The Herb of the Week
Plants that do unexplainable things
Shillington thoughts and research notes
In this amazing world we find that there is much we don't understand, maybe we can be content with that.
There are religions and sciences who define everything and there are those who simply acknowledge its existence but we can all agree that there are plants that make your mouth very hot and plants that make you see strange things.
This week's post will talk about plants that have strange properties and plants that do the unexplainable.
Scroll down to the bottom for a bit of info about these herbs.
I'm going to say some words that some folk find dirty; they are Science, Magic and Religion.
Science deals with understanding all the little parts, giving names to them and studying them.
Magic can be very similar but embraces the unknown as being just that and is about communication with the unknown + belief.
Religion is belief but seems to have a great spirit involved who put the plants here for us to use.
In this post I shall not favor any of the three above but only look at what each plant does.
There are plants that heal, plants that kill, plants that make food taste good and even plants that defy what we would call natural.
I know of a plant called Indian Cumber that you can eat the roots of and this turns your spit into fishbait. =) That's right!!! Spit on a hook and you have bait.
All very magical and I'm sure there's a very scientific reason for it, but I'm not going to tell you 'why', I'm not going to bore you with talk of elements or preach to you of how God intended it to be so or explain to you how the energies of the plant call out in the spiritual word to the far off star cluster Pisces and that is why the fish bites.
Mint makes the back of my throat feel cool and refreshed. I could spend a lifetime trying to find out how or why it does that but in this post I shall only talk of the plant reaction for (in most of these cases) I am not sure why or how and in some of them I haven't the slightest clue.
Plants that do unexplainable things
Yellow:
If you work with cement and then prune your tomato plants, your hands will turn neon yellow. Not sure why but it does and it is very hard to get off. Future experiments to conduct for possible new technology in the Shillington dye department. lol. I discovered this while doing the stucco in the green house.
Fishing with plant dynamite:
Buckeyes are a nut that are not good to eat. They look a bit like chestnuts but are considered toxic to humans. In the Appalachian Mountains I learned of how people dry, powder and grind them to make a 'Fish Knockout Powder'. This is supposedly an organic way to fish that has the same results as a stick of dynamite and like dynamite may not be legal in your location, still... useful survival information.
Echinacea as a taste enhancer:
If you have a bottle of quality Echinacea you can try this test. Take a dropperful and then bite into your favorite food. It is incredible to me how good water, apples and other foods taste. MSG is very bad for the human body but what if the Shillington Tasting Department just discovered a substitute. Wouldn't that be something? Echinacea and Quality Echinacea extract has the power to make the mouth salivate and tingle.
Poison Ivy:
Incredible how touching a plant can give you the most miserable rash. No wonder witches were to blame for everything that went wrong at times throughout history. Herbalists had knowledge of plants and were the most frequently burned at the stake. The smoke from burning poison ivy and poison oak has the same effect as the plant. Don't breath the smoke from your burn piles = a heap of trouble.
Ginseng:
Ginseng is another herb that people might call magical. The second the taste touches my tongue I feel most aware, mentally focused and physically strong. 95% of the Ginseng on the market doesn't do this for me but the fresh root is phenomenal.
Drugs:
To many people this is a bad word but it was not always so. In reading the works of Marco Polo (written in 1295 AD) I found that many of the common foods and culinary herbs used today were once thought of and referred to as drugs. I personally don't like the word or find any practical use for the modern day definition but I do find it interesting how some plants, certain cactus' and dung loving mushrooms. can cause visual often harmful reactions in the brain, body, mind, spirit, etc. Definitely the kind of experiences that people of old would call supernatural and even people today would call magical, religious or scientifically fascinating. I was reading the other day on the 'awesome facts' app on my wife's ipod that 80% of pharmaceutical drugs are still derived from plant sources.
Sensational Plants:
Some plant products like tea provide us with sensation that affect the mind very little but the body drastically. Some would call coffee a drug as it hypes you up and the same goes for Cayenne (which is actually prescribed as a pharmaceutical drug in some countries) but what of plants that calm you down like Mint, Lobelia, Tobacco or Television? Are these drugs and if they are not then what would you call them?
Mustard for your Socks:
Mustard Powder has been used for many years to keep the feet warm. You can by it in the shop by the slope when you're skiing or in my case snow boarding. Mustard in the socks works! Your feet will be sweating while you're freezing your buns off. Yay!
Sandal wood Pits:
Smelly pits has plagued man for thousands of years but you won't be surprised to hear that woman were the first to do something about it. These girls put soaked blocks of sandalwood under their arms and this is when man first started scratching his head.
