the Witchen Kitchen Beginner Herbal

tammy July 21st, 2008

I made the yummiest apple crisp for dessert last night, with crabapples. These little beauties taste like a cross between cherries and apples. So delicious! I got them from a tree in my mother-in-law’s yard. She didn’t know what they were and had been telling the kids not to eat them because they were poisonous! Somehow I had never seen this tree in her yard before, but I’m glad I finally discovered it.

(sorry the pics are a bit fuzzy… don’t know what is wrong with my camera)

First take out the seeds. The crabapples are small, so this part is quite tedious. The quickest way I found was to just cut the flesh from all around the sides. No way I was peeling them, though!

Then coat your baking dish with butter and drop in the cored crabapples.

Make a crumb topping from brown sugar, butter and flour. I didn’t have any regular wheat flour, so I ground some flax into flour instead. Sprinkle the mixture all over the top. Bake until lightly browned. Yum!

I spent the morning with my mother-in-law attempting to also make jelly from the recipe I found here: http://earthnotes.tripod.com/crabapple.htm, but alas it did not jell as it was supposed to. I now have liquid “jelly” — anyone know what I could do with this sweet, tasty liquid?

P.S. the chickens really loved the cores!

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tammy July 5th, 2008

I almost forgot to show off the skullcap that I found and tinctured a few weeks ago. This has been a year of many first finds for me. Seems there is a new gift waiting for me every time I go outside!

Here she is. So beautiful!

And it is an effective pain reliever for many different kinds of pain. I’ve found it particularly useful for tension type headaches and tension related back pain. Kiva Rose has also written about it extensively as a nerve tonic. She calls it blisswort, so if you do a search for that word on her site you’ll pull up all sorts of information.

A sweet story… Hubby had seen me gathering the skullcap for medicine, and even helped me reach some that I couldn’t quite get to in the overgrowth with my bare feet (he was wearing boots).  Now, keep in mind, this man knows nothing about plants, and doesn’t particularly care one way or another, and he’s not particularly sentimental either.  If I let him, he would just mow all those “unsightly weeds” down every chance he got.  But he did remember this plant and the fact that it was important to me.  A few days later he came in from walking the dog with a bouquet of skullcap for me.  Is this the flower you were looking for?  Awwww… he’s learning his plants! And wasn’t that sweet of him to bring me such lovely flowers?

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tammy July 4th, 2008

They have arrived! Standing tall and strong all around the edge of the yard and all over the meadow, with tiny little flower buds just forming. I crushed a few of the buds this morning while I was out walking to sample the sweet, heady fragrance and be instantly reminded why I love this plant so much.

Even if I could find no medicinal uses, I would make oil with the flowers every year for no other reason than to be able to smell them all through winter. It has been described as an anise fragrance. I’m not sure what anise smells like; I just know I love the aroma of Goldenrod. I find it invigorating and expansive and intensely joyful. But it turns out that it has many uses besides just therapy for the olfactory senses.

I call the oil “summer in a bottle.” In addition to frequently opening the jar to smell, I also use it as a relaxing and pain relieving massage oil and bath oil. This year I want to experiment with some other creations. A honey, a tincture, a vinegar, a syrup… what else can I think of? Some dried for tea? I want to experience it in many different ways in order to understand its medicine better.

It has been used frequently by herbalists for bladder and kidney problems, as a diuretic, as an antisceptic and astringent wound wash or salve, as a fomentation for pain relief in arthritis and rheumatism, as a tea or tincture for relief of colds, sinus congestion, and related headaches, as a general tonic for exhaustion, as an anti-fungal for candida… there are probably other uses as well.

I still have about 3 or 4 ounces of the oil I made last year. It smells just as beautiful and potent as it did when I first made it. Since I’m going to be making fresh oil in a few weeks, I’d like to use up this batch. If you would like an ounce, email me. I will sell this batch for $5 per ounce including shipping.

I wish I could put one of those scratch and sniff cards here on the computer for you to sample it. But alas, you’ll have to either go out and find some growing and make your own, or email me if you’d like me to send you some of mine!

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tammy June 22nd, 2008

I haven’t let hubby mow the meadow at all this year, just so I could see what would grow if we let it alone.  I’m glad we did this because yesterday, a beautiful Summer solstice day, I found St. John’s Wort, one of my first and very beloved herbal allies, growing in a corner of the field. 

