting ancestors that started our march toward a free country by giving up something that was very important to them.  Maple syrup is a very North American product.  It comes from only one tiny little part on this planet,  the North East part of the U.S. and the Eastern part of Canada.

Again, the history from here is something that most young Americans are taught in school.  Despite the patriots giving up their imports, there were still many people that just kept right on buying from the enemy.  So one night some men in Boston climbed aboard three ships that the leaders of Boston refused to send back to England.  They threw the tea overboard so that EVERYONE in the colonies would be forced to join the struggle on one side or the other.

It was the beginning of the war that led to the interesting experiment that is The United States of America.  And maple syrup played a role in our freedom.

Independence Day Challenge 2/17

Independence Day Challenge

From Sharon Astyk's page: 

http://sharonastyk.com/2012/02/01/independence-days-challenge-is-back/

We haven't had much of a winter this season, until the last few days.   It has snowed on and off this whole week.  The nice thing about these late season snows is that they melt pretty quick.  Still can't do anything in the outside garden, but I am working a few things indoors now.

Plant something:  I had this sweet potato that I have been saving for its slips.  They were growing slowly all winter and then when the days started getting longer, boom the thing took off like crazy.  I was going to wait and plant them in the greenhouse but they were starting to wither on the potato.  

So I had these peat pots that someone gave me awhile ago and I planted the slips and put them in the south window.  I've never planted sweet potatoes indoors with the intent of planting them outside later so we'll see how this works.  If it works well, I'll be doing it every year.

Harvest something: 

Besides the normal eggs, milk, sprouts and porch greens, I have tapped 722 maple trees and we have boiled down just short of 11 gallons of syrup so far.  It is early in the season, so we'll see how good of a run we get.

Preserve something:  

I guess I would have to fall back on my maple syrup.  While most of the early runs are sold because they are the highest grades, I do keep a few pints back to give as gifts or to put up at the fair for prizes.   I did dry some squash leather from squash that were starting to soften up in the basement cellar.  The outlying cellars are still good though.

Waste not:

I was given an old recycling bin that a friend was going to throw away.  I scrubbed it up, drilled some hole in it, and now it is a potato bin down in the cellar.  I hand made my old potato bin of woven grape vine and it last many years, but it is slowly giving up the ghost.  Tine for a spiffy new plastic one.  Can I be a redneck witch if I store my potatoes in a plastic bin?

Want Not: 

Not the easiest category for me because I HATE shopping.  I did order a oil expeller off of Amazon.  My friend has one and she is making her own pumpkin seed oil.  I loved it so I ordered myself one.  Other than that, I am not going near a store just to say I bought something for my list.  lol

Eat the Food: 

Big apple and squash eating time right now.  They last well in the basement root cellar until the end of February and right on time they are starting to go soft.  I made applesauce and have been eating it with every meal.  We also made squash leather and I can't eat enough of that.  My stomach is telling me "no more" but my hand just shovels it into my hungry mouth.  lol.  It's great for carrying with on long hikes like the one tomorrow when we go and harvest our skunk cabbage.

Build community food systems: 

This time of year we have our community garden meetings every OTHER week.  This was an off week for it.  But I did go in a clean up the community cannery, if that counts.  I don't think so because I was really upset that it had been left in such a mess.  But I guess it needed to be cleaned so others in the community could use it so maybe I can count that...maybe?

Skill up: 

Still taking my First Responder course.  I usually take it every two to four years but I pushed just a bit past it this time to four and a half years.  Time kinda got away from me.  I still think that chest compressions make the best workout for your butt and thighs.   My butt burned for days after we had to do chest compression drills.  I keep thinking if I have to keep someone alive, am I strong enough to keep going at it?  So I've been doing my StairMaster coat rack again.

I'm also learning about alternative energy, albeit I am doing this for ulterior motives.  I am dating the instructor and I enjoy listening to the man talk.   I don't know if I am hearing everything he is saying though.  I have to listen closer and stop staring at his....well, that's another topic.  LOL  .  

This time of the year w are just starting to get into many of these categories but it's good to keep a tab of what we do so that we feel that we are moving ahead.  For me it makes me know that I am not spinning my wheels and it gives me a push to get out and do more.