Understanding Wild Herbs & Edibles | Darryl Patton, Homesteaders of America 2017

anyway how many of you took the plant walk this morning with me how many of you remember the jokes i said very good anyway let me tell you a little bit about me for those of you who don't know my name is daryl patton i go by the moniker the southern herbalist and i've been working with medicinal plants for about 32 years now and was fortunate to study with an old man named tommy bass who gathered medicinal plants for 81 years in the southern appalachians and was an amazing resource for medicinal plants and so my passion in life is to pass this knowledge down to you because there are a lot of herb stores nothing wrong with them a lot of herbalists nothing wrong with them but they're not a lot of herbalists who know the plants out where god has put them and i believe it's important if you want to be an herbalist or a homesteader who uses herbs to know the plants because what happens if the north koreans nuke us you're not going to have an herb store what happens if health care gets too expensive can't afford it you have the woods tommy when he was born in 1908 was born into a sharecropper family and as he often told me if there had been welfare back then they'd have had to borrow money to get on it they were that dirt poor and so for them going to the woods going to the fields was not something a trip you went to go get something special it was if you needed yellow dock go get some yellow dock and you went to where the yellow dock was there was nothing special about it it was just common everyday knowledge among the people of that day in fact how many of you have ever eaten pope salads a few of you still you know and go back a couple of generations everybody ate poke salad but we have become afraid of nature in my opinion we're afraid to go out and forage plants because people think that they'll poison themselves odds are extremely low that you will about nine cases a year of poisoning from foraging that are serious enough to require hospitalization seven are by mushrooms two of my plants usually it's pokes island or something that they didn't wash the plant like the water called phytolactotoxins out and they got real sick went to the hospital you know wish they had never eaten it and probably will never eat it again but actually it's actually very very safe to gather wild foods and by incorporating wild foods into your diet you're doing two things you're adding a lot of variety to your diet because many of these wild foods are very very nutritious they're very edibly tasty they're not just green tasting and they're also extremely rich in vitamins minerals and phytochemicals that can heal you now since we're at a homesteaders conference everybody should be able to answer this question positively how many of you grow a garden all right you may not have wished you raised your hand how many of you have grown a tomato plant okay you did now i know you rachel did you raise your hand good so i'll pick on him since you have the camera all right you know what a tomato plant looks like right are you positive okay i've never seen a tomato plant in my life describe one to me tell me what it looks like oh you're talking about a potato plant very similar how do you know it's a tomato plant not a potato plant oh what's the tomato look like oh like an apple oh okay so you're talking about an apple tree on a potato plant now that's called circular reasoning and i can keep it up for hours because there is no way to get out of that trap however everybody here that at least has who gardens and has planted tomatoes knows what a tomato plant looks like the very instance you see it with or without tomatoes on it why nope not because you're familiar wine what nope but how do you know how do you know when you see it i mean you take a look you don't have to you know it's like looking at a rattlesnake you don't have to decide if it has rattlers on it or not you know it's a rattlesnake nope nope they all play a part but the reason you know a tomato plant when you see it is for one simple reason go to walmart in february and buy a tomato and eat it what will it taste like cardboard now in july go get a tomato warm and ripe out of your garden and take a big old juicy bite out of it what does it taste like heaven the closest i can ever become to becoming a vegetarian as long as some meat thrown in with it would be by july you've got all of those great garden plants coming in but you know it because it fills your belly makes your taste buds happy it's because you have a use for it that's why you know a tomato plant when you see it however if you take a look at this little vine grows all over the place here that you probably have never noticed called cross vine you have no use for it so you have no reason to really remember it easily once you find out that hey i can use this with somebody in my family who has had chemo or radiation and they have no energy and this will give them energy in about three or four days and they can get back up and walking again then you have a reason to store it in your subconscious mind and bring that information back i have an herb school where i teach herbal medicine and we do math all the time doing tincture percolations and calculations and when i was in high school i did not like math i couldn't tell you what kind of algebra i took in 9th grade math because i was just chasing a girl that's only reason i took that class however you ask me about geography or history or government things topics i absolutely love and i can throw you facts out all day long because i value that knowledge and i have a reason to be able to pull it back out but that algebra unless i self-destructed it is still back in the brain i just didn't have a reason to bring it back out so once you find out that you got a kid that's got the croup in chestnut leaves chestnut from a chinese chestnut or an american chestnut or a cinco pen will help with that croup now you re you realize hey this is something useful to me to know what it looks like going outside so my goal with with teaching plants is teach you how to value them because they're not anything well they are special in a sense but they're not anything special in that it's very hard to work with them and so i wanted to show you a few plants today and talk about them and i'm actually going to make you some pancakes for those of you who want to try a wild food pancake that is really really good we'll talk about it after a while and somebody needs to tell me when to be quiet because i lose track of time i have no idea i just know i don't have enough so i'm speaking