Although my friend Sue sent me some baby plants this year that I planted early this spring in another spot, this is the first time I’ve seen it on the property growing wild, and I am very excited!

St. John’s Wort usually blooms on or around the Summer solstice.  See the little buds?

I don’t know if there are enough to really harvest them this year.  I think I may let them go to seed so there will be more next year.  We live in a very rural area with many pastures and open fields.  I’ll definitely be scouting out the neighbors property to see if I can find some more that I CAN harvest!

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tammy June 22nd, 2008

My new little grandson, barely 2 weeks old, has had his first minor diaper rash. ‘Cause he likes to poop in the middle of the night while he’s sleeping and nobody knows about it until the next morning! Here is a simple herbal balm I made that cleared it right up.

I used raw, organic coconut oil as the base, and infused some dried Balm of Gilead (poplar buds), dried yarrow, and fresh chopped plantain from the yard. Yarrow is known to be quite anti-bacterial and good for skin ailments. Plantain draws out infection or toxins and helps heals skin beautifully, and Balm of Gilead is well known as a skin healer and soother. the coconut oil itself is also anti-microbial and very nourishing to the skin. There are many, many other herbs adn oils that could have been used here, but these were the ones I had on hand and that came to mind when I started mixing.

Since I needed this balm immediately and didn’t want to wait weeks for it to infuse, I decided for the first time to use a heat infusion method. I followed Frances’ suggestion to use a crock pot set on low for a couple days.

I put the coconut oil in a small jar and immersed it in the warm water in the crock pot to melt it, then added the herbs, stirred it well, put the top on, and sat it back down in the warm water bath (along with a couple other infusing oils so as to get maximum use from having the crock pot on for so long). I let it infuse for two days, opening the cap to wipe away moisture condensation (from water in the fresh plantain) and to stir it occasionally.

When it had taken on a nice green color and I deemed it done, I strained the oil through a mesh strainer first, then strained it again through a clean cloth to get all the tiny little herb particles out.

Coconut oil will stay solid at room temperature, about 76 degrees or less. In our air conditioned homes, this makes a perfect salve. If it were going to be stored in a warmer place, I would have melted some beeswax into the mixture to keep it solid at higher temps too.

While it was still warm and liquid, I put it in a squeeze bottle to keep fingers out of the mixture to avoid introducing bacteria so it will last longer. I have no idea what the shelf life is. Since there are no preservatives, we will keep a close eye on it for spoilage.

My daughter took the filled bottle with her before I took a pic, but here is an empty one.  I picked up a bunch of these at the discount store for about $. 50 a piece.

This balm has a lovely light coconut scent and feels really nice on the skin. In addition to diaper rash, it could be used for many other purposes. It could be really great for moisturizing elbows and feet, or soothing any minor skin abrasion.

I bought the dried herbs and raw coconut oil at Mountain Rose Herbs.

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tammy June 14th, 2008

If you suffer from insomnia, this common weed could be your best friend. It can provide deep relaxation and a delicious, gritty-eyed, cuddly sleepiness when you are wound up and your mind is racing and you find that you can’t get to sleep or stay asleep for long.

Last month I started a bunch of new things in my life. I changed my work schedule, started massage school, began doing some computer consulting work on the side… there were a lot of new things to absorb and a lot to juggle. I was quite wound up and often had trouble getting to sleep, and when I did, I slept lightly and woke just a few hours later to begin tossing and turning for the rest of the night.

Just when I was getting desperate, I found the prickly lettuce (Lactuca scariola) growing tall and strong right at the edge of the yard. To make sure I had the correct plant ID, I felt the row of prickles along the bottom mid-vein of its leaves, and then plucked off one to see the yellowy sap oozing out. Sap will ooze out of any part of the plant that you break off.  I ate about half a leaf, tasting its sweet, slightly bitter, flavor. The young leaves are often used in salads, though the older leaves can get much too bitter for eating.

After eating the leaf, I began gathering what I needed to make a quart of tincture. I felt super relaxed as I walked around the edge of the yard snipping the stalks. Not drugged at all, just calm and relaxed. I also began to feel pleasantly tired and sleepy. I hadn’t felt that in sooooo very long. Delicious.

After I chopped up my harvest and put it in a labeded jar with 100 proof vodka, it was time to get ready for bed. I went through my usual bedtime routine, tidying up, washing up, laying out clothes for the next day, etc, all the while feeling very calm, very relaxed, and knowing that I would have no problem falling asleep that night. I crawled into bed, went right to sleep, and slept soundly the entire night — the first time in over a month!

