 a $5 fee and we can just collect that as you want and I think if you can just give that to me it doesn't need to go through the library process so that would be great. So I'm here tonight to talk about roots because we're talking about rooted in Vermont and I'm here to talk about what might be growing in your backyard that you may or may not know about but the reason that it's fall and the reason that we look for roots in the fall is because the plants when they die back all the medicinal properties go into the roots and so there's many roots that we can look for this time of year if you know where they are so for instance if you're looking for dandelion roots and you haven't dug any in the spring you need to know where those dandelion plants are so that in the fall you can go back and get them or something like echinacea you might have it growing in your perennial bed in your in your landscape bed and not even know that you have echinacea sitting right in your perennial bed because purple comb flower is echinacea which is a very common we use coal remedy for one. So I'm just going to talk a little bit about the roots that you can find around you and how you might use them and how some of the ways that you would incorporate those into your lifestyle or your ways of getting them into your system so the tea that you have right now that's roasted dandelion with vanilla is dandelion root and which is really good for your kidneys and so you may not have a kidney problem or as people get older they're liberating your kidneys kind of get little stopped up sometimes and or don't work so well your kidneys are also very much associated with your blood pressure so if you have a blood pressure problem that seems that it's looking like it your numbers are getting worse you might want to start having a little dandelion tea on a daily basis and you'd be surprised how that might be all you need to adjust that in your system or what you're actually doing is you're feeding your kidneys so they can work efficiently so that your kidneys can do what they're supposed to do and so the reason that whether it's leaf material whatever plant you have to use or whether it's a root whatever it is the reason that plants make good medicine is really because they're good food and so I'm also a nutritional counselor so I have a lot of knowledge about just food and nutrition also and so it dovetails herbs dovetail very nicely with nutrition because it's all about food for your body that's how your body recognizes it rather than a pharmaceutical where it's a chemically processed ingredient that goes into your system and thus often creates side effects that we don't necessarily see when we use herbs now that said you have to keep in mind that everybody is unique and everybody's different so at any time anybody could have some kind of a reaction or an intolerance to any herb whether it would be a common one that most people are not so when you're using herbs it's really a good thing for you to take a smaller dose when you first start and then just make sure that you're you're not reacting in any way or it's not giving you an upset stomach or any symptoms the negative symptoms in that regard because there are some things for instance people that have are allergic to poison ivy can also have trouble with chamomile it's a similar type of species and sometimes not but you know there are herbs like that that are from similar in species so anyways just it's always good to be wise and do things in moderation when you first begin in the smaller the dose that works for you the better so anyway those are just a few background pieces of information when you're using herbs but so where do you find these roots so sometimes you find them in your vegetable garden so things like garlic and onions so you know it's hard to classify whether they're actually food or medicine because we use them both ways gobo for instance is actually burdock a cultivated form of burdock that you can grow in your garden burdock root is really good for you it's a again it's it's a bitter herb it's one of the bitters all the bitters are really good for your liver so we'll talk a little bit about that as we go along but gobo is cultivated long long taproot and some people will use it like um a regular raw vegetables in their salads for instance but it's a bitter so in the western culture we don't often we are more attracted to sweet and salty things and the bitter and the sour things um are kind of set to the side but every one of those tastes sensations on your tongue actually stimulates your certain organs in your system to work and bitters actually stimulate your liver which is part of your digestive system to begin to make the bile and the other materials that your digestive tract is actually going to use to break down your food thus the old um the gentleman in their smoking jackets in the um in the smoking room in the hotel in the old tradition having their bitters before dinner that was why they were doing that it was a social event for in that old tradition but those bitters had a purpose and we have bitter recipes now that we can actually make and I have one here that um we make that's made with yellow doc which is another bitter herb that um also has some other roots in it like ginger and turmeric which are herbs that grow in your vegetable garden most commonly if you are going to grow them but we usually get them at the grocery store but still there are roots and they have extremely um high levels of the immune boosting capacity and um the reason that roots especially are good food and good medicine is because they grow in the earth and if if you have good soil and and it's been taken care of well um and it hasn't been you know overgrown and overtaxed and and fertilized and all those things we know that have negative effects on the soil if you have good soil it's full of great mineral content and minerals we all we need in very small amounts but because minerals are generally rocks it's like we don't digest rocks very well but if the plant takes them up and then you eat the plant then you're getting good mineral material um into your system that helps and they're often the catalysts for many um chemical electrochemical processes that your body carries out so that's one of the reasons why bitters are good so um we have bitters we have tea and we have tinctures which are made um we're going to talk about making simple tinctures tonight um you can you know you can go to the health food store and buy standard extracts which are also tinctures but they're very carefully measured with the intent that the outcome would be that every single bottle of an extract would have the same um um strength and consistency as the next bottle so if you're making tinctures in your home though and you're making what we call symbols it's very um it's if you're using symbols with herbs that are non-toxic