Natureās Apothecary; Medicinal Weeds For Health & Healing
Hello, hello! And thank you so much for taking time out of your day to tune into this podcast and learn a little bit more about how you can use herbs and plants as medicine. And in particular today we are going to talk about the wonderful wild world of weeds. And there's a few reasons I want to talk about this.
Number one, these plants are incredibly abundant. They're free. They're the plants that most people are trying desperately to get rid of out of their yards. Yet, they're incredible. medicine. They are, more often than not, very, very nutritious food, and they're something that we all need to become more aware of, stop poisoning the earth to get rid of them, and instead take them in for their incredible, again, healing and nutritious properties, right?
I think it's so, so very important, and one thing that I find funny about weeds and their incredible abundance and their ways of providing so much for us, is like, here is a large part of humanity for the past hundred, two hundred years, however long it's been, I don't, I don't know exactly how long people have been, you know, using poisons to get rid of plants, but however long that has been, people are pulling up these weeds, they are putting herbicides on them, and yet these plants keep coming back with a vengeance, as if to say, Hey!
I'm here. I am here for you. I am your food. I am your strong, powerful, potent medicine. Use me, don't abuse me. You know what I mean? Like we really do need to shout this kind of stuff from the mountaintops. From the treetops on top of the world, and let everybody. know the importance of these plants and I gather that like yeah you're listening to this podcast so you probably already know that things like dandelion and that plantain or burdock are all amazing foods and medicine and you're likely not poisoning your yard if you are.
Please, I highly encourage you to stop doing that if your neighbors are. Have them listen to this episode. Give them some other dose of knowledge and information sharing how important these plants are for our ecosystems, for our own individual bodies, as food, as nourishment, as medicine. And especially as we head into these I'm not even head into it's kind of scarce times for many many people and there's Maybe a lot of fear out there Um, I don't really like to go down that fear train But I am really really grateful that I do understand how to use the plants around me That I know what I can eat that I know what I can use as medicine like what an incredible gift to offer yourself to share with your children, to share with your community.
Like this is beautiful. This is what we need to be doing. This is why we need to make herbalism spread like wildflowers. And if you hear like panting in the background of this episode, that's I apologize. It's my puppy Pepe, who's not so much a Pepe, puppy anymore. He's like 14 and a half. He's an Aussie Shepherd Border Collie.
He is really, really handsome. He's wearing a tuxedo every day and he got the name Pepe when he was a teenager. teeny tiny like three week old puppy because he looked like a little skunk and he would like, he tried licking my face like right away. He still very much tries to steal kisses like Mijo Le Pew or Pepe Le Pew if you're old enough to remember those cartoons.
I think they're no longer allowed on on TV but anyways Pepe loves to follow me around. everywhere and just breathe and I could shut him out of my office but then he's just gonna scratch at the door. So if you hear panting it's just my old fluffball Pepe trying to be a part of the show too. So I apologize.
Anyways, uh, let's get on to the weeds if you are down with that. So The first one I want to share with you I think is really important and this is a great one especially if you have people in your family that are like, yeah yeah I'm not so into what you're talking about with this herbalism or plant medicine stuff or this foraging stuff and they're really really skeptical right because they're so well trained and well versed and well maybe they're not They're not trained in western medical, uh, practices, but they are absorbed in that system and that's all that they know, so they think that plant medicine is just a bunch of hippie dippie woo woo junk.
If you have people like that, please reach out, let me know. I also have people like that despite being in this world for, you know, two plus decades, so, it happens and it's understandable. But, this is a great plant to introduce them to because it is so incredibly powerful and there has not been a time that I have introduced somebody to plantain and their mind has not been completely blown away.
Completely blown by what this plant can do. So it's plantain, um, I'm talking about Plantago Major or Plantago Lanciolata There are other cousins in that family that are also great medicine But these are the two that grow most readily available around me. So they're the ones I talk about the most And plantain's like greatest claim to fame is because it's really amazing at drawing out venom and infection and other kinds of things that might cause inflammation, irritation, itchiness, things along those lines.
And it's really, really Well known for bug bites and for bee stings and you can use it for spider bites. You can, I've had colleagues of mine that were out backpacking in the southwest and her dog got bit by a rattlesnake and she used plantain and saved her dog's life was able to use that plantain out in the backcountry and then get her dog to the help that she really needed and it's that powerful of a plant.