fast but anyway when i first started doing this i'd go up to old tommy bass's house with a big old sack of plants he'd identify for me and then as time went by i started learning you know you can experiment and so i developed some some rules that i teach that apply to both herbal medicine and also to wild foods and when it comes to wild foods or herbal medicine a the plant needs to be easy enough to identify that you feel safe in picking it because everybody's scared to death they're going to poison themselves which is not going to happen b it needs to provide more calories than it takes to get something out of it you'll see a wild food book be about that thick 900 plants and 880 of them you'll spend a thousand calories to gain 50 calories in my book that is not worth the effort other than as a trailside nibble say you've been there done that got the t-shirt however you take things like acorns yellow dog those are things that you can gather in a short period of time tons and tons of calories of food easy to be stored which is another one of my rules and it'll last all winter until the next harvest comes in which is another rule you go by you know if it's going to go bad on you it's not worth gathering and when you learn some of these rules you realize hey i have a whole world open to me because we're in virginia without knowing i would estimate it's probably like alabama with about 3 000 species of flowering plants that doesn't count your trees your lichen or your fungi all of which are also medicinal and some are edible and so you will always be a student if you get if you delve into this and one of the really important parts to this is that when you use them as wild foods is you want to have a plant that either tastes good on its own or can be utilized in dishes that will make it taste good so you know once you learn a few of those rules and apply them it's very easy to you know i couldn't go hungry if i if the world came to an end i couldn't go hungry i know too many plants and as and if you look back and i'm you may laugh if i walk right off this thing because it's liable but in the mid 1980s is when all the survival books really took off and in and that was because tom brown got on tonight show which was you know the uh facebook of the day was tonight's show if you got on that you wrote your ticket and everything was hunt trap fish fish trap trap trap hunt fish trap very little on plants and oh my god don't ever touch a mushroom you'll poison yourself looking at them there's no food value in them you're liable to poison yourself there's no medicinal value in them stay away from them and that's because people had these blinders on mushrooms um for example if your ancestors are from england scotland ireland or wales raise your hand all right you are mushroom phobic in english culture mushrooms were associated with witches you look at the old fairy tales big old toadstool which was an amanita muscaria they've got red with the freckles on it very good medicinal mushroom by the way and if one dose of it you can knock sciatica out completely also edible if you peel the cap and cook it right hallucinogenic if you want to get high on it and people there couldn't read couldn't write so what do you do you teach your kids you teach your kids that if you get near that mushroom that witch is going to jump out grind your bones into flour and eat you bake you in an oven and if you ever want to read something really entertaining is skip the american version of the grim fairy tales and get the european version they are they will put stephen king to having nightmares they are terrible but they were meant because in that day and age if you're your kid and you got kidnapped they'd never see you again so you were taught these things to keep you safe and we brought that mushroom phobia over with us so unless you're from france germany and some other places where they liked mushrooms we bring that fear and it's an unfounded fear but let me show you a few plants that i was talking about earlier and actually what you need to do by the way i'm going to do a couple of giveaways if you take a piece of paper and just write your name on it if you don't have paper a 20 bill works well the higher the denomination goes the higher your odds of winning but just write your name and piece of paper on piece of paper fold it up don't do it on pink or green paper because i'm going to close my eyes and i'm going to give a couple of things away but i was talking earlier about cross vine in april as you drive down the sides of the road you're going to see this beautiful ever semi-evergreen vine and it'll have clusters of red blooms that look like tubes with yellow lips that is cross vine if you will pass these around you can look at them take yourself if you want to keep it and you'll you'll notice on the stem that it's that it is two leaves across from two leaves so i'll throw them out to you hey i feel like i'm on a mardi gras float try that and that's how i got the name cross vine and i saw the story this morning i had a lady it's past bran he had a lady that contacted me her husband had had chemo and radiation mid 70s 80ish maybe and she said what can you do for him yeah he all he does is sit in his easy chair because he has no energy sent some of the cross find up and about a week later i had an email from her saying thank you for giving me my husband back he's out in the garden i ran into him a few months later at the program he said i drink about half a cup a day good to go and what it does is back in the 30s and 40s and when people still plowed with horses and mules they had a condition called hide bound and basically they worked them to death so the kidneys would shut down toxins would build up the horse would lose its hair meat would stick to the flesh would stick to the bone and the animal was on its way out so they would give them an herb called pepsicoid or rat's vein which opened up and flushed toxins out through the kidneys and they'd give them cross vine for energy three days later the horse would be playing on plowing again so tommy was smart and figured well if it's good for a horse it's good for man and in general except for cats which are wonky about about medicines of any sort you can go by body weight with animals and kids and adults and so he would start using with people and realize three or four days later you man i feel i feel like i've got some stamina some energy may not want to run a marathon but you feel better and at one point in time a few years back one a student from baster university which is a huge naturopathic university out west came down and i showed him crossvine