and very um very easily um adaptable to your lifestyle um you don't have to worry about the exact amounts like you do with herbs that are really potent so if you're growing herbs in your backyard um or using things that you're wild crafting that are around you um you can make simple tinctures um according to what your family might need so if you have family members that are have bronchitis regularly or um respiratory issues or if you have family members that have digestive issues you might be you might have collect those herbs that are around you that actually um pertain to those particular problems and have them on your shelf and you can make your own simple medicine that could be a first first your first response to a problem in your household without having to run to the pharmacy um and it takes a little bit of knowledge but um making them actually is quite simple and not and not extremely complicated um so we'll talk a little bit about that um yeah you ever chew on roots you can chew on roots if you don't mind so for instance um we have lots of bitter leaf lettuce escrow those kinds of things radicchio that we use in our salads often and there are different they those have those have bitter um potential to them um and not everything is sweet and so again bitter is great because it stimulates your liver to work efficiently your liver does an extreme amount of work in your system it has to um filter out all the toxins out of your body so anything that comes in externally that has any kind of toxic substances in them is going to get filtered through your liver and on and then filtered through your kidneys because your kidneys filter out the liquids and your kidneys filter out more of the solids but um but your liver balances insulin balances cholesterol um does a lot of hormonal work cleans out toxins so it it needs to work efficiently and so the best way without taking medicine to to get your liver to work efficiently is to continually use bitter boobs and herbs and that because you're actually helping your liver to work efficiently um so that's one of the reasons why um something like a bitter might be a tonic herb considered a tonic herb or something like milk this all which is a liver related herb might be considered a tonic herb because you're taking it regularly to sustain that system and that organ so that it can do the work that it's supposed to do so really what you're doing is you're feeding yourself the things that your body really needs um and keeping it clean of toxins because these days I figure I forget how many thousands of toxins a day that we are actually exposed to so they're in the air and they're in the water and unfortunately they're in our food um and they might be in your they might be in your cleaning closet um they could come from any number of places so um we like to be intentional about detoxing and keeping our bodies cleaned up and eating like really clean food um so where else do you find these things so you might have an herb garden in your backyard and you might um you know look at a book like this that's about the medicinal garden and you know figure out what you'd like to grow in your garden and and you cultivate those close to the house um and then there's the fringes of the field in the forest where there's foraging to be done and there's a lot of things that most people consider to be weeds that are actually really good for you so all those people who put chemicals all over their lawn and destroy their dandelions every year not only are they putting a very toxic substance on their lawn that they're going to breathe every day and add to your own bodily toxicity but they're killing the good stuff that's actually there and so a lot of us if we let our our lawns grow we find that we have actually quite a number of things that grow in your lawn but the thing that's probably the most common one that's the root um herb would be dandelions and there's lots of ways to use dandelions so we're drinking a tea um you can tincture it um you can and this tea by the way and so we've used vanilla or may I say the republic of tea has used vanilla and there's no sugar in here but it does taste rather sweet they they've um um balanced off the bitterness so that you can actually enjoy a nice cup of tea if you took it straight in a tincture form it might be quite a lot more bitter or you know you can encapsulate it you can use it um dandelion wine there are a lot of wines that um can be added to herbals or herbal substances added to them and that's another way of getting um herbs into your system that might be not as tasteful as you'd like um without and so they taste a little bit better um so though there's lots of things that grow around the edges of your fields and your forest so Marshmallow is a really interesting plant that has a beautiful pink flower on it um and you may see it in the fields and it has these beautiful pink flowers it probably goes about two to three feet high um and if you went to dig that root up it has a very long tap root and most of the time when you dig it you can't get the whole root and so it'll break off and you'll take what you get and next year you'll find that it's growing back again because they're pretty tenacious um there's another interesting plant um called Joe pie weed that has become really popular as a landscape plant nowadays um it's that grows about four to six feet high and um has these beautiful pink flowers that grow late in this in the summer early fall and at this point up where we are they've um we've had hard frost so they're gone at this point but they do grow around the edges of wet areas um so if you have a wet area in your yard it might be a good thing for you to plant this is used the root of this plant is used for urinary tract issues and and kidney stones so people who are prone to kidney stones might use a tincture of this in order to um keep that at bay. I have a question you mentioned marshmallow you didn't say what was it for? Yeah marshmallow is um is is what we call mucilaginous so what that means is it has this kind of slimy smooth kind of um gel that it exudes if it's tinctured or put into a water base of some sort um and what that does is it can be used in formulas for like your digestive tract if it's irritated so it will soothe it or for your respiratory system if you have like um you know some kind of chest lung congestion to like soothe those so it's usually put into formula with something else like in a respiratory scenario it might be used with mollum that's a mild expectorant or elecompan which is an expectorant um to keep the coughing irritation less um aggravating. Um bone set is very similar looks very similar to Joe Highweed and Rose in Wet Places too but it has the little flower crown is white and bone set the the the roots of bone set are used to um help heal skin and bone and um open wounds and that kind of thing