I have purchased wild lettuce tincture in the past and knew it could help me sleep, but that’s really all I knew about it. Last week I got my hot little hands on Matthew Wood’s new The Earthwise Herbal: A Complete Guide to Old World Medicinal Plants and have now learned a few more things about this plant.

According to the profile in Wood’s book, I can see why it works so well for me. “It is indicated for stiff sore persons with painful muscles, especially the lower back. The pulse is slow and hard… [which] indicates ‘cold blockage’ or ‘internal cold’… Sometimes there is slight evidence of the heat that is being blocked… it produces red margins of the eyelids, allergies, and facial acne.” (p. 307, 308)

I had been very, very cold this past winter, and very, very stiff and sore, especially in my lower back. After reading this I looked in the mirror and sure enough there were red margins around my eyelids also.

He goes on to write that Lactuca also addresses hormonal imbalances caused by excess of androgen — think teenage acne as a common manifestation of this. It has also been used to cure “dropsy” (water retention, edema). Acne and edema — two more conditions that I have dealt with in the past.  Seems I have a lot of affinity for this herb.

However, even if you don’t fit the profile completely, I think it would be beneficial to almost anyone who needs a little help relaxing and sleeping. It is very gentle and effective for that purpose, and unlike most pharmaceuticals on the market for that purpose, it is non-addictive.  I plan to make it a permanent part of my herbal medicine chest.

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tammy June 1st, 2008

When I first started my herbal journey, for some reason I thought harvesting and drying my own herbs would be terribly complicated. Maybe this had something to do with growing up in a family where dried up shriveled things were tossed straight into the trashcan, considered completely unsuitable for human consumption. Dried herbs are definitely dried up and shriveled!

I also thought you had to have special equipment and string your plants up in just the right way so that your herbs would dry properly. I didn’t want to end up with a bunch of dried up shriveled stuff that I would have to throw out, so for a long time I just didn’t go there. Instead, I bought all my dried herbs.

Then recently I happened to see Phyllis Light in a video calmly talking about bringing in a branch of some herb she had picked and left on the kitchen table for a couple of days to dry. She picked up what looked to me like something for the compost pile, crumbled a few leaves between her fingers, and declared it as having “dried nicely” and that it was ready to use as a tea.

Wow, what an epiphany for me. Huh? That’s all there is to it? Hey, I could do that!

And so began my first drying experiments.

I’ve learned that in some cases, with especially juicy plants, you do have to be careful so that you don’t get mold or fermenting going on, but really even that is not nearly so complicated as I thought it would be.

Most herbs really can just be laid somewhere convenient on the kitchen table or counter for a couple days and they dry beautifully, keeping their fragrance and color. As soon as you detach an herb from the living plant, the dehydration begins. As long as you keep it out of especially humid places and give it lots of circulating air, it will dry just fine with no other effort.

Here’s some plantain I dried in just that way.

Some flowers and plants may need a little more help because of high moisture content. For example, red clover blossoms can ferment if the moisture in them evaporates too slowly, causing them to develop potentially dangerous blood thinning properties.

The answer for these is to dry them more quickly by putting them in a hotter environment with lots and lots of air circulation. To accomplish this, I’ve heard of some using the oven set on a low temp, turning them frequently, or hanging their herbs to dry in a hot attic with good air flow, even using fans if it is too humid.

You can also use a dehydrator. I was recently gifted one of these handy little contraptions, and I have to say it is a totally awesome tool. Mine has seven trays that you can fill and stack to dry quite a bit of herb all at once. Lay the herbs on the trays, flip the switch on, and just a couple hours later you have perfectly dried herbs. Then just crumble them into a quart canning jar and cap it tightly.

For the first time this year, I’m filling my cupboard with self-harvested, home-dried herbs. So far, I’ve got honeysuckle leaf and flower, tarragon, sage, rosemary. And the season is early yet, so that’s just the beginning.

What are you drying? Do you use different methods? I’d love to hear what you do

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tammy May 26th, 2008

I just can’t believe the bounty of this little plot of land we live on.  I discovered recently that there are bush after bush of wild blueberries, which happens to be my absolute favorite fruit.  I missed them the last two years because I wasn’t paying careful attention in the Spring when they were flowering and so had no way of really knowing what those random berries were that I saw later in the Summer. 