he took some back received permission to do gas and liquid chromatography on it because he was a graduate student in the lab and discovered it contained a chemical called rawluffia rawlfia is also present in not raw wolfia recirpine which is present rao wolfia from india but it's a very toxic medicine used for kidney ailments and as an antipsychotic this contains trace amounts just enough for the body to stimulate healing so to give you an example of that is here you are trotting down the trail scared to death that something's going to jump out and get you you look down and there's a rattlesnake what and you know this is a trick question but what's the first thing that you do what scream no no no no i grab them and pick them up before that you immediately secrete a chemical called adrenaline every ambulance in the country every er has adrenaline as a prescription controlled medicine also known as epinephrine that is your fight or flight syndrome so you're walking down there there's the rattlesnake and for some people it could it could be a garter snake or a little tiny worm snake and you look at it and you go i'm not boo-boo body secret adrenaline doesn't work that way does it you have that mind-body connection that your sympathetic nervous system your autonomic nervousness immediately makes medicine so your body has that ability to make its own medicine in many cases and sometimes all it needs is that tiny little stimulus when i was going to school i worked at a detention center and i had kids from murder to you name it there and someone would go be going off the wall just tearing things up we'd give them a sugar pill now you need to go sit down because in a few minutes this stuff's going to really make you sleepy you know this is a strong sleeping pill five minutes ago sound asleep because their mind accepted the fact that this was medicine and their body produced that sedation my i do medical hypnosis also and that there's a big key when we do hypnosis is getting if the mind can accept it the body will follow and so you give those little trace elements of some of these things and it'll achieve that purpose now you do have to be careful with this i was doing a plant walk with clayton college when i worked with them and friend of mine if you've if you know of matthew wood who's very well known herbalist up north and he was down and i showed him cross finding down this down near atlanta and he picked a flower and chewed on it and said wow this is good stuff i can really feel the the the difference and i thought wow that's fast never heard of that he's a bit strange it's giving me this weird body reaction of making my left ankle tingle never heard of that he picked another one man i like this stuff but now it's making my ankle burn i looked at him i looked down and said cause you're in fire ants anyway really good stuff how about that rabbit tobacco life everlasting cud weed wonderful wonderful plant different species in this genus grow from florida to canada and west to california common everywhere in spots this is traditionally you go out behind the bar and roll it up in some brown paper sack and smoke it when you couldn't get cigarettes in fact i did i tell a story about my nursing home thing no my master gardeners i was doing a program for master gardeners about this many people 65 on up the average age and i said how many of y'all smoked rabbit tobacco oh yeah yeah a bunch of people razor and i remember doing that out granddad's barn if you couldn't get that how many of you smoked cross fine cigars and that's where you split these vines down into four pieces and suck your eyeballs out trying to get the smoke through it but you were cool yeah about six or seven people raised their hand i said when you couldn't get either one of those how many of y'all smoked pot people going and afterwards oversight 85 year old lady came up and said i wanted to raise my hand but i go to church with so and so and that was 45 years ago anyway so if you got dry stuffy sinus and that's a true story too if you've got dry stuffy sinuses you can either smoke or you can boil this and inhale the steam but blow the smoke out your sinuses and temporarily it'll shrink the mucous tissue back down and dry it up and open your sinuses back up if you take that same smoke and inhale it in your lungs it'll cause reflexive spasmodic action of the lungs and you will all of it out real fast when my son was seven he said daddy i want to learn how to smoke i looked at myself okay got a corn cob pipe fill it full of this it looked like lava glow and it was so hot and i said when i hit three inhale as deeply as you can he never smoked again chewed for a while but never smoked but it actually smells quite good and it's very good for lung conditions and one of the things it does if you use it in a liquid form it does not cause that spasmodic action it it acts as an expectorant but it also shuts off the production of mucus so you start talking about herbs that dry the lungs or dry this out they don't necessarily in most cases dry them like a sponge they shut the production of more mucus off so as you get the phlegm up and out you i am going to watch it you're going to you're going to not produce more mucus excellent but what i like even more about this is this is not known for this but this is one of my favorite respiratory antivirals it's very high in what are called terpenes monoterpenes diatropine sesquiterpenes triterpenes very powerful antivirals specifically for respiratory viruses and you'll hear this a lot in in talks in her books where this thing says it has an affinity for and some herbs and just like antibiotics have us have an affinity for certain conditions they work on and this will be specific to respiratory viruses colds flus viral pneumonia not i wouldn't use it necessarily for shingles rabbit tobacco if you look it up in the books the botanical name is nathalium obtusifolium or pseudonyphaleum up to sifolium or the two main fry you can't tell them apart unless you uh bonus and kill them out but we'll pass around just you can open it up spread it help yourself to these i have wads of this stuff oops yes you can make sage bundles out of it it has a different odor but it's a pleasant odor and those and those terpenes wait and you think about it what is one of the fastest ways of getting medicine in you the olfactory system you inhale it yes no not as a smoke as a tea because it's like asthma you don't want to stop spat you don't want to start spasming of the lungs liquid lick is fine no problem at all using it for that it's like for asthmatics you would not use this or you'll you'll make it