um bone set was used um traditionally uh as it would you would make a poultice out of it and you would if someone had a broken leg they would wrap the leg with this poultice of bone set and it actually creates um bone quicker and it would help that bone break to heal so um it does the same thing with um you know wounds and that kind of thing so that would be what they would use that for um what else elecompan is um an interesting flower and that you see growing late summer and it looks like daisies when you look at it from a distance and it grows in the fields and it is really good it has inulin in it which is really good for your lungs so it's a mild expectorant and I can't find it it's not enough you see big patches of them growing in the fields and they come up pretty easily they look like small daisies um they're very beautiful and but they're very good for your lungs that's what the root is used for is that the latin name inulin the elecompan no elecompan is it's been known that way um it the latin name is um inulin yeah um what else so birdock we're all familiar with birdock right um that grows everywhere and um the thing about birdock is the same thing the roots of wild birdock are like really tough to get out once it takes root in your yard it's like you have a war on your hands um but the thing about birdock is too that um the big seed heads that form that stick to us wherever we go those um if you think about what a seed is it's actually the essence of the entire plant so you can actually teacher that seed head too without digging up all those roots and have um medicine that way and the same thing goes for echinacea so purple coneflower is echinacea now we use the root of the plant um and you can use the leaf and stuff during the summertime but the the greatest medicine is in the root when it dies back this time of the year um but those seed pot those seed heads are quite large and when the flowers die back and those their seeds form you can do the same thing with those seed pods and quite often i'll take a couple seed pods and just throw them into my tincture bottle with the roots and let them tincture all at the same time um yellow dock is an interesting plant it has it's sometimes known as curly dock because the edges of the leaves have little scallops on them they're kind of a little bit curly they look similar to birdock in some ways but you can tell the difference between the them because the the leaves are all but the root if you dug the roots birdock is quite white very white when you come bring the root up when you bring the root up from yellow dock it is yellow as a matter of fact if you were making um dying yarn or cloth or something like that you could use yellow dock to make a nice yellow light tan color um die so i'm not going to be able to find that one either you said curly dock and yellow dock at the same curly dock and yellow dock that's the same same animal same plant doesn't get a flower per se so it's mostly the leaves that you recognize them from and that's another thing that with root plants it's like if you're looking for root plants that are growing in the field in the forest then you're looking you need to remember where they are so when you find them in the summer and you can identify them you want to remember where they are so that when they die back in the fall you go and get the right thing um that's always good to try to identify your plants in one or two different ways um rather than just one because there are some false guys out there that can fool you um most guys are always next to the real guys not always do you have any techniques as far as do you just put stakes in the ground during the year you can do that um you know usually there's enough plant material still above ground that you can um if you know where they are you can find them again but if you're not familiar with them that would be a good way for you to start learning um you're also saying that um earlier you hit the first frost there for the foliage has died down you can still go back and uh what roots have it's below the ground that's the time is always good to wait till the plants are killed off by the killing frost because then all that plant material goes all that plant strength goes back that's when it goes back to the roots Kathy this isn't necessarily about who's uh not a lady I mean I mean a bunch but as far as planting bulbs is it after the killing frost that you plant the bulbs or can you plant the main time in fall I think you can plant like September you know later in the year but is it okay after the killing frost as well yeah because they're they're undercover most things underground will stay around 50 degrees um except in really cold climates or where there isn't a lot of snow on the ground um and then the temperature of the ground might get down to colder temperatures which is why some plants don't grow in our colder climates my question was if you're wildcrafting or even if you're like we have echinacea for a landscape plant how much can you take without killing it so when you pull the root you kill the plant so what I always do is when your heart oh well so here's here's a kind of a rule of thumb for harvesting plants in the wild especially because you always want to make sure that you don't take all of it you want to leave some of it so that continue to grow so when I work in my own flower gardens I will pull I have enough flower in the garden so that I don't have to take all of it and I will take maybe a third of it at the most and leave two-thirds of it um and then what I'll do is I'll take those seed heads and break them up and seed them into the place where I've just pulled the um the plant out and so that they will grow back and so it'll take two years for them to get to be their full maturity and so in the meantime I can go back and take another third of my plant space and I've still got mature plants for the next year so and if the same goes for when you're working with um when you're wildcrafting things so you want to do things like stay away from um roadways like within 20 feet of a road because you don't want petroleum and and um salt and those kinds of things contaminating your plant materials you want to be away from main roads or away from some kind of toxic um you know building or something like that and again you want to take only a third of what you find if you're going to take if you need to take a lot you only want to take like a third of what's there that leaves another third for somebody else to come along and get and a third to keep growing and whenever you get a chance to put seed back into the ground it's a really great thing to do um echinacea is one of the plants that has been over harvested in the past years now that people grow it in their in their landscape beds it's it's better but um people who are you know making large quantities of product it's like