I have used it to pull out like huge splinters from my friend who's this rough and tumble mountain carpenter dude and got a big old splinter that couldn't get out and I use plantain. I have pulled giant splinters. Thorns that I let sit in the back of my leg for weeks and get infected, um, just by like putting the plantain on there.
So I'll do that with like a tincture of it or you could use fresh plantain where you just mash it up either with a rock or you can definitely chew it. You can also add plant, like it's edible, you can add it to your salads and things like that. Stick to the young fresh leaves. Um, but anyways, if you're chewing it, you might want to be mindful, like, if you're on the popular neighborhood dog walk route, you know, dogs pee on weeds, so be careful, or mindful, but still, there's times, like, if somebody just got bit by a really bad poisonous spider.
I would rather chew on the dog pee and save them than let them suffer with that venom inside of their body. Um, but you could also mash it up with a rock. The important thing to do is to make sure that you are making those juices come out of the plant matter so that you can really get the good medicine and it can do It's magic.
Okay, so yes, it draws out venom, infection, um, all kinds of things out of the skin. It's also, um, really fantastic for soothing inflammation in mucous membranes. So our skin is mucosal tissue, it is a mucous membrane, so is our respiratory tract, so is our digestive system. And plantain can be really, really helpful for both of those systems when you're dealing with inflammation.
I use plantain often, um, when working with somebody to do the actual work to heal the gut. And plantain can really come in and be a great helper once you go through the first steps of, you know, uh, eliminating what's causing all of the inflammation. Plantain is then a fantastic ally to help heal things like leaky gut and the, like, perforations that are happening on the gut wall.
It's really, really amazing. It's also, uh, a bit of a hemostatic, so if there is some passive bleeding, maybe in the digestive system or even in the respiratory tract, you could use plantain. Maybe add in some yarrow, maybe add in some cinnamon, things like that would, uh, do a good bit of reducing some of the bleeding that might happen.
Um, I like to use plantain on my eyes when they're like, inflamed, or if somebody has red, irritated, itchy eyes, you could use plantain with chamomile or calendula and just make a nice like, um, I wash for them. I love to use plantain for mouth infections and tooth infections. You can use it to like if somebody's got an abscess or boils or maybe you have a teen that's dealing with a lot of acne.
Plantain poultices could really be a great benefit. We did a big deep dive study on plantain right as I was kicking off the KidSafe Herb Club so that's. Now that that lesson is available inside of Apothecary Mama if you ever want to go check it out and there's tons of recipes and like how you can cultivate it and the best ways to um, to make medicine into it, how to use it for things like poison oak or sunburn or poison ivy, maybe somebody in your family gets rashes, maybe you're dealing with eczema or psoriasis, things like that.
So yeah, we um, share and talk a lot about that. The ways that you can use this incredible plant as medicine. It's absolutely one of my favorites. And again, back to like, it's abundance. It's in your sidewalk cracks. It's at the edge of the park where the kids need it the most. Like I remember one time my adorable daughter was about three and we were at the park with one of her friends and, you know, three year olds are so cute.
They just kind of like waddle around all over the place and do the silliest little things, but one of her friends got an ouchie. And so what does my three year old daughter do? She walks over, all on her own, like no help from me, walks over to a plantain plant, picks up the leaf, and takes it over to her friend and says, here you go.
And the friend's parents are looking at me like, what's your daughter doing, Mel? And then we all, you know, kind of came together like, oh right, this is Mel. Of course her daughter's picking a weed and giving it to our kid when they got an ouchie, but like, At that moment, I was such a proud mom, knowing that my three year old daughter knew exactly what plant to help heal her friend at the park.
Like, that is mom life goals and gold, in my opinion. So, that's kind of what I love about it. about teaching people and moms herbalism, right? Because as I'm teaching you as a mom, hopefully you are also teaching these things to your child, so that we can have generation after generation of herbalists, of these children, knowing exactly what plants to turn to, to heal themselves, to heal their friends, to heal their community, and all of these incredible things, that is what it is all about, and that is what life was.
once upon a time, right? Everybody used these plants and that's just what we need to get back to, right? So I'm, I'm so grateful that you are listening to this podcast and hopefully sharing these lessons with your children and letting them explore and play with these plants and get to discover how amazing they truly are, right?