Yucca:
Should be called yumma as it is a very tasty root but did you know that Native Americans would use the roots as soap? They would beat it half to death with a stone and then wet the root and scrub with it. Natural suds of good quality. I've done this and it made my clothes smell like Yucca. Another thing I've done is make string from the leaves.
Purple:
There is a plant that is very rare called Mono Tropa Una Flora also known as Ghost Pipe. This herb has painkilling properties and is said to bring vivid, frequently erotic dreams so I considered it not a very useful medicinal but then I found a hollow deep in the old wood forests that had a large population of it. I harvested some of the whitish grey, sponge like roots and tinctured them but then the strangest thing happened, it turned a rich dark purple. I was talking herbs with a Master Herbalist friend of mine and he said that his Mono Tropa Una Flora tincture turned purple too. Go figure.
Rabbit Brush:
Out here in the middle of cow land we have a bush that is pretty hardcore and we call it Rabbit Brush. It can live without water for a year or more and it can live for more than 200 years but it is not useful to us as far as we know. It is considered toxic and will give a cow an abortion if ingested during pregnancy.
A tiny bit of info about the plants in the picture above is as follows.
Wild yam is good for female difficulties, Bloodroot is for Cancer, Ginseng for stamina, Trillium for Prostate complaints, Juniper for UTIs and Lady's Slipper has been used as a pharmaceutical drug for pain and as a sedative. (Put a hundred etc, etc, etc's in the sentence above.) False Solomon's Seal is not good for much but it is highly mucilaginous meaning that it is slimy like Flax Seeds.
♣
I didn't have the time to do any research this week so I just pulled it off the top of my head. Hope you liked this post.
Please don't reply.
Ask the good people on Herbal Remedies your questions if you have any or want to add info.
I'm in the process of building a self sufficient community and building buildings, digging gardens, planting fruit trees, etc.
I sincerely apologize for only getting on the computer once in a while.
Plants that do unexplainable things
Shillington thoughts and research notes
In this amazing world we find that there is much we don't understand, maybe we can be content with that.
There are religions and sciences who define everything and there are those who simply acknowledge its existence but we can all agree that there are plants that make your mouth very hot and plants that make you see strange things.
This week's post will talk about plants that have strange properties and plants that do the unexplainable.
Scroll down to the bottom for a bit of info about these herbs.
I'm going to say some words that some folk find dirty; they are Science, Magic and Religion.
Science deals with understanding all the little parts, giving names to them and studying them.
Magic can be very similar but embraces the unknown as being just that and is about communication with the unknown + belief.
Religion is belief but seems to have a great spirit involved who put the plants here for us to use.
In this post I shall not favor any of the three above but only look at what each plant does.
There are plants that heal, plants that kill, plants that make food taste good and even plants that defy what we would call natural.
I know of a plant called Indian Cumber that you can eat the roots of and this turns your spit into fishbait. =) That's right!!! Spit on a hook and you have bait.
All very magical and I'm sure there's a very scientific reason for it, but I'm not going to tell you 'why', I'm not going to bore you with talk of elements or preach to you of how God intended it to be so or explain to you how the energies of the plant call out in the spiritual word to the far off star cluster Pisces and that is why the fish bites.
Mint makes the back of my throat feel cool and refreshed. I could spend a lifetime trying to find out how or why it does that but in this post I shall only talk of the plant reaction for (in most of these cases) I am not sure why or how and in some of them I haven't the slightest clue.
Plants that do unexplainable things
Yellow:
If you work with cement and then prune your tomato plants, your hands will turn neon yellow. Not sure why but it does and it is very hard to get off. Future experiments to conduct for possible new technology in the Shillington dye department. lol. I discovered this while doing the stucco in the green house.
Fishing with plant dynamite:
Buckeyes are a nut that are not good to eat. They look a bit like chestnuts but are considered toxic to humans. In the Appalachian Mountains I learned of how people dry, powder and grind them to make a 'Fish Knockout Powder'. This is supposedly an organic way to fish that has the same results as a stick of dynamite and like dynamite may not be legal in your location, still... useful survival information.
Echinacea as a taste enhancer:
If you have a bottle of quality Echinacea you can try this test. Take a dropperful and then bite into your favorite food. It is incredible to me how good water, apples and other foods taste. MSG is very bad for the human body but what if the Shillington Tasting Department just discovered a substitute. Wouldn't that be something? Echinacea and Quality Echinacea extract has the power to make the mouth salivate and tingle.
