Are you interested in foraging wild medicinal plants to make home remedies?
Connecting with common wild plants that live right outside your door will bring joy and health to your life.
It answers a deep ancestral calling, a remembering of ancient traditions. Since the dawn of humanity, we have been living in connection with plants for food, medicine, fiber, housing, and the air we breathe.
Before we forage wild herbs, there are some things that we need to know first so that we may honor and protect the plants that give us so much.
What we need to know before we forage:
1. Start by learning about the plants that grow around you. Get to know them really well, before you begin to harvest and prepare it. Know how to identify them and why you will want to be working with them.
2. Know how the medicinal actions and constituents useful for you are best extracted and ingested. Being able to properly make use of the gifts of the plants, ensures that we do not waste them.
3. Know the poisonous plants that grow in your area and your gardens. Know what medicinal plants have poisonous look-a-likes. For example, in the garden, nutritive and healing comfrey looks a lot like poisonous foxglove before they grow stalks and flowers.
4. Know the lifecycle of the plant and which part of the plant you will be harvesting. For example, if you are harvesting the root of a biennial, it is important to know that you can only do so in the fall of the first year of growth or the spring of the second year of growth.
5. Know the specific individual plant you will be working with. Form a connection, a bond, a relationship with it. Some indigenous cultures of the world believe that the plant will be able to help you, if (and maybe only if) you tell it ahead of time your needs and intentions with its gifts of medicine. It is thought that it will make more of the medicinal constituents that are needed, if it knows what is desired.
6. Know the location where the plant is growing. Is the soil healthy? Has it been treated with pesticides/herbicides within the past three years? Is it public land or private land? Do you have permission to harvest?
7. Know the plant's population so that you can know what is a sustainable amount to harvest, if any. Is the population healthy? Has the population been growing or receding over the past few years? How much can you harvest with out depleting the population? What can you do to help increase the population? You may need to watch the population for a year or more before you know the answers to these questions. As you observe, you will learn to recognize the health of populations from year to year.
8. It is important to be ready to process the plant immediately after harvesting. Know what preparation you will make or how you will dry the herb. Know what materials you will need and have everything on hand and ready before you harvest. Plan your time accordingly, so that you have time to complete the processing directly after harvest.
9. To learn how to sustainably harvest medicinal plants, it is best to work with weeds the plants that grow in abundance where you live. An easy place to start sustainably foraging is with the weeds in your garden or your local farm fields. Many herbs that are considered annoying weeds are actually very health promoting for us. Instead of weeding them from our gardens, we can harvest them and make herbal remedies with them. Your friendly local farmer would likely be grateful for the help in "weeding", as well.
Spring is in the air and soon our green friends will abound. Now is a fun time to dig into some books and decide what common wild plants you want to get to know this spring.
To learn more about these wonderful medicinal weeds, continue to check out these newsletters, follow me on Instagram, listen to my podcast (The Healthy Herb), and check out the new Solidago Herb School membership classroom on patreon.
You can also check out this video webinar that I did with the Blue Hill Heritage Trust on Sustainable Foraging.