echinacea we had to actually start as herbalists starting to cultivate echinacea in a formal setting in order to have enough product to you know serve the world as it were so um we have to be careful of things like that too so there's a number of plants that get over harvested golden seal is one of them very potent anti-bacterial antibiotic plant but it's been over harvested and so it's if you go to buy it in the in like the apothecary it can be rather costly and that's why because it's over harvested and it has to be cultivated now and that plant particularly grows in a woodland setting under a hardwood and so in order to grow that in a cultivated um scenario they have to recreate that kind of setting so it gets a little labor-intensive um yeah is uh golden seal that's not the same as golden rod is it no okay so golden seal is a root okay um and so golden rod now i'm gonna just because you brought that up i'm gonna show you something golden rod grows you know like in um august during the season when people have um allergy symptoms and everybody thinks they're allergic to it and they're not because what you're really allergic to is ragweed but ragweed is a little ground vine that you don't hardly ever see but it grows at the same time as rag as golden seal and but golden seal is actually an antidote for allergy symptoms that's golden rod this is golden rod okay and it's the upper it's the aerial portion so it's the leaves and the flowers that you used in this case um but so golden seal is actually a woodland plant that we harvest the roots from and then there's a little um there's a little plant that's called gold thread that grows in um places where um it mossy places in higher elevation and we find it when we hike a lot um but it's in wet places it could be near like swampy areas where there might be mossy areas that are growing and it kind of looks like a little um um a little irish shamrock it has a very unique um three little um leaves on it and if you reach down through the moss and you grab ahold of the root it's tiny tiny tiny it's called it's looks like a thread it's that tiny and it's those little pieces of thread that you actually tincture the little and those are the roots and again that's another scenario where you want to be careful that you don't take too much but those little gold threads will turn your tincture bright yellow just like golden just like um um golden seal will um and it has the same it's a similar species so it has the same properties so you can if living in brahm on we have we're in a climate where we can find gold thread very easily and you can use that as a substitute for golden seal it's it's antibiotic and it's antiviral it's a very strong um medicinal herb and it's great for um any kind of situations that require it might require antiseptic or antibiotic use um as a substitute for antibiotics so um problems with issues in the digestive tract where people might have ulcers or they might have really inflamed um Crohn's disease or something of that nature where there's there's actually a a chance that there could be infection um um gold and seal or gold thread as a substitute would work very nicely can i ask you a question about we we've misidentified i think agrimony and golden rod they're separate or yes they're different so the golden rod is more we've seen i think we've seen that along the roadside it's very showy and taller yeah when it comes it comes like in massive amounts it's all it's everywhere yes and agrimony i don't know i don't think i have a picture of agrimony so but they're different when you look at them um that's agrimony so it has a stalk to it yeah and the others are and the other yeah we have like the whole head is like yellow yeah yeah so they have a stalk like mullin similar to mullin but it's more of a the mullin stalk is quite tall i don't think agrimony gets that tall but it has a very unique flower arrangement whereas mullin the mullin flower is more like this um anyways mullin has that silvery feathered kind of leaf on it that's thick like succulents are and then the stalk and then there's um um there's just because we have issues with ticks now in Vermont we have a school that runs from May to October and one of my students we actually created these tick kits that next year will actually be selling but it's made with an herb called andrograbus andrograbus is an herb that grows in india drum and it is a repellent for ticks it works really well you can buy it in the health food store you can add it to water and make spritz it on your skin it's non-toxic you can use it on animals they can lick it and it doesn't make them sick and ticks do not like it if you do happen to get bitten by a tick and you pull the tick by the tick out you can actually take some andrograbus internally and it'll help to keep it out of your bloodstream it's an extremely bitter herb so you want to chase it with water or something and then in some one of our tickets that has we also put a bottle of clossus liniment which is an antiseptic that you can actually put on this site excuse me but unfortunately we have not yet learned how to grow andrograbus in the state because the climate isn't quite right so we have to get it from outside the states and we have to be careful because as rome and i were talking about earlier it's like when things come in from outside the states they're often sprayed or radiated unless they're processed before they get here unless they're bottled and processed before they come in so i guarantee though that that herb will probably become you know cultivated to the states sooner and then there's things like angelica which is an herb that has been used for female problems and the root has been used it tastes like anise so it's been candied and used for years and years and years and used in wine and it can get to be like six feet tall it's got very showy leaf on it and that's an interesting one to have in your herb garden if you use if you have if there's female issues that you need to deal with this only shows the seed the head but you can see that the leaf itself looks the big leaves actually look like big maple leaves but the plants themselves will grow this high and they get quite large so you have to make sure that you make space for them in your garden are they related to carpars? no different species it doesn't look similar but the plant itself grows totally different yeah and it smells like anise when you get close to it and they form heads um seed heads on them like dill does where those seeds can be used too and those that grow wild or you can only cultivate those you usually are usually you have to buy a cultivated plant and it ends up in your garden somewhere and or you put it somewhere where it's not quite so invasive so yeah um so anyway there's lots of plants like that and many to be found and you know you want you need to learn each one as you