And hopefully not only your kids, like take this stuff to your skeptical Uncle Joe. Or maybe it's your neighbor that's like, sure, crazy trained, yeah, uh huh, uh huh. But when you see them, find instant relief from that stubborn wasp sting. and they are looking at you like you are the craziest thing and holy cow how in the heck did you did that do that like That's gold.
That's magic. Anyways, I hope that you do that. So that's that's my little spiel on plantain. I love it It's amazing. It is so abundant and it wants to be your medicine and your food So check it out get to know it when you do let me know and if this is new for you And you find this information amazing, will you do me a huge favor and just like screenshot this episode and tag me on social media?
Because then more people will learn about this, they will hear about it, and I will know that you are loving the content I'm bringing you. Um, yeah, that would be fun. Thank you. So let's talk about the next plant. The next one, um, actually was our herb of the month this month. It is currently April as I am recording this and, um, we have been doing this deep dive study actually in about an hour and a half.
I'm doing the herbal show and tell inside of the Kids Save Herb Club where everyone's going to come together and talk about what they learned about. dandelion or dent de leon and dent de leon is one of my favorite ways to share with people how how you can like start to identify the dandelion versus all of the other amazing yellow plants in the Asteraceae family that have these gorgeous bright sunshiny yellow flowers.
that more often than not people will think are automatically dandelion.
So if you think about dent de lion it means tooth of the lion and if you look at a dandelion leaf it has these sharply serrated leaf edges that look like giant lion's teeth. Okay, so think about that because there are quite a few other plants that have more wavy edged, um, leaves and things like that.
You can also see like this white milky latex like stuff coming out from inside the leaf. So that's another sign. And then when you pick the dandelion stem, it's actually hollow. You'll see more of the white milky stuff if you squeeze it, that latex stuff coming out, but the stem is hollow. And you can actually, like, let your kids use it as a fun straw or, like, come up with some kind of fun craft idea.
Like, that's the greatest way to use these things and teach your kiddos about how amazing they are. Understanding that plant identification is really, really important because you're gonna be bummed if you, like, go find this yellow flowered plant and you dig up the roots and you make a tincture with it and you spend this money on the alcohol and you spend this time and whatnot.
but it's like not dandelion at all, but you're expecting it to do this medicinal stuff for you, but it doesn't seem to work. That happens when we don't 100 percent positively identify our plants. So those are just a few tips on identifying dandelion. Again, another incredibly abundant weed that everybody wants to get rid of, but it's so pretty, like it's so bright and sunshiny, why would you want to get rid of such a beautiful flower?
Just because somebody labeled it a weed a while ago? Cah! Pshaw! It is incredible food, if you haven't heard about this yet, but dandelions are so amazingly nourishing. The blossoms are loaded with vitamin D, so they're kind of known as the sunshine vitamin. You can fry them up in some butter and garlic.
You can batter them and make like dandelion flour fritters. You can just use the petals and add them to your salad for their vibrance and their beauty. The roots and the leaves are both really, really nourishing. They are loaded with minerals like calcium and iron and copper, magnesium, potassium, zinc, all kinds of things.
They've also got loads of vitamin A, all the B complex vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin D, like there is so much nourishment happening inside of these plants and they can be incredible food. So I do recommend that you get out there and you harvest the, um, The dandelion leaves, while they're nice and young and spring like, some of them may already be getting past their prime right now, but you could probably still get away with it.
Um, it's actually one cup of raw dandelion greens can provide up to 14, 000 IUs of beta carotene. Like that is so cool. Here's this food. Here's this medicine Growing in your yard, in your neighbor's yard, wherever, just saying hi, I'm beautiful. I'm food. I am medicine It's super duper cool. The other Cool things about dandelion.
I mean, there's so much medicine going on there. One, it is a bitter herb and we here in the United States are really stuck on our sweet stuff, right? But dandelion is bitter, which means that it's going to stimulate the digestive secretions, to be made in the liver and then excreted out through the gallbladder and that will in turn help your body to break down fats and proteins.