worse there there are many other things like yellow plum bark the syrup etc or jimson weed is another one that works real well for asthma one or two puffs of that it does not get you high but it'll immediately stop the spasmodic action of the wheezing etc but help yourself to it now when you harvest this during the spring when in summer when most people can't identify because it blends in with everything the top of the leaves will be green underneath will be a white silvery white as they mature in the fall from the base up they start to turn brown on top white on the bottom that's when you start harvesting those because that's when the terpene contents are at their highest also good for poison ivy poison oak and salve as well good for healing wounds okay now this one's getting puny but we'll get we'll actually but it'll come back if you want to do i'm going to give this one away and we'll do a drawing for it this is solomon seal now if you look at gerard's writings in the in the late middle ages he wrote that solomon's seal is most excellent for for strong-willed women who run into their husbands fists in other words it was good for the bruising when you got soft because you know rougher era but it was good for bruising but it was mainly used for women who had had babies and their pelvic region had been stretched and the tendons and ligaments were stretched torn and bruised it heals them and brings them back into condition i use it with anybody that's got any kind of sports type injury ac mcl's torn ligaments tendons use it internally as a tincture and externally in a sad form and it will actually take a lot of pain out very good stuff the root tastes like a cucumber so you can eat it if you so desire don't eat lots it'll make you throw a kidney stone but it's a really good medicinal medicinal plant i use it in some cough medicines because sometimes it's people use it for arthritis as well because it lubricates the joints and lubricates the lungs ma'am it depends on what's causing the back issues yes if this involves ligaments tendons or muscles [Music] there are other things i would do for the disc uh i use this recently i was walking in publix with my wife and there was this huge mexican clay pot my warning bells did not go off i've been over if it hadn't been for the buggy i'd have been laying on the ground dialing 9-2-2 it i pulled muscles in my lower back this is what got me back on the road in about two weeks i mean it was oh it was agony right another one here that reminds me of tommy bass because it's one of the first plants he taught me was it's called yellow root also known as shrub yellow root because for the further north you go out of alabama and you hit tennessee they they call goldenseal yellow root then you got barberry gold thread out west oregon grape algerita so common names will get you in trouble sometimes and you actually harvest the stems because they're as medicinal as the roots and they don't kill the plant and as long as you leave the root in the ground excuse me the plant will keep on spreading they spread real well if you take that scrape it it'll be a yellowish green color especially when it's fresh and if you smell it you will smell the berberine in it in fact tommy bass got one visit from the fda in his whole 81 years of doing this and so i don't know who did it but somebody called the memphis office said this man's making claims for yellow root that it will cure stomach ulcers and cure cancer a lady from the memphis office came down she said mr bass we heard this rumor that you're claiming that yellow root will cure stomach ulcers and he looked and said why yes ma'am it will it'll kill him graveyard dead and she said you can't say that that's a new claim he said well ma'am i've been doing this for 77 years and it'll kill a graveyard dead she never came back they dropped it you know it's an old guy doing this stuff didn't hurt anything three years later dr james duke comes along grew up in birmingham his jaw and new tommy where his job was working with with the government looking for medicinal plants for the government to study and he said wait a minute what causes stomach ulcers you used to think of drinking and all that that can play a factor but 90 85 90 of all stomach cultures are caused by the h pylori bacteria helicobacter pylori bacteria and in government testing there was a chemical that actually killed that bacteria guess what it's called berberine therefore yellow root would cure a stomach ulcer tommy didn't know berberine was so the day he died but he knew from eight you know by the time he died 81 years of doing it his grandparents doing it you know in everybody's south knowing yellow root that it would cure stomach ulcer and it would cure stomachs it will knock out a mouth ulcer canker sore wonderful liver herb great for for for liver and gallbladder derangements good for any it goes in the salve i'm going to give away because it really helps keep wounds from being infected and to heal excellent excellent stuff and believe it or not it makes really good wine is bitter you would think it'd be bitter but it's actually sweet makes i haven't tried mead with it yet excellent plant to use and we'll let this one go you stick this on a shady creek bank and it'll slowly take off and they can actually get that high on occasion but this is about about average real pretty plant um there was a herb doctor in gatson named doc i think it was docent that one that had a stomach ulcer cure that people from several states around in the early 70s would come fly in just to get his stomach ulcer cure and all it was was he would buy yellow root and goldenseal from tommy grind them up mix it with mayonnaise that was the critical ingredient and the reason it was critical was because it got that nasty tasting bitter stuff down your throat before you realize how nasty bitter tasting it was but people swore by where they would actually get plane tickets just to come get that remedy that's all it was was ground up yellow root goldenseal with the berberine content little mayonnaise to oil it on down the gullet and you're good to go i have seen this in some of my salves the bass in particular take wounds to the bone and heal them okay we'll go to a fungus now how many of you familiar with chaga pretty good how many of you have ever had syrup made from chaga other than within the last few hours did you like it pretty good isn't it you would not think that this would taste good grows on yellow birch trees down here if you can find a white birch that's the main one up north that it grows on and down here you have to be up in the mountains to find yellow