 When many of us think of the pharmacy this is what we think of but the truth is the medicine here can actually make the earth our plant and animal relatives and us a lot sicker in the long run. Today I'm going to take you to a pharmacy that has a whole different take on health and wellness. Welcome to Walden pharmacy where they have a whole different take on health and wellness and it's located in a surprising place just outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Here they believe that healing ourselves comes as we heal the earth. Thanks for having me at the pharmacy. Yeah thank you so much for being here Rob. That's really what belief we were found it on is that you can't heal the people if you're neglecting the land that we really exist as one organism so we grow food for our family on our farm as well as medicine for our community in a way that is regenerating the land that we're farming on. Alright let's meet the plants come on. So we have elderberry here which is not quite ripe yet and I feel like we just have to start with elderberry because elderberry syrup is some of my favorite medicine. Yeah we grow and wildcraft at least 50 medicinal herbs here on the property including goldenrod, elecampane, pleurisy root, passionflower, turmeric, ginger, nettle, violet, Solomon seal, hibiscus, elderberry, poke, wild lettuce, skullcap, blueberry vein, yellow root, echinacea, plantain, peach, lemon balm and reishi. Wow nature's pharmacy is truly alive here. So back to the elderberry this is something that I love and that is elderberry syrup so I'm gonna have a try of this medicine. That's good. So tell us a little bit about the medicine behind elderberry. Yeah it's definitely one as you can see with good patient compliance because it tastes pretty great even our kids love it and so that's why it's our go-to immune booster when they head back to school it really helps prepare the body to deal with any coughs, colds and flus and can lessen the duration of them. And it sounds like the ducks are just about as excited as I am about it so let's move on to the next medicine. All right what plant friend do we have here? This is Solomon seal and it's definitely my go-to for any ligament, tendon or joint complaints you can use it internally as well as topically. So we have it here topically as one of an ingredients in our muscle and joint salve. A salve is an oil extract of the herb that we've then added beeswax to and melted it down and let it solidify into a container so you can carry it around with you easily. Violet here is one of my personal favorites and it's one of the ingredients in our sore throat spray. It's a gentle lymphatic safe enough for children and it can really help increase the drainage when you have stuffy ears or congestion around the throat. So it's in there along with echinacea which is growing right beside it. So I've been here for the last couple days and I arrived with a bit of a sore throat and I have been working with the sore throat spray and I have to say it has really worked wonders so thank you for sharing your medicine with me. Happily. We're here with our turmeric in our greenhouse and it is one of the medicines that I think has gained a lot of mainstream attention just because of its ability to reduce inflammation which is the root cause of so many disease. So we use it for that in our joint relief bidders. We also use it for stimulating digestion, it's great liver and gallbladder support as well. So this is the joint relief bidders right? Yeah. Okay so I'm gonna have a dropper of that. Bitter. So I just have to say that turmeric is one of the most important medicines to me during my year of growing and foraging all of my food this was such an important daily medicine and it's so great to be here connecting with this plant. You can smell the medicine that we're in right here. Yeah this is our abundant patch of holy basil and we love this medicine personally because it's great at helping you cool off on a hot summer day which we're very familiar with here in Alabama. Basils are also known as heart exilerants so they increase feelings of joy and I would say this is the easiest to grow adaptogen and those are plants that help you cope with feelings of stress and just help your body be a little more resilient. Well I can feel the stress just releasing and I can feel the joy so here we have the medicine in a tea. So as you can see our medicine can be growing freely and abundantly all around us it can be accessible in fact it looks like there's more like a hundred different plant medicines here than 50 wouldn't you say? Yeah once I'm walking around out here I'm just amazed at how surrounded I am. Every plant I see almost has a use and southern folk medicine which I'm trained in they believed that if you had an illness the remedy was somewhere in your own yard. If you have an illness the remedy is somewhere in your own yard and it can be as simple as a delicious tea. All right ducks we might need you to quiet down a little bit and you two chickens just for a little while. So often in today's culture there's this clear delineation between food and medicine. We have our food and we have our medicine but here at Wild and Pharmacy there really is no separation. Our food is our medicine and it's intricately at the same time part of healing our earth. So tell us about where we are right now. Yeah this is our chicken composting system where we compost our food scraps in our garden weeds and we turn it into beautiful compost with the help of the chickens. So we turn each pile down the hill each week and create this amazing beautiful compost. And of course with beautiful compost also chicken eggs at the same time. So we're talking about this rooster's quite excited. So we're talking about creating healthy compost turning food waste into compost and at the same time getting a wonderful thing chicken eggs. So we're out of the chicken composting system we're just below it and tell us about where we are now Trevor. Yeah so we are in a big bio swale. So a swale is a ditch and a berm on the contour and it catches water that is shooting down downhill. So we are functionally interconnected with the chicken composting system here because it is just above the swale. So water is rushing through the composting system catches in the swale and then vertigates the system past it. So rather than the water being you know distributed and shipped off the property you're trying to keep as much of that water on the property as possible to water your gardens to grow food and to soak it in. Yeah the best place to store water is in your soil so this is an awesome way to do it. All right today when a lot of people think of growing food they think of monocrops acres and acres of the exact same food being grown such as corn or soy or wheat and they see this behind us and they just see a wall of green and they don't know what it is but this is food tell us a little bit about it. Yeah this is a forest garden which is an indigenous technique adopted by permaculture that mimics a healthy forest ecosystem so we have all the layers of a forest ecosystem here and we're gonna come in with the ducks to create disturbance on the ground level and utilize their fertility and collect their eggs. So we're talking about dozens of foods and medicines coming out of one area all growing together right? Yeah. So we haven't talked about the goats yet. Tell me a little bit about how the goats play into this entire holistic system. Yeah they do some weed management for us we have some invasive weed trees that we coppice and there will be regenerative forage for the goats so I used to battle this weed but now it's like a regenerative food so I'm happy about it. And of course you have delicious goat milk and goat cheese. Yeah. Poison Ivy and the goat milk. Yeah actually one of the most interesting things he was sharing is that he used to have poison ivy all the time and once introducing goats and the goats actually eating the poison ivy and then drinking that goat milk that has the poison ivy or actually sister ivy I like to call it then you actually seem to have adapted to the to the sister ivy. Yeah I can roll around in it and I don't get it at all. So we're really out of the belief that everything on this planet is here for a reason so every weed or plant or animal has a role to play here on the farm and as the land steward we're really just the conductor of the symphony of life around us. It's a beautiful way to look at the world that we live on. So this right here here at Walden Pharmacy is proof that our medicine can be growing freely and abundantly all around us and that we can do this together as community. Oh hey and that we don't need the pharmaceutical industry to take care of ourselves and our community. So if you found this inspiring and you want to connect more with herbal medicine and food as medicine the links to Walden Farm our pharmacy are in the description and of course if you want to continue learning more make sure to subscribe to this channel where there'll be many more videos to come and if you think this is a message that you would like the world to see like it and comment share your thoughts to help spread this out into the world. So we love you all very much and we look forward to seeing you again soon.