become the more you use it or and a lot of times if you move it into your living environment you can watch it grow so you watch it from the spring and how it develops over the summer and what it looks like and then when it dies back and so you get to recognize plants where when you go to other places and all of a sudden it's like oh i have one of those in my garden it's like and you begin to recognize them so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to hand um you can just take one of these um this is a really basic um description of how to make a tincture so you can tincture most all of these roots you can tincture if you were going to make a tea from a raw from raw material you would want to put it in a pot and simmer it for three or four minutes on your stove in order to drink it so rather than just steeping it like you would um leaf material um because it's a root in root form that you'd want to simmer it for a few minutes in this case here it's already been roasted what you're drinking has already been roasted so um it's already been um heated and cooked but if you were going to just have you know dandelion root tea that you picked out of your garden you'd want to chop it up into smaller pieces and either dry it that way and use it later or just simmer it a few um minutes on your stove and then drink it and strain it and drink it um rather than steeping it because it needs a little more time but a simple tincture that's made um with alcohol so alcohol is the common thing that is used to um um put your herbs into that draws the medicine out of the roots it's not the only thing that can be used um sometimes people would use um brandy perhaps because it has a flavor to it and so if you were tincturing a root like valerian which is sedative but literally tastes and smells like dirty socks you might want to disguise that flavor it's an incredible sedative or um you know if you've got somebody that's in a high anxiety situation or if you have some kind of trauma going on or um you know um it could act like you know a pain killer even um as a sedative to help just bring that pain level down um it's like you could take up to an ounce if someone was in really a lot of pain normally you'd use a tincture or two a you know a dropper or two um but it doesn't have a great taste so you might want to use brandy a flavored brandy in order to make that more palatable especially if you're dealing with young children you know they're going to let you know that it's not very tasty um and the other thing is for people who for some reason um can't use alcohol um you can actually reduce alcohol tinctures and what you would do is you would add a small amount of boil almost boiling water to a tincture um usually five mills which is um not quite five ounces it's about four ounces is what it is um and you would add that and um add it to your tincture um and then put your tincture in there and let it heat give it four or five minutes to sit in that hot almost boiling water and it will evaporate the alcohol and then it will be um it will be a problem for someone who can't do an alcohol tincture um so but again the reason we use alcohol is because it draws the material out of the plant so what we do is i don't know if you can follow me what we do is we take the plant and we pull it and we would have the root on the bottom and we would take our jar and you can see the roots here that have been in there um so we put the roots in the jar and then we fill it now there's been stuff taken out of here so but normally wherever your dried material comes you would put enough 80 proof vodka usually because vodka has no additives to it it's tasteless and it doesn't um it's the the most um you know mundane flavor and pretty much draws out whatever the flavor is in the herbs other than if you wanted to use some flavored brandy because of the the taste of bitterness of the herbs but you would probably you would fill your um alcohol in to like two inches above your dried material and then just kind of move it around so that you can make sure that everything is covered and then you would leave it in like out of the sun so um it doesn't have to be in an amber colored bottle um glass is better because it doesn't you know plastics is problematic as we all have been hearing these days because of what it gives off and um glass is better to use and if you put it in a closet or some place um pantry somewhere where you can sort of observe it um for six or eight weeks um and every once in a while maybe just wash it around a little bit um and it will that your alcohol will turn color and in about six to eight weeks what you can do is you can take this material and just pour it through a strainer um take out all this root material and put it in your compost pile and then um you can re jar this if you want because it's a smaller quantity than what you had when you have the roots in it and um cap it tightly and just and use it that way or you can obviously bottle it into you know useful sizes um but you can and because it's in alcohol there you run no risk of any kind of bacterial issues or mold or anything like that and most tinctures will keep at least two years and most of them will keep five to six years without um altering the or losing the medicinal effects of those tinctures so that's really all that it takes to make a very simple medicinal tincture that you can use at home and if um again if you know what your family's calm and health issues are then you can find the herbs that address those issues and um and have those on hand so echinacea for instance is used commonly for colds quite often used to be combined with golden seal to kill bacteria but um the reason that echinacea works so well for colds is not necessarily that it breaks up congestion or anything like that it's good because it's a blood cleaner that's its main property but it's often in cold remedies and other formulas because as your body is cleaning itself of those toxic substances from you know the viruses it's keeping it out of your blood so there are stories that have been told about echinacea where um someone that was bitten by a rattlesnake was actually given one ounce of tincture every half hour until um they stopped their fever stopped and um kept them from dying of rattlesnake poison so that's how good a blood cleaner it is if you know how to use it um but it's used in combination with lots of things for colds because um it also is a is a it's mild stimulant and it uses um it it is good for your immune system too it builds up your immune system so the other way that you can use echinacea in the winter time is if somebody has chronic respiratory issues or is prone to bronchitis or something in the winter you can take this every day one week on two weeks off and it will be um a maintenance or a tonic for those folks throughout the winter so this is a good um tincture to have