How to make Wild Lettuce TINCTURE (for pain & sleep)

hey good morning everyone Kay here on my Homestead as part of my medicinal plants series of videos today I'm going to talk about wild lettuce or prickly lettuce which is probably growing in your yard checking everything out I know check out the lettuce I had heard about the medicinal properties of wild lettuce and I had one growing behind this raised bed last year and I I pulled it out because there's a bunch of weeds back there and I thought ah you probably shouldn't have done that but I thought oh there's going to be so much more and there really wasn't so when I saw this one coming up in this location I put you know small and I put this chicken wire wrapped around it to protect it so it wouldn't accidentally accidentally get weed whacked you know when I did take the weeds out which I did do if you saw my recent video and this was just all my raised bed garden was just in encompassed with so many weeds and I finally just said you know it's it's just too snaky I can't handle it and I I had it all weed whacked so but I wanted to protect this because it's for Millennia it's been used as a painkiller the latex inside the leaves has been used as a painkiller and we'll take one of the leaves there's a white latex that's the lactone inside the plant and that's what is used for pain it's used for restlessness it's used for insomnia even warts so you don't want to cut this the leaves are anywhere from five to ten inches long and some of the lettuces have this row of just hairs running down the back side of the vein and then some have prickly edges around and it grows between three and five feet tall so this is already four feet tall some people even eat the lettuce but it's very bitter and it the bitterness can be reduced by boiling it I am not a medical practitioner I am only passing along information that has been used for centuries regarding this plant and many other medicinal plants so you have to use it at your own risk in your own precaution and do your own research you know especially in your preps now we want to have a lot of tinctures and and balms and you know plant medicine that we can use rather than having to run to the pharmacy I'm going to focus on making a tincture today and the reason I wanted to get this video out right away is because this plant blooms in late summer early fall depending on your zone so if you're farther south than me it may already be blooming and I wanted to get this information out so that you could look around your property and see if you have any wild lettuce growing some people even just lick the sap for an immediate effect I'm not recommending that I'm just telling you what other people have done you can feel the effects and this is nicknamed the Opium plant although there's no opium in it so you can imagine it does have some effect but what we want to do is we want to have a tincture so that we can use it with caution carefully and per our own body weight and of course age you want to take all those factors into consideration and to use it very sparingly at first and see how it affects you so I wanted to show you another plant that's growing down in the shade if I take all these leaves off it this plant won't recover and it won't get to the blooming stage which is the prime time for the intensity of the sap so it's getting there but we're not blooming yet and I don't want to damage this plant so that it doesn't recover I'm going to pull out a plant down in in my yard and chop it up and make a tincture out of it so stay tuned the best way is just to collect this sap directly into a little glass jar but that would be very time consuming and tedious because it's not like you can just squeeze it out just a minute amount that's bitter oh that's bitter this is one of those areas down in my yard that is covered in poison ivy so but that right there I am assuming that a deer ate the top off because that thing was three feet tall and that's what I was going to use I'm using gloves because our little spines on here this is not enough to make a tincture and it will have to be washed because there are little bugs and things there's always bugs and things this is also wild lettuce but it's not the same exactly this one's been eaten too I guess my deer are getting a little high on my yard okay we've got this much see what you don't want to do is waste all that precious sap by chopping it all up and then rinsing it because it would just wash out you know foreign foreign of these had been nibbled on by and see it's the the new growth is coming back where it was nibbled so I guess the deer know not to eat too much or they'd destroy it you want to use a sterile jar or you know you can put it through your dishwasher and I thought well if I chop all of this up on The Cutting Board half the sap is going to rub into this cutting board you know so I'm going to attempt to cut it directly into the jar I'm not seeing as much sap coming out of this one because maybe because the deer sucked it out I don't know the other one was nice and juicy I sort of imagined it would be dribbling all over my cutting board but this is my first time too I do see it coming out though see [Applause] I've seen some people put this in the food processor but it just seems like to me it just seems like a lot of the sap would just wind