For most of the past year, Daily Kos has been blessed with a really wonderful series of diaries by Wide Eyed Lib, on Free Foods and how to forage for them.
With the onset of winter, the foraging season here in the Northeast is drawing to a close and W.E.L. has decided to take a well-earned break. A few of us have offered to fill in the gap by authoring diaries in the spirit of the series that will focus on some other aspects of the general topic. Today I’m launching what will probably be a four part mini-series on medicinal plants.
In part one, I’m simply going to go over the basic foraging guidelines and storage/preparation for some medicinal plants. In the next three parts, I’ll discus different preparation methods, using plants with different medicinal properties, for some specific preparations.
First, a wee bit about my experience in this area. (Note: for the easily bored, feel free to skip this part...) I’ve been collecting and using wild foods and medicines for the better part of 40 years. I first got interested in wild foraging through the books of the late, great Euell Gibbons. Eating wild greens, roots, berries, and so on was sufficient for a couple of years. Eventually, my interest in medicinal herbs began to grow. I have to confess that as a teenager in the early seventies, a large part of my interest stemmed (watch the puns...) from a desire to find some free, wild plants that did the same thing as the ones I had to pay for.
Later, in the early eighties, my wife and I started a small herb company that specialized in preparing birthing kits for folks who were planning home births. Our kits included teas, tinctures, and herbal bath kits. We also had the opportunity to work with Linda Runyon for a few years back when she still lived in the Adirondacks. But for the past couple of decades, our wild food/wild medicine foraging has been pretty much for our own use and that of our family and friends.
But enough about me.
The basic foraging guidelines are pretty much the same for wild foods as for wild medicines. (Another note: I worked briefly with a fellow from the Mic-Mac lands up in the Maritimes, and he always maintained that food is medicine. In other words, anything you ingest has the potential to influence your health. I see no reason to challenge that assumption.)
First and foremost is identification. You want to always make absolutely sure that you know what you are picking. There are hundreds of books available as well as many, many valuable resources on the Internet that provide excellent visual identification through sketches and photos. And by the way, a good sketch is far superior to a crappy photo, so don’t be afraid to go low-tech.
Try starting with only one or two formerly unfamiliar plants. Get to know them well, and then move on to a couple more. My wife strongly suggests making your own field guide. Include photos as well as notes on where you found the plants, soil type, companion plants, etc. And keep things simple. Learning to use a handful of medicinal plants well will serve you better than trying to master the uses and combinations of dozens and dozens of plants.
Once you are sure of your identification, you need to consider a couple of other things. Generally, when harvesting flowers, you want to do so shortly after the plants bloom. For leaves, you’ll want to get them before the plant flowers, as early in the spring as you can. For roots, the fall is the best time, when the plants energy has retreated back under ground. Berries when they are ripe.
You also want to show some wisdom and forethought as you gather. While many plants grow in great abundance, some are pretty difficult to find and aren’t so plentiful. My rule of thumb is to take no more than a third of what you find. Leave enough for the plants to propagate, or for the next person.
Ideally, if we need to make a certain type of tea, we could walk outside, gather some fresh plants, take them inside, and concoct our preparation. But since things don’t usually happen that way in my part of the world, I had to learn how to prepare and preserve plants for later use. By far the easiest and most common method of preservation is drying. It also happens to be pretty dang easy.
There are three simple ways of accomplishing this. All of them can use recycled/re-used stuff. For long stemmed plants, you can simply wrap a twist-tie around several stems and hang them in a dry area. For smaller leaved plants, flowers, and roots, you can stuff them loosely into an old mesh onion bag and hang them up until dry. Lindy Runyon turned us onto the idea of collecting old window screens, building a simple multi-tiered rack for them, and spreading the plant materials thinly across the surface of the screens.
Once your plants are dry, they can be safely stored in glass jars, of zip-locked and placed in the freezer.
Other ways to preserve plant medicines include things we’ll discuss in upcoming diaries, such as tinctures and oils.
So, next week, I'm going to discuss the simplest methods of herbal preparation. Teas, infusions, and baths. In other words, instant medicine. Just add water.
Please feel free to let me know of any questions you might have or specific plants or preparations you would like to talk about over the next few weeks.
(From Wide Eyed Lib)
If you'd like to learn more about foraging but missed the earlier diaries in the series, you can click here for the previous 36 installments. As always, please feel free to post photos in the comments and I'll do my best to help identify what you've found. (And if you find any errors, let me know.)
Here are some helpful foraging resources:
"Wildman" Steve Brill's site covers many edibles and includes nice drawings.
"Green" Deane Jordan's site is quite comprehensive and has color photos and stories about many plants.
Green Deane's foraging how-to clips on youtube each cover a single plant in reassuring detail.
Linda Runyon's site features only a few plants but has great deals on her dvd, wild cards and books (check out the package deals in particular).
Steve Brill's book, Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places is my primary foraging guide. (Read reviews here, but if you're feeling generous, please buy from Steve's website.)
Linda Runyon's book The Essential Wild Food Survival Guide contains especially detailed information about nutritional content and how to store and preserve wild foods.
Samuel Thayer’s book The Forager's Harvest is perhaps the finest resource out there for the 32 plants covered. The color photos and detailed harvest and preparation information are top-notch.
Steve Brill also offers guided foraging tours in NYC-area parks. Details and contact info are on his website.
Don Wiss’s website is a treasure trove featuring hundreds of photos of common northeastern edibles.
Finally, the USDA plants database is a great place to look up info on all sorts of plants.
<-- Previous Diary in Series
Next Diary in Series -->