in your medicine closet like over the winter cold months for instance for many reasons but that's one of them how much so normally you would take a half a dropper usually if you get your droppers working well um you can't get a full dropper of anything you can usually only get a half and most tinctures will say take 20 to 30 drops so instead of like counting drops the 30 drops is about a half a dropper fall so and that's really all you can usually get in one in one swoop there so so anyway um so I you know instead of having everybody make a tincture um because we could make quite a mess at the library I didn't want to messing them but um so if we had made something we would have had a jar like that and you would have had to wait six weeks in order to get your jar of echinacea but um so I just jarred you some and so you can take some home if you want when you go with you um so there are in this handout that I gave you it does say for equipment to use a jelly bag or a muslin bag or a wine press to like sift out the ingredients I just use a um you know a strainer that I have in my kitchen a lot of this stuff can be done in your kitchen it's really very kind of appropriate to the harvest season and all the things that we do um so there's libel so when that's strained out there's libel to be some sediment that accumulates at the bottom of your main container um and you can strain that all out in muslin if you like but really it doesn't it's there's no harm in it it's just going to sit on the bottom um and again there's no bacteria involved and there's no mold involved in any of that because of the alcohol content of the the teacher itself so um you can make that as clean as you like um so um this just kind of reminds you of the things that you can do when you go to make a tincture and um it's really that simple um sometimes we make tinctures um or herbal medicinal with vinegar um this time of year fireside is quite quite popular which is made usually with garlic and cayenne and it has a vinegar base to it usually apple cider vinegar but there's many variations on fire cider um but cider vinegar has a lot of um amino acids and um is has a lot of um electrolytes in it so vinegar based products whether you use apple cider or vinegar as a base for your salad dressing or whether you make shrub which um has a vinegar base to it or fire cider um one of the things that traditional use of shrub was that the guys that in the summer that were outhang in the fields would be perspire so heavily that they would be in um you know a threat of passing out from lack of hydration and electrolytes and so without Gatorade back in those days they would drink shrub and it was the vinegar in the shrub that would actually give them their electrolytes back um and so they're you know quite often with shrub they'll will add some kind of um fruit flavoring to it like whatever's in season like raspberries or that kind of thing um and maybe something sweet like maple syrup so that it cuts that harsh um sensation from drinking vinegar but the guys in the hate fields that was what they drank and that was the reason why and you can also you know as you make your vinegars in the fall with whatever herbs you have in your garden your rosemary or your or your thyme or those kinds of things um to flavor your vinegar for maybe your salad dressings it's like those those homemade salad dressings are all full of um electrolytes that are really good for you rather than buying Gatorade that's got way too much sugar and that kind of stuff in it so um that is just trying to think if there's anything else I wanted to tell you about um I do have some bitters here if you would like to these are sample bottles that we've made up um and you're welcome to take one of these if you want if you want to if you want to taste it and see if you like it first um you're welcome to do that too I'll open a bottle and you can um you can try it um this is a really um nice herbal bitter so it's made with yellow doc and so that's the root from the yellow or curly doc that grows in fields all over Vermont and we've added ginger and turmeric which are two really good garden herbs that are great for your immune system um and sin with a little cinnamon in it which is really good for insulin balance um and they're done in alcohol um but the flavor is um um really nice flavor um if you were just what you would do is you would take just a few drops of this either on your tongue or in a little glass of water or um even in maybe an evening toddy that of some sort with um quite often bitters were combined with some kind of um um whiskey or bourbon or those kinds of drinks but you can um take them as health a health bitter also and you know it has doesn't have to be associated with any kind of alcoholic you know social drink so um it's especially good are good for um people who are older who may be not wanting to eat that much their their appetites slow down and um a few drops of bitters sometimes can stimulate their appetite to just eat better so um that's all i have for the evening and unless you have any questions so i'm happy to take them for you uh your recipe for the echinacea is the same recipe that i use with um uh black currants and vodka college schnapps but you know you said put in the dark place shake it everyone's yeah and um i have a friend who claimed that that uh prevented colds like we are any kind of brambles in the bramble family there's um they have good medicinal properties actually raspberries specifically raspberries the leaves of raspberries are really good for balancing um women's hormones um it's just that as a it's really good tonic herb for females for you know whether it's you know premenopause or early you know menstrual cycles does it matter what time of year you harvest the raspberries um it just in the middle of the summer when they're you know really nice and the bugs haven't two nice holes in them or they haven't you know kind of gone by the you'd probably want to get them like before the fruit is harvested um the leaves are usually the best and or around the time that you're harvesting fruit the leaves are our best right in that window of time can i ask you about we have a lot of japanese knotweed oh boy anything any uses i've heard some people saying it's medicinal japanese knotweed is um become really invasive um apparently there's species of japanese knotweed that's really good for ticks um but i don't know which species it is and i don't think it's the one that's you see everywhere unfortunately yeah so i unfortunately i don't think we have but i understand you could eat japanese knotweed we use we try to yeah our our goats like that the goats like well that's another thing about goats that um i guess goats eat poison ivy and it doesn't hurt them so you could probably try sticking them on whatever invasive species you have so this teacher that we just