birch and then it's cool enough to let this stuff grow this is one of my favorite medicinal fungi wait anybody fda law enforcement blah blah here okay anyway when i work with people with cancer this is one that all go on because it is a what you call a broad spectrum anti-cancer herb if you're familiar with the russian distant writer and doctor alexander solzhenitsyn he wrote the gulag archipelago and he also wrote one called and i swear i've got a mind block on the name it's either cancer water cancer doctor cancer ward i think but what happened was every few years the soviets would ship him off to siberia to shut him up and then they'd finally let him come him come back because of his fame and they didn't put these prisoners these political prisoners in prison cells they put him in prison camps siberia was your prison i mean you were ten thousand miles from nowhere if you got out the villagers would hunt you down and kill you for the bounties uh you were stuck so they had these huge prison camps of 30 40 50 000 men when you've got a prison camp of 30 40 050 men what do you have a city and you have every disease that pops up in a city that size so he had had a bout with cancer and went into the village to look for black market medicine for cancer and could not find anybody with cancer he said it was so low statistically as to almost be non-existent and i got to thinking well what in the world are they all doing the same and as a former teacher and he i like the fact that he did not have to grow up using common core math they used regular math and came up with well two and two does make four and what are they doing the same ten thousand miles from nowhere you couldn't get coffee unless you were rich or the prison you know commander so all of the people in in the the soviet system that were not in prison were drinking this beverage just like the natives did as a hot coffee substitute and it's you know you know you can if you're not a coffee connoisseur you can convince yourself it's coffee tasting and it's and it's a good substitute and it was that water decoction was keeping them from getting cancer so eventually it became a prescription medicine for cancer in the soviet union and so what i do with this is i make a double extract which is alcohol and water-based because some of the chemicals are alcohol-soluble some are water-soluble and then you combine the two and it causes a couple of things to happen first off it has a thing called apoptosis apoptosis means every cell in your body is programmed to die at some point in time it doesn't live forever and it's replaced cancer cells are just another living cell they are programmed eventually they die they're replaced with more cancerous cells this beats up the process of cancerous cells it does not touch a healthy cell there is absolutely no side effect well the only potential side effect of this is it also helps regulate blood sugar levels but i've never heard of any problems with it but it causes those cells their cancers to speed up and die and not be replaced it also has what's called an anti-angiogenesis effect anti against angioes the vessels genesis beginning it shrinks and shrivels up those blood vessels leading to the cancer cells and just like any living cell cancer cells need water they need food they need nutrition or they die and this shuts off does not touch healthy cells and it's full of different chemicals it's got what's called superoxide dismutase all the terpenes beta glucans bitulanic acid wonderful by the way birch trees themselves are very good for cancer from the betulic acid in it now i'm going to hand this to you but i want you to realize something i can run faster than you i want this one back this is really hard to get for me but it's good but when we make these these pancakes we're going to actually use some chaga syrup on it that i think you'll like another mushroom that i and i use the term loosely because it's technically a fungus not a mushroom but we call them all mushrooms and you should be fairly familiar with this hint of the woods also called maitaki in japan it was known as one of the laughing mushrooms because it was so rare so expensive that if a peasant found it you laugh because it was worth its weight in silver this is an excellent for regulating blood sugar levels it's an immunomodulator and what that means is it resets your immune system so that your body's not fighting against itself it fights against what's going wrong with your immune system for example if you have rheumatoid arthritis you don't use things like elderberry elderberry is an immune stimulant it'll make it worse if you use too much of it you can use things like echinacea which people think are is an immune stimulant and it's actually an immunomodulator that the government recognizes for the treatment of ebola they recognize it as an immunomodulator but there's a lot of mythology surrounding it but most of these medicinal mushrooms not all but most of them are actually immunomodulators they'll give you a strong immune system if you need it they will dampen it down to where it needs to be if it's too strong in fighting your body you want to grab that passes around grows at the base of white oak trees mainly no that's hint of the woods chicken of the woods is orange and yellow and it tastes like chicken it's great it's an antibiotic it is not an immunomodulator per se but it's really good to eat much more common than hint of the woods in the woods you've got to find a big gold white oak look at the base of it this morning we found it on that huge white oak stump that had been cut and so i wish i'd been here a week ago because i would like to have got it they're hard to find in alabama not real real common but it's an excellent medicinal mushroom one of the best eating fungi that you'll ever have i love it better than morels by a long shot excellent to cook with you can actually take it powder it use it for soup stock and a lot of people will take the petals that's what they eat but if you take that big thick core that everybody throws out you can actually either dry it and powder it use it for soup stock or slice it real thin and make beef jerky and it tastes like beef jerky again i do a double extract when i'm making medicine with it this right here is wild ginger now you have two families that wild ginger comes in one is a serum one is hexa stylus this is hexa stylus i think it tastes better than the official wild ginger very good medicine it works in the same way that you use commercial ginger for it for nausea it heats the body from the core out it's a good liver herb good heart medication many many things