Flowers are the easiest way to identify any unknown plant.  They follow patterns that are easily categorized by family, and this helps tremendously with narrowing it down the correct plant.  Most online identification tools are also going to be easiest to use when you know the flower. 

Below is what my blueberry flowers look like.  I was able to find and identify this plant online by searching under “white flowers” at www.missouriplants.com. The latin name is Vaccinium stamineum, so I had to scroll through many pages before I got to the “v” section and recognized this flower.  Once I had the latin name, I searched Google for more photos to be sure it was a correct i.d.

This variety of blueberry is known by the common name of Deerberry, and are edible.  From what I’ve read, the fruits do not become dark blue and sweet when they ripen, but remain a bit green and sour. 

The other day in a particularly sunny location I saw a nearly ripened fruit on one of the bushes, and it was somewhat purple, but not blue.  I ate one and found that it was quite tart, but I thought they were actually pretty tasty. 

I’m going to harvest as many as I can this year and freeze them to add to smoothies and such, as they are very nutritious.  According to a recent USDA report*, they contain loads of anti-oxidants (as most berries do), which are a group of nutrients that support cardio vascular health and scavenge free-radicals in the body to prevent things like premature aging and cancer.  

Wow, what an awesome gift from Mother Earth, just sitting out there waiting for us to partake.  I never cease to be amazed.

* While I find the goal of “genetic improvement of fruits and vegetables” in this research quite scary, I do find the nutritional information about the deerberry they have discovered to be useful. At least I know my wild growing blueberries haven’t been genetically modified!  But who knows what they will do to the commercial blueberries using this info, yikes!

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tammy May 20th, 2008

I have Sassafras trees! Everywhere! I feel so rich and so blessed. I dug a sapling root on Sunday to make root beer and dried some leaves for tea. I have to say I’d be quite content to just go around smelling them all day every day… ahhhhhh, there’s nothing so lovely as Sassafras.

So once I smelled them, I had to also taste. The leaves are sweet and mild and extremely mucilaginous. I hear they are often used to thicken soups and stews and gumbo, and I can see that they would be very good for that purpose. I dried all the leaves from the sapling I dug up, and I plan to make some leaf tea soon. I hear it is almost as good as the root tea.

But the root… now that is something straight from heaven. Smells and tastes strongly of root beer — as you may know, it IS the original genuine flavor for that lovely beverage. I used it to make some tea and two versions of root beer.

Now, I didn’t quite know exactly what I was doing, but just followed my instincts and some vague recollections of stuff I had read in the past.

First, I washed off the root thoroughly. Then I used a knife to peel off the outer bark. From what I have read, the inner side of the outer bark is the part with the good stuff in it. The peelings went into the pan; the stick remaining I gave back to Mother Earth. I ended up with about an ounce of bark, which I covered with water to fill a 2 quart pan.

I then boiled it until the water evaporated to about 1/2 of what I started with. The water turned a lovely red color and the whole house smelled sweet like Sassafras. We tried some of the resulting decoction plain right out of the pan and it made a very good tea all by itself. Since I wanted to make root beer, though, I added some sugar (not sure how much, just till it tasted sweet enough).

For the first version of the root beer, I filled a glass half way with the sweetened Sassafras decoction and then the other half with sparkling water. Abracadabra! Instant root beer. My grandson loved it and hubby and I thought it was really good, too.

For the second version I put the rest of the decoction into a pyrex glass 4 C measuring cup and added some yeast while it was still warm (about 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon), stirred it, covered it, and set it on the shelf to ferment. I just used regular bread yeast ’cause that’s what I had on hand. I let it sit for about 24 hours. When I got home the next day I pulled out my home brew and dipped a wooden spoonful out to taste.

Oh, my! Gotta have me some more of that! The fermenting really brought out the strong root beer flavor and added a fizzy kick. It is one of the most delicious things I think I’ve ever tasted. The sparkling water version can’t even come close. There are probably more sophisticated ways to make this, which I’ll be wanting to learn about now, but I think it’s not too bad for my first try.

To store it, I poured it into a recycled (sterilized) olive oil bottle that has a rubber stopper on it, and put it in the fridge to stop the fermenting.

**UPDATE 5/26:  Check out Kiva Rose’s recent post on an easy way to make lacto-fermented herbal brews.  Her method uses whey instead of yeast.  Fermented herbal infusions could easily replace soda in any household.  I’m excited to try it!