described that you can do that with any root you can do the same thing with any um any leaf material so tincturing that's how you tincture whatever you're tincturing and so the trick is to learn about the the plant that you're looking at and how it's used and then make your tincture and and always label it as far as what it is because i guarantee you especially when you're drying dried material is like the leaves look different when you throw them in the dryer but once they're dried and they're all broken up you say oh it's like we've all done it and it's like no you won't so make sure that you label what it is and the date that you harvested it or the date that you tinctured it so you know how old it is and in any information that you need to remember how to use it i always wonder so for instance we have lemon bomb and i could use it in a tea but i wouldn't get very much tea out of the amount it seems like with a tincture you you'd get a higher value per um not necessarily it depends what herb you're using um lemon bomb is a really nice herb it's really good for a lot of things it's really good for stress levels and for female issues for it's it's it's really used to like bring down a lot of stress which unfortunately in our western civilization here in the u.s. we have very high levels of stress and so drinking a cup of um lemon bomb tea every day is a really good tonic just for stress levels or anxiety issues or any of those things um you can take sure it um it's nice in formula with some other women's herbs for instance um in situations like that or for some with some other herbs that might help people to sleep um better um so yeah either way um lemon bomb is a mint but it's a very strong one and so you can get a really nice cup of tea um yeah and just take even just taking a few flowers i think when you draw usually when you dry material if you dry it slowly and if you want it to maintain its color um but when you dry it it takes less dried material to make a stronger tea than it does raw material so how do you maintain the color? you you just you just dry it slowly and you keep your eye on it so um i don't recommend using your microwave ovens um because microwave ovens you may or may not know actually um change the the molecular structure of whatever food you cook in it so i don't recommend them actually to use as cooking so if you used it to dry your herbs you'd be doing the same thing you'd be taking the medicinal properties right out of them so the best way to dry them is if you happen to have a gas stove that has a pilot light on it that's a really good way because it's a slow drying process um there are some round food dryers with um shelves on them that you can use that have a coil in the bottom just a coil and that's enough heat to dry most things in like a 24 hour cycle um if you do have dryers that have settings on them you want to dry at a really low to medium low setting you don't want to dry at a really like you don't want to you know some of the higher settings are for like drying vegetables and those kinds of things that's a different so the best way to get good color is to dry slowly and things like um mullin for instance that's kind of thick um those might take you a couple of days to dry if you're drying slowly but small batches especially if you're if it's at home you know you're just drying small batches and you can keep your eye on them and again if it's in your kitchen area somewhere where you're working like all the time you can keep your eye on that stuff if you dry in a different manner and loses its color or turns black or something that's that bad or is that easily well you're losing um you're losing the viability of the properties of the plant so um heat too high of heat will actually take the viability out so for example a hang dry mint and sometimes it will turn black rather than just losing it's okay right um it can get a little darker um but if you're if it's really turning black then you're drying it too fast or too hot yeah so even like things like if you were drying red clover blossoms you want them to stay red you don't want them to turn brown then you know you have good quality um clover so it's better to like really keep your eye on them and dry them and then even dried material it's like use glass they'll keep much better in glass and then you know there are things like um you know how to clean um how to use some of the vegetables in your vegetable garden too for like garlic for instance garlic is hugely medicinal um great for colds it's like if you like garlic you can eat it raw and you can kill a sore throat with it um that it's that potent it's that antiviral um so and all those things are really good to add you know when it comes to food or herbs for that matter it's like when you're cooking for your families or if it's like throw them in your stews throw them you know in your smoothie drinks it's like throw them you know in your soos it's you get to sneak the good stuff and even though people might not like the taste of it um while you're cooking because it's like good food is good medicine and you know it's like we have the ability to really counteract a lot of health problems if we get them early enough and we get people to change their eating habits quite often we can really avoid um them having to go on um pharmaceutical drugs and either that or um we can help the your ability to to take pharmaceutical drugs for a shorter period of time so you just mentioned garlic for sore throat you also mentioned uh marshmallow and mullet as different things for different purposes have you ever combined them together or sometimes yep sometimes so if you're tincturing things it's better to tincture there are some formulas that work really well but generally speaking we would tincture everything individually and then combine things after the fact so that we're not we're again even though these are simples and we're not measuring exactly we're controlling really the percentages of how we're mixing them together actually it might be outside the scope of what you wanted to discuss but we can you use oil as a way of trying out the medicines in a plant or is that I mean I guess you wouldn't maybe use that internally maybe that would be some yeah oil is is not that great um what we it's called a menstrual so it's not that good a menstrual um oil is good for a few things if you're going to use that material for like making a salve or something topical but you wouldn't get it if you you want you wouldn't want to take you wouldn't want to take oil it's not that palatable and in most cases the oil itself isn't that doesn't draw that well so it's mostly a preparation you would use that preparation if you were going to make something with it right so like um if you take st john's wort and you put it in oil it'll turn that oil in absolutely gorgeous red yellow color um so it's drawn that