the root smells wonderful that's where you think root beer you can take this and make syrup with it then thicken that syrup and use it as a glaze on ham and step back as they say in south slap your mama it is that that good in fact i've got class next weekend i'm going to teach them how to make um what we're going to make shagbark hickory balls and hard candies with wild ginger it's really good great antiviral by the way don't give this to young kids who can't control their core body temperature or somebody is old and frail because it'll cause seizures because they can't stand that body heating up and little kids especially they'll have what are called febrile seizures and i don't know what the technical term is for old folk seizures i always call them geriatric seizures and some of you can have somebody 80 years old that can do a good diaphoretic and sweat no problem but then you may have somebody 65 that's been in bad health for a long time they're frail they're weak and you give them any diaphoretic herb and it'll make them have seizures potentially and the last plant up here sort of speaking is wild yam this is the family where the original birth control pills came from but what is so neat about this is in the 1800s they had a condition called bilious colic now tell me what that was they thought it was severe cramping of the intestines rising out of the liver and gallbladder nowadays we call that irritable bowel syndrome but they did have irritable bowel syndrome back then they just called it bilious colic and they used the root or the rhizome of this for bilious colic it acts as an antihistamine to the intestinal tract you take a a tablespoon of this to about a cup of water boil it and then take a spoonful every couple of hours and then two three hours it's just not some usually sooner than that it just knocks the spasming out completely makes a slimy reddish looking liquid and it's extremely effective works really well now tommy bass knew it even more so as an anti-inflammatory for arthritis which is a interesting thing and that's what it does it works really well for arthritis but nobody ever uses it for that and i use it in some of my my formulas for that and it works works well all right one of the things i wanted to make for y'all today is let you what time is it by the way anybody something all that on time okay is uh some pancakes but first i want to give a jar save away this is a sad that tommy bass made for 81 years his great-grandparents actually developed this in england in probably 1850s 1860s eczemas rises skin cancers wounds that don't want to heal you name it i was sitting in a meeting with a friend of mine he was about 75. interesting guy he's from england but he's born in pakistan back when england known pakistan and he was sitting there with shorts black socks and flip-flops or sandals now i do not swing that way but i was looking at his legs and my thought running through my mind was oh god please don't let me dress that way when i hit 75. but i noticed on his ankle right about here was a wound about six inches long to the bone you could actually see the bone it was oozing and weeping and nasty looking and i said mike what's wrong with your ankle and he explained that he'd had a steel rod taken out i don't know if his car record fell or whatever and his doctor in north alabama is regionally known as a very well-known wound care specialist they tried hyperbaric chambers debridement antibiotics nothing was healing this it was not closing at all and i don't know what their next step would have been and uh i said i'll tell you what i got a skin set up i make and he knew of tommy bass from living there i said you promised me three times a day see you next week so i'm next week at the meeting shorts black socks flip-flops i was thinking oh lord please don't let me oh anyway and i asked i said mike how's your ankle doing big old allies he said you're not going to believe this it was halfway closed three weeks later was it was gone three weeks later took it to his doctor and said what you do he said what did you do to your ankle to make it heal and he got some of this have to try where hang on i saw a lot of this under the table to nursing homes for bedsores and because i've got diabetic ulcers that would be one to try it on right that'd be one i would try i'll let you try some okay let me go dirty better not close my eyes and the winner is emily popa papa that would be you you're welcome and of course that was a sneaky advertising i got plenty over there anyway one of the things when it comes to doing wild foods i said is it needs to be able to be tasty by itself or be made to taste tasty right well one of the plants and also provide more calories than are spent harvesting it one of the plants that you have that grows all over the place here i saw some 10 o'clock plus sign the headlights driving through is yellow dock it's also called curly dock the root and actually it's in that skin sap too because of its ability to heal wounds very high in iron in fact farmers in 1800s would put old horseshoes and nails around it the year before they dug it so that it would absorb the the iron as it leached out to make it even better and then they would use it for medicine tommy bass's first meal in like 1912 when he moved in that area where they stopped inside of a creek and had some fat back with yellow dark leaves as a green you think of it like spinach or turnip greens it's actually in the wintertime in the early spring it's quite tasty it's not bitter at all but anyway in the late spring early summer it sends up a stalk about so high sort of greenish-looking seed cases on that turn brown and once they turn brown you'll see fields of these brown stalks standing up this plant is actually in the uh nothing's at the uh um shoe where'd that go uh buckwheat family need to start with b it's a member of the buckwheat family so when you make you take those seeds and harvest them and make pancakes or crackers or bread it tastes like buckwheat pancakes and the nice thing i like about it is the speed at which you can harvest this i harvested 30 gallons of a couple of months ago and it took me an hour and 10 minutes to snap the stalks throw them in the back of the truck drive home and strip them off and i got 30 gallons of seed and you use the husk everything you grind it all up together and so if you immediately you look at it first y'all can pass that around that's what it looks like stripped off and i won't pass it and then i just put it in my vitamix and just grind it down as needed there are no oils in it so you can just leave it all year and it won't go rancid like