While I was out getting the Sassafrass Sunday, I also found and harvested some wild grape leaves, which I promptly cooked and served with dinner, as well as bunches of violet leaf and sweet clover. The herb gardens are prolific and overgrown already, so I also cut some rosemary and sage. While my root beer boiled and brewed, I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging herbs to dry and making rosemary and sage smudge sticks. Oh what a glorious day it was!

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tammy May 15th, 2008

The blog party for May is being hosted by Darcey at Gaias Gifts. This month’s topic is “Spring Greens”!

My absolute favorite spring green (so far… I’m sure there are others I haven’t discovered yet) is Bittercress (Cardamine spp). I found this little beauty last fall growing in my yard. I’m not sure what made me notice it, but I remember being intrigued right away. The intrigue soon turned into an adventure of “let’s identify this plant!”

First, the taste

I started the identification process by tasting a small leaf. Since I had no idea what kind of plant it was, I had no intentions of swallowing it just then, just tasting it and then spitting it out.

When you first chew, it tastes garlicky, then as you hold it in your mouth you slowly start to feel peppery heat that continues to rise in intensity for about 15 seconds, then the heat subsides and leaves the absolute best garlic-pepper aftertaste lingering for a long time. Mmmmmm!

With that first taste, from somewhere in the depths of my brain out came the word Brassica. I had to go look it up, though, as I couldn’t quite remember what it meant, even though I knew it was one of the common plant families. I must have read about Brassica in one of my botany books and retained the sense of it, if not a full blown definition. For those of you who haven’t learned it yet, Brassica is a subdivision of the Brassicaceae family, which is the latin name for the Mustard family.

As my books reminded me, all of the Mustard family are edible. Yippee! I definitely wanted to eat some of this tasty little plant. But first I had to make sure it was indeed a Mustard before I would think about adding it to a meal. I felt intuitively that it was good for food, but as a beginner I didn’t feel confident enough to go on my gut feeling alone.

Next, observe carefully

It wasn’t in flower at that time, in the middle of Fall, so identification was going to be a bit difficult. If it had been in flower, I would have been looking to see if it they had 4 petals and 6 stamens, 2 short and 4 tall (identifying characteristics of Mustard family flowers, from Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification by Thomas Elpel).

But alas, no flowers, so I had to look for other identifiers. I noticed carefully it’s physical characteristics and where it liked to grow. Below is what it looked like in the Fall when I found it. Notice the leaves are opposite and roundish along the stem. You may not be able to see in these photos, but the stems grow in a whorl from a central point. The leaves also have little hairs on them, easily felt with the tongue when tasting.

Finally, research it

I needed to start with some names of possibilities that I could then plug into Google and also look up in the indexes of my books. I did a general search for Brassica, but that was too broad to narrow down. To get some ideas, I posted my photos to one of the herbal forums I frequent and asked my online friends what they thought it was. I got lots of different suggestions, but the one that seemed closest when I looked it up was “Cuckoo Flower” (common name for the latin Cardamine pratensis), which was also a Brassica. It was a bit difficult at first to find any online photos of the Cuckoo that was even close in appearance to my specimen, because it looks quite different when it is flowering in the Spring than it does in the Fall with just leaves, and most of the pics I found were of the Spring flowering plant.

I determined after a lot looking and comparing different pictures that my little plant was definitely a Cardamine, but probably not the Cuckoo. The information on the Cuckoo did, however, lead me to information on some of the other species in the Cardamine genus. I determined from online photos that my plant was Cardamine hirsuta (hairy bittercress).

Below is a Spring pic of Cardamine hirsuta (white flowers) nestled around the Henbit (purple flowers). Notice how the leaves on the flower stalk are narrow and pointy and darker in color. You can’t see it in this photo, but the leaves nearer the ground are still similar to the way it looks in the Fall photo above.

How to eat Bittercress

So… plant identified safe to eat, now what to do with it? Well… it’s super yummy on sandwiches. It also ads a zesty kick to Chickweed pesto, which I think by itself tends to taste a little bland. And of course, it adds tons of flavor to a fresh wild greens salad. I haven’t tried it cooked yet, but I bet it would be delicious that way too. You can eat the entire plant, leaves, stems, flowers, seeds… the whole thing tastes great. The flowers and seeds are more peppery and spicy; the green leaves more garlicky, but still peppery.  I think this is the most savory wild green I’ve had so far.

Depending on where you live, you may have some nearby right outside your door. Why not go take a look? Go on now… and let me know if you find any!

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