Poison Ivy:
Incredible how touching a plant can give you the most miserable rash. No wonder witches were to blame for everything that went wrong at times throughout history. Herbalists had knowledge of plants and were the most frequently burned at the stake. The smoke from burning poison ivy and poison oak has the same effect as the plant. Don't breath the smoke from your burn piles = a heap of trouble.
Ginseng:
Ginseng is another herb that people might call magical. The second the taste touches my tongue I feel most aware, mentally focused and physically strong. 95% of the Ginseng on the market doesn't do this for me but the fresh root is phenomenal.
Drugs:
To many people this is a bad word but it was not always so. In reading the works of Marco Polo (written in 1295 AD) I found that many of the common foods and culinary herbs used today were once thought of and referred to as drugs. I personally don't like the word or find any practical use for the modern day definition but I do find it interesting how some plants, certain cactus' and dung loving mushrooms. can cause visual often harmful reactions in the brain, body, mind, spirit, etc. Definitely the kind of experiences that people of old would call supernatural and even people today would call magical, religious or scientifically fascinating. I was reading the other day on the 'awesome facts' app on my wife's ipod that 80% of pharmaceutical drugs are still derived from plant sources.
Sensational Plants:
Some plant products like tea provide us with sensation that affect the mind very little but the body drastically. Some would call coffee a drug as it hypes you up and the same goes for Cayenne (which is actually prescribed as a pharmaceutical drug in some countries) but what of plants that calm you down like Mint, Lobelia, Tobacco or Television? Are these drugs and if they are not then what would you call them?
Mustard for your Socks:
Mustard Powder has been used for many years to keep the feet warm. You can by it in the shop by the slope when you're skiing or in my case snow boarding. Mustard in the socks works! Your feet will be sweating while you're freezing your buns off. Yay!
Sandal wood Pits:
Smelly pits has plagued man for thousands of years but you won't be surprised to hear that woman were the first to do something about it. These girls put soaked blocks of sandalwood under their arms and this is when man first started scratching his head.
Yucca:
Should be called yumma as it is a very tasty root but did you know that Native Americans would use the roots as soap? They would beat it half to death with a stone and then wet the root and scrub with it. Natural suds of good quality. I've done this and it made my clothes smell like Yucca. Another thing I've done is make string from the leaves.
Purple:
There is a plant that is very rare called Mono Tropa Una Flora also known as Ghost Pipe. This herb has painkilling properties and is said to bring vivid, frequently erotic dreams so I considered it not a very useful medicinal but then I found a hollow deep in the old wood forests that had a large population of it. I harvested some of the whitish grey, sponge like roots and tinctured them but then the strangest thing happened, it turned a rich dark purple. I was talking herbs with a Master Herbalist friend of mine and he said that his Mono Tropa Una Flora tincture turned purple too. Go figure.
Rabbit Brush:
Out here in the middle of cow land we have a bush that is pretty hardcore and we call it Rabbit Brush. It can live without water for a year or more and it can live for more than 200 years but it is not useful to us as far as we know. It is considered toxic and will give a cow an abortion if ingested during pregnancy.
A tiny bit of info about the plants in the picture above is as follows.
Wild yam is good for female difficulties, Bloodroot is for Cancer, Ginseng for stamina, Trillium for Prostate complaints, Juniper for UTIs and Lady's Slipper has been used as a pharmaceutical drug for pain and as a sedative. (Put a hundred etc, etc, etc's in the sentence above.) False Solomon's Seal is not good for much but it is highly mucilaginous meaning that it is slimy like Flax Seeds.
♣
I didn't have the time to do any research this week so I just pulled it off the top of my head. Hope you liked this post.
Please don't reply.
Ask the good people on Herbal Remedies your questions if you have any or want to add info.
I'm in the process of building a self sufficient community and building buildings, digging gardens, planting fruit trees, etc.
I sincerely apologize for only getting on the computer once in a while.
~B
Journeyman Herbalist
Join Herbal Remedies
Disclaimer:
The above information is the opinions of a 23 year old, uneducated tree hugging farmer and is to be regarded as complete and utter BS by any and all readers. Nothing here in is acknowledged as being true by licensed professionals and nothing stated above is to be taken as medical advice. The writer, as well as the readers who send this on, hold no responsibility and can not be charged, tried or held responsible in any way for Organic Gardens springing up in rural neighborhoods or anything else that grows from the text above. Remember that if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands. 
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