acorn flour will and so you use this about a third of your mix when you're making pancakes waffles anybody ever make able skivers oh aren't those good and i make i like them enables givers so what i did was i did some foraging on the way up and in in the mountains of southern tennessee i went to the buttermilk complete pancake tree carved out some wooden plates dug for oil and oh and there's the hand carved spatula from spatula city anyway you know we do have one little challenge i don't have a bowl let me see what we're gonna do how clean is this bucket have we got a bowl or something somewhere that we could use i knew it's missing something um always a solution i've got a bowl right here okay and i blew a glass bowl so now when you make this you do about a third of the mix you do with your yellow dot no gluten in it so it won't rise if you do too much it'll be too heavy i like the galloping gourmet remember him yeah you eyeball it so we're going to do about two cups of flour you can make your own rice self-rising mix or this is dollar do you have dollar general up here okay dollar general this is where this came from down to alabama we just we just eyeball it uh somebody's gonna need to get me a little like a thing of water hmm yeah my wife has banished me from the kitchen so we'll go we'll go with that then we'll do about a third and somebody can have this if y'all want it i got plenty we'll do about a third yes please it may take two may have to fill it up again yeah see if his galloping court may be a bottle of wine going okay thank you because you can always add more flour turn down [Music] and mix now what we're going to do once we get to a certain point is we're going to add a secreting well that was really good guesstimating is we're going to add a secret ingredient which will no longer be secret all right yeah did y'all go up to the people doing the shag white hickory syrup up the booth okay i made that for you this is uh oh thanks for shag mark hickory nut syrup that will put into the mix and it is delicious and to make this you actually chop up the notch hop you grind up the nuts shell and all and you boil them all shell and all then you strain it out and this adds a lot of flavor you can add add the chaga syrup to it now i'll have to do a little bit more flour thicken that up this green of the leaves if you eat the leaves is as nutritious or more nutritious than any garden leafy green that you'll have very good dark leafy green vegetable now there's also another one out there called broadleaf dock but it's also known as bitter dock and the seeds look sort of similar but if you don't winter the seeds out of the chaff it'll be bitter and if you eat the leaves you can boil them throw the water off a couple times like you do poke's head it'll still be bitter so people will talk about you gotta winter the seeds out or you can't you have been using bitter dog not curly dock that'll work oh thank you i had already forgotten about it you should have kept it anyway now y'all you test the griddle ow that's hot so oh yeah this was the hardest thing to make yeah okay look how nice and brown they are now i'll make i'll make all this and y'all can get you some and do some of this chaga syrup that's got kudzu blossoms in it by the way did you know that kudzu leaves are about 24 to 28 protein in the spring if you take the young leaves when they're they're shiny and not hairy cook them up in scrambled eggs really really good as they get older and get hairy and not quite so much fun to cook with i take them dehydrate them powder them up and then make vegetable bouillon cubes out of the powder really really good and extremely nutritious you can it's higher in protein than alfalfa so it's real good for feeding rabbits etcetera i'm going to set these down here and by the way any questions you understand everything the syrup is was hickory nut syrup oh the yellow dock seed just ground up husk and all this can't get any simpler than that uh let me do i don't have it with me it's over there but i'll give away another sap mayor fox mark fox mary fox okay you help yourself over here the jar salve you can have a you've won one so let's try these yeah my wife came home one night and here's what i was doing in the kitchen sink flour makes a really good concrete she came home one night because she teaches uh yoga at the gym and i had one thing i waited i waited you know i waited she goes and do things and cleaned up real good and i left one little bottle on the counter she walked and she said what's that i said what that bottle what's it doing there and i thought for a split second then i decided honesty is the best policy i said but i cleaned up okay that's going to take a few more minutes in fact it's not all right it would help if the heat would stay on okay anyway any other questions and we'll slow this thing down yes for what for identifying wild plants for making medicines out of them making foods or what okay if you're looking at wild foods two good authors to look for are samuel thayer t-h-a-y-e-r he's up in minnesota and wisconsin michigan there is somewhere really good writer does very detailed books he's got the foragers harvest and a couple of other books that are excellent from out west dr john kallus k-a-l-l-a-s is really good he and he'll have a few things that grow at west we don't have like miners lettuce and stuff but but a lot of it's the same and then if you go to my youtube channel i got about 40 videos on on plant hikes and talking about medicinal plants and edible plants john kalas k-a-l-l-a-s dr john kalas he's got one or two books out that i know of i can't think of i can't think of the names of them and then samuel thayer's got two or three out right now that are very very well done uh i don't know that's the last one over there today it's normally 35 if you order it off my website it's 40 because it's shipping uh any and plus if you get like if you get my card contact me if you got a plant you want id just text it to me i get about 10 or 15 texts a day say what is this well if you wouldn't take it up like that i might could tell you and uh i don't that's what i do so i don't mind a bit doing it uh if you're ever interested in classes i do classes from florida to virginia i mean to uh obviously virginia to uh michigan usually weekend classes where i teach all day both days let's try that see if that'll that's getting there okay i'm not my heat's not sticking on this thing something's well well it was a good thought but that's probably wait a minute let's do it this way some reason it is not staying up there now we're cooking with gas okay so when it comes