the medicine out um but you wouldn't take that internally you take a st john's wort tincture internally but you'd use that oil as a topical salve for skin issues perhaps or that kind of thing so it's not maybe not as medicinally not as strong or uh it's more of a topical I mean st john's wort is a good herb but to take it internally you'd want to take it as a tincture or in a capsule even rather than in the oil process so you can well yeah it was very it was a wealth of information yes yeah so so don't be afraid to the experiment just be careful and be wise and find good good sources of identification and you know use more than one source and use more than one way of identifying your plants so by the leaf size of the flower or by the smell or by those kinds of things so I'm gonna send out books on it's kind of step oh the line so well thank you all for coming and um please take your tincture um if you would like to take it um yellow doc bitter please do that too um if you want to taste it first I'll be happy to open a bottle and you can all do the taste test I'm reading somewhere that the yellow doc leaves you can cut them up and throw them in your compost and it helps does it feed the microbes I don't know the answer yeah I don't know about yellow doc leaves but confry which grows like crazy and you have one confry plant you'll have a bazillion but you can that is full of nitrogen and you can when you if you cut them down before they bloom and spread they won't spread so much um and then throw it in your compost you will fix nitrogen in your compost it might be similar but I've never used it that way yeah but there are I mean there are plants like that that you can use um you know for well it's not just medicinal for us and you know even for like some of your um animals so like for chickens and that sort of stuff they like a lot of that those that green material my horses will eat the heads off from the yellow doc sometimes uh-huh which is interesting just the heads just the heads and I also had a horse that and only I've only ever had one horse that I was sitting here he would eat in the fall or late summer the golden rod so I was like that's like some liver issue well that's it's possible because when we um you know I I've had a friend whose horse we treated at one point and the um the herbalist that came to work with her horse what we would she had a number of different herbs and what we would do is we would let the horse smell them and the horse would either refute would turn would turn away from them or he would either or he would eat them he would just literally take them out of her hand and that was the way that she determined which things to combine to treat the horse for his particular problem yeah so they'll often be able to tell you that and it might be sometimes that they just are being fiddly keen they don't like that particular thing and not that it won't work for them but um if they're not going to eat it it's not going to work right yeah they are they are it's amazing so Jan asked about books and we've got a lot of stuff in our library loan about herbal medicine making tinctures all kinds of stuff so if you're interested in any of that library hasn't closed yet and uh it's up on the screen out there great yeah all right thank you thank you so much and there's a couple of there's um um business cards here if you would like to take them for later where do you live happy um i live in north stanville vermont but i have an office here in waterbury center so we use the um hunger mountain christian church site so i have we have an office there they have 11 acres there and so they let us use their gardens to like plant stuff so we can use them as demonstration gardens and we can we can use some of the material plus there's a lot of stuff that we can wildcraft there so and i also do quite often um video conference teaching classes in the winter time especially so um i do we do have a newsletter if you would like to get added to the newsletter i so that you get information about that i'll be happy to do that and as a matter of fact on the 15th of this month um we came we were privileged to receive um two three coolers full of elderberry mash from some growers that were growing elderberries for a brewery scenario so they did the first pressing and then they were they gave us the rest of the mash and so we're we're gonna like between five and whenever we're done like five and nine on the 15th at hunger mountain they have a big kitchen there we're gonna be um stewing down that elderberry mash and for elderberry syrup and because it was free to us we're just gonna give it to people because it's gonna be way more than what we need so if you would like to come and get some you are you can come and see what we do and and learn and taste it and take some home with you because we're gonna have way more than 15 it's the 15th of october yeah from five to nine so it'll be in the evening okay um and we'll be in the kitchen doing stuff down so um just come bring friends if you'd like because we can only take so much on that um we've used elderberries to make the schnapps too uh elderberries really high in vitamin c um really really anti-viral i mean that is the best thing to treat the flu with don't go buy tamiflu at pharmacy go get elderberry so yeah that's great and it's um folks that have to take boost because they're not eating or they're recovering or anything or whatever yeah um i've often heard them say they're too sweet right there's a lot of sugar and yeah and um someone said um put some bitters in it would this work yep if they'll if they like it if they'll taste it i mean the other thing would be find um go to the health food store get rid of the boost and find um a um a superfood powder yeah like cabbett puts out not a way product but a superfood product so way based is dairy based right um and that's okay but it doesn't digest well for a lot of people a superfood powder is one that is vegetables and fruits powdered and um you take a scoop of it and either make it as just a water-based drink but a smoothie would be better and especially anything for the elderly that needs to be liquid is better so a smoothie the more you can get in the smoothie drink i think if you can find the flavors that they like um that would be the better way to get that stuff in their system and things like um cucumbers and celery are your sweet what i call the sweet vegetables so they don't have sugar in them but they actually sweeten the flavor so it's it doesn't taste so um earthy so earthy yeah and if you get usually if you get a superfood powder um um there's the fruits in it will flavor the drink to a more kind of berry flavor too so that would be the better way to get what they the minerals and vitamins that they need yeah so amazing grass is a really good brand but it doesn't taste like grass at all anyway so okay one of each