It is really amazing for the entire digestive process. It's also a diaphoretic so you could use it to release heat from the body by sweating and through the skin. Um, the, um, it, it can act as like a mild laxative as well and increase the movement of the bowels. So that could be really nice if somebody is constipated, perhaps you could maybe turn to a little bit of dandelion to help move things along.
Um, What else about dandelion? It is just such an amazing plant. Oh, the roots are loaded with inulin, especially if you gather the roots at the end of the season, right after that first frost of the year in the fall. fall is when you're going to get most of the inulin which is going to feed your healthy gut bacteria and really happyfy the gut.
It can help with skin issues, so somebody dealing with eczema or psoriasis or acne, what have you, if you've got a skin issue, our skin is our largest organ of the body, it is a sign that there is something internally happening, maybe your liver is having Dandelion is very much a liver loving herb, actually our latest deep dive workshop in Apothecary Mama is all about the liver, how it functions, how it's so important that we work with the liver, especially when it comes to using plant medicine and everything else in life.
Um, Um, but that when we treat the liver well, we are treating the rest of our body well. And when there is a skin condition in the world of herbalism, we look to the liver first. So dandelion can be a really, really great hepatic herb for you to check to. Um, there's definitely some studies showing that dandelion root can help with, um, anti tumor.
have anti tumor effects and really help those dealing with cancer. Of course, I'm not going to go into that kind of stuff here on this podcast today. Um, dandelion can help with all kinds of inflammation, right? We've already talked about the skin inflammation and a bit of the digestive system going on, but like if somebody's dealing with arthritis or fibromyalgia or dealing with Stiff joints, or maybe you are somebody that gets really swollen and especially when it is time for your menstrual cycle, or maybe you are dealing with swollen kinkle or your eyelids are puffy, your.
Your feet are puffy, your breasts are puffy. You can turn to dandelion because it is a fantastic, um, diuretic, actually the French name is piss inlet, which means to piss the bed, because dandelion is such a diuretic, meaning that it makes you urinate a lot, which is a great way to detoxify the body, to rid your body of things that don't need to be there.
Um, dandelion's amazing, y'all. It does so many other things that I'm not even able to get into on this podcast, because otherwise I would be talking forever and run the risk of boring you on plant medicine. Could anybody really be bored by plant medicine? Or is that just me? Like, I love this stuff. Okay.
Let's talk about the other plant though that I wanted to share with you that is a weed and I'll share with you a really fun story of how I got to really know this particular weed which is funny because I told you my dog Pepe may be panting which right now thankfully he's just sleeping right by my side but he's a part of this story let's just say that.
Um, so the next herb I want to talk to you about is burdock or arctium lapa. Um, The burdock really tells a little bit, uh, the name burdock tells a little bit of its story. So the bur part comes from the latin word burra which means a lock of wool because the flowers of burdock really do get tangled in sheep's wool or other animal hair, things like that.
Um, the dock just talks about like the huge leaves that burdock has and just back to that burr part, uh, later in the summer there's like a very kind of spiky flower burr type of thing that grows out of this beautiful plant and It gets, it's like, it's like velcro times 500, right? And my dog Pepe, again, he's an Aussie Shepherd Border Collie, he's got that beautiful black flowing hair with a long tail hair and um, he's so handsome.
But when we lived on our 10 acre property, burdock, I didn't know it was burdock at this time, but it surrounded the outer edges of the property and Pepe would get those burrs in his hair, and it would cause the nastiest, gnarliest tangle that would turn into like a doggy tail dreadlock if we didn't take care of it, and it was so infuriating.
I was so mad that this darn plant had ruined my precious and beautiful handsome puppy's tail hair. Got so mad. And then I remember one particular day going like, all right, I see that it's this plant. I am so mad at this plant. And I rip them all up and I take them over to the fire pit. And I remember as I'm like at the fire pit, I'm like, okay, There is something good about this plant.
Like, this plant is some kind of medicine, but I didn't know what it was, and I was still so frustrated at it, like, quit getting in my dog's hair, um, and I, you know, I burned it in the fire pit. And come like six months, seven months later, I'm looking online and I'm looking at this Elder Herbalist's website and she's talking about the power of burdock and there was a image of her hand holding some seeds.