up on the sides of the food processor and since there's not that much to start with it's not like it's flowing you know yep see that comes right out and that's the other one the other lettuce with more of an elongated leaf that's tough but you can see the sap oh come here sap each time you cut it you see the little white you know this is not quite full I don't need to waste the extra vodka I'm just gonna make sure it's covered you want to use at least 80 proof whiskey or vodka okay foreign I just wanted to mention if you're new to this at all you know you want a resource and many Preppers have said if you're watching any of the prepper channels if the grid goes down we want to have books we want to have information imprint that can't be changed by a little keystroke and this is a great book that I'm sure if you've watched any of the prepper channels uh on YouTube you've seen these this series of books by Dr Nicole appellian this one is also Claude Davis compiled this book The Lost book of Herbal Remedies and so this is a great resource there are many others I'm sure and of course online and I wanted to say that what has really made a big difference for me here with all of these plants is my picture this app people have asked me what app am I using and that's what I use now I think that there's free ones picture this is a paid app yearly but I think you can also find out what plants are by free apps so be sure and check if you're unsure about a plant don't eat it check it out research it before you you try to eat it or turn it into a medicinal tincture or a remedy of some some kind now in this we want to this we want to keep in the Vodka for three to four weeks we want to shake it every day just keep it in a cool dark place but you still have to remember to to grab that and shake it and then at the end of four weeks you strain it out through a fine sieve or cheesecloth and store it in in a cool dark place in a dark bottle you could put it in a dropper bottle you know you will have to figure out the amount to use and and do your research everything depends upon you know your age your medical condition your weight and all of that so I hope this is helpful I hope you subscribe to my channel if you haven't already I live on about 9.18 acres in Tennessee about half is wooded and I stay out I leave that to the wildlife except in winter when I can see the ground and the rest I either mow as lawn it was all lawn except for a few raised beds over here when I got here uh I'm two and a half years in and this is my third Garden season so second Garden season for the big Lower Garden which is about 85 percent planted I may have to do some replanting okra's not looking good the flowers just I I've already replanted some of the flowers They're not doing well down there so maybe just too hot too much intense heat I just don't know so it everything is a learning process with growing your own food and this is a big one also this is free growing in your yard most likely and I'll be doing more of these yarrow and plantain are on the agenda so I hope you subscribe hit that Bell for notifications scroll down and click all so you won't miss anything right here on the homestead I'm Kay and I'll see you next time I'm going to revisit this come back when the plant is In Bloom we'll talk about it again and hopefully you'll have some feedback and you can leave comments if you have it growing if you've tried it if you've used it for pain please leave a comment below so other people can benefit from your experience P.S I did not feel any effect from just um touching that sap on my tongue just FYI but I don't feel bad either so there are different extraction methods some people cook it down some people dehydrate it turn it into something like a heart you know because the sap will turn brown when it's exposed to air in fact we're going to go down there and look and see if it started to Brown where I pull that leaf off but it will keep for years if you do it that way this will keep for like three three to five years the tincture will so that's why you're not always going to have that intense period right before it's blooming and some years you might not even find it so that's why you want to do it get out there and see if you've got some lettuce in your yard right now that reminds me I need to shake my red clover if you haven't seen my red clover video I'll put the link right up there and this is what it looks like after three and a half weeks the red is gone and pretty soon I'll be straining this out and putting it in a separate container look at that that is where I tore the leaf off and it is now Brown so that's another way you can distinguish you've got the right plant

Channel: Kaye Kittrell Late Bloomer

Views: 58,675

Keywords: Organic, Grow Your Own Food, Late Bloomer, Late Bloomer Show, Kaye Kittrell, Grow Your Own Vegetables, Tennessee, Tennessee homestead, homesteading, gardening, sustainable homestead, Gardening, Tennessee gardening, grow your own, country living, wild lettuce tincture, how to make wild lettuce tincture for pain and sleep, make wild lettuce tincture for pain, plant medicine, plant medicines, lactuca virosa, prickly lettuce, pain relief naturally, cute cats, how to make tincture

Id: upuiBBeg_io

Length: 17min 15sec (1035 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023