And I looked at those seeds in her hand and I was like, oh my gosh. Those are the seeds of the plant that I burned and that I was so mad at and that is getting tangled in my dog's hair. That is the plant. That is burdock and that is amazing food and medicine that I was learning about. Um, yeah, so that was kind of my intro into burdock and its power.
I was so mad at this plant and yet, like, my gut still told me, like, there is something amazing. about. This very very plant here, and there's a lot. You actually may have eaten burdock before. It's roots Roots are incredibly nourishing and you'll see them in grocery stores. Sometimes it's labeled as gobo root right?
And the roots are loaded with calcium, with fiber, with chromium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, vitamins A and C, like they are really, really nourishing. And if you want to gather burdock roots, if you find them on the edge of your property and you're so mad at them, like I was, ideally you are gathering the roots in the fall when all of that good medicine is going back into the earth and all of the energy of the plant is down there.
Um, you could also do it in the spring of their second year, so that you would do it in the fall of their first year, um, and spring of their second year. Uh, after that, they're going to get kind of like rough and chewy and fibrous and maybe not so delightful. So, get to know the burdock around you and identify it and when you are going to use it.
Uh, the roots again, they're another one who's, you know, who's loaded with inulin, which is a soluble fiber that is going to do a really great job of feeding your gut bacteria, the good guys, the ones that you want. So it's like basically a prebiotic party in your digestive system, getting you ready for, I don't know, health and happiness and a wonderful life.
It's also really nice for the liver. So this is definitely an herb we're talking about in the liver lesson inside of Apothecary Mama. Um, it helps to detoxify the liver and gently break down fats and proteins in a much more efficient way. This is definitely an herb an herbalist might turn to when somebody's dealing with those skin conditions, right?
When we have skin conditions we want to look to the liver, so when we're talking about eczema and psoriasis and acne and things like that, definitely what we want to do. So, you can Add it to your meals. It's really, really easy. You can make stir fries and soups and stews and all kinds of great things out of burdock root.
I highly, highly, highly recommend adding it to your life. The burdock seeds, those are a fantastic diuretic. So if somebody is dealing with edema or swelling and maybe it's because you have an extreme amount of sodium in your body, or maybe you get really bloated during your menstrual cycle, you might really benefit from using burdock seed, especially about two weeks prior to your cycle.
to help reduce some of that swelling and discomfort that's caused with the swelling as well. Something to consider. You could even use it with dandelion, right? That would be a great pair if that's what your major concern is. Um, yeah. I love me some burdock. You can also use the leaves as medicine. Um, you can use them topically for various forms of inflammation on the skin.
So maybe somebody has an irritating, itchy rash. Maybe it's poison oak or poison ivy or maybe Somebody has just burnt themselves in the kitchen or got a sunburn. Like burdock leaf can be a helper in those departments too. So yeah, that's just a quick little skinny rundown on the power of some of these medicinal herbs and, or medicinal weeds, right?
They're weeds. People hate these plants because they invade their space, but they're invading their space because they're just trying to tell people, Hey, I'm here for you. I love you. I want to give you food. I want to be your medicine. Please love me back. Please love me back, right? This is here for us.
This is beautiful. We don't have to spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars on all the fanciest herbs, when we have some of the most simple ones that are going to nourish our bodies in a beautiful way, and a well nourished body is going to live significantly better than the malnourished bodies, right?
And then they also provide all of these other medicinal attributes for us. And they're beautiful, y'all. They're so pretty, especially once you get to know how magical they are, how powerful they are, how good for you that they are. It's beautiful. Anyways, I hope that you have learned something in this lesson.
I hope that it is a bit of an awakening at the power of our weeds as food and medicine. If it is, I would be so honored if you take a picture of this or tag me that you learned something on social media. I am at the Herbalist's Path on all of the platforms. Maybe leave me a rating? for this podcast because the more ratings I get from people like you, hopefully five stars, um, the more people get to listen to this, the more we're all making herbalism spread like wildflowers.
The more I get to know that you're out there listening to me as I speak to you through a computer. It's really, uh, something very kind that you could do and would make my heart so grateful. So thank you again, even just for taking the time to listen to this episode. I really, really, really truly hope that it helps you and I hope that you continue on carrying the beauty of herbal medicine with your friends and family.
Make this stuff spread like wildflowers and have yourself A magnificent day. Thanks.