to the the plants you know start with a few things slowly incorporate them into your diet and that way you don't overload yourself or slowly incorporate the medicinal plants you know i know four or five thousand plants that i go out and make medicines from but in reality if you learn about 30 you can cover a whole wide range of things and if you look at it well you need to decide what are you wanting to work with if you're a mother got young kids you want to help your kids elderly parents you're in you know certain stages of life you may be have family members dealing with cancer or that so you start looking at what are the things that i deal with now or unlikely to deal with and that will help you decide which way to go in my okay in my class i've got about 20 students right now and they all have different goals some want to be herbalists some like the social aspect of getting out hiking digging herbs and some want just enough knowledge to treat their family now if you got to go while we're waiting on these to cook and they're starting to cook now is you can take a taste of this this is that where'd it go my fungus chaga and i mixed kudzu blossoms which tastes like grape in with it and pour a little on your finger and taste that otherwise wait on a pancake and you pour it on the pancake because it's good i've got one more bottle in the truck if you if we want it in some more of the other syrup as well there we go i see steam oh yeah and you can take wild hickory nuts and black walnuts and throw in the mix never hurts okay i'll cut these in half and that'll start getting everybody some and i started doing this in 1984 so going on 32 years and i still go to the woods and i'm excited about it because it's a never-ending source of new learning new plants new uses for the same plants i've known for years so it's something once you started tommy told the story once he said it's like this man he went up to a friend's house and there's this mama dog had puppies she came running up to him was going to bite him so he grabbed her by the ears and then he said i didn't know what to do i didn't know whether to to hold on or let go he said i never did let go i guess so i stayed working with her for 81 years so i guess i'm getting on up there now i was talking to my wife one day and i said you know how's that i was at this workshop some slaves you know that old lady you know and she said you know she's probably your age and i thought oh i haven't thought about that let me change what i say because you'd never know i was 82 years old this year no i'm not i i just turned 60. the by george old age will have to catch me from behind oh yeah okay if you want to try one we'll i'm ready to serve some up and i promise not to poison you besides i got insurance okay and there's the job with those tell you what i'm just gonna before i burn them all give me let me have a plate y'all can divide them up that way now now that it's cooking it's hot hot hot looks pretty good doesn't it and if i had a time to find a wild buffalo or deer i'd meet you some butter but um yeah you could probably just tear them into halves man these will cook fast because it's hot griddle making some pancakes with yellow dock okay give me i'll tell you what let's do it this way we were kind of cutting down yeah scissors would have worked real well here okay here's some more if y'all want to pass those around and get a plate thank you you're welcome okay tell you what would you like i don't know where the syrup went somebody yeah if there's not one on the table yeah there should be there's a box underneath there it's got them i'm getting i got eight more coming well anyway thank you for coming thank you ooh that's the corner let this go a minute okay has anybody tried it yet like it pretty good isn't it okay anybody want the yellow dog powder oh you huh that's what's in the pancakes get if you get a baggie or something let's see what y'all can split that one up you have to grind it yourself and this one and actually you can use it on ground yeah well y'all split it if you can find some containers put it in i still got about 28 gallons of this left so i'm good so okay from that hickory nut it smells almost fruity it's got a really good odor to it now if you really want to get exotic when it comes to herbal medicine i use a lot of non-traditional well they are traditional but i use beaver casters from which is a sink gland from beavers that is one of the most powerful nervings calm me down i've spent the last two months harvesting spider webs on a stick because it it's a mood elevator uh make bee venoms out of honeybees but you'd be surprised how many modern medicines are made out of bugs your big flu vaccine everybody's taking right now one form of it's made out of uh army worms those green caterpillar army worms that they they grow them in that so you're eating you're using bugs stuff in your flu vaccine and if you use lipstick and rouge and all sorts of stuff you're getting insect blood catching cochineal in you but it's another good medicine too real pretty gotta be careful not to spill it all though give that just one more minute this will be done that one's done it used to be called carmine red well it is all natural it's made out of bug blood natural bug blood no now typically they would harvest uh commercially uh in the cellar black spiders but any spider web works so i go every time i go somewhere i see this by the way i give them a chance to run and then because they rebuild it every day anyway there you go there's some more it does you can make a take the tincture and it's like i feel bitter it's called taylor t-e-l-a or tella either one yeah you'd be you'd be surprised though you ever heard of primarin for women for yeah some of you familiar with it primarin pregnant mirror urine that's where it's made it's what's called primarin look under the table there's a flat box bunch of it under the table ten ten dollars huh better i don't trust anybody over there they look a little skeezy uh the i don't see it no more somebody get it oh it's the last one i've got if you want it's 35 bucks 35. it's the only one left that's all i brought is this enough for everybody okay well i'll make one more batch if let me just bake it i got the stuff i don't want anybody not to get some no the yellow dock seed wild pancakes curly dock is yellow dock same thing just two different names for the same plant it's the broad leaf or bitter dog and you can see because it's got a wide leaf with a red mid vein that'll develop that's the one that if you use the seeds you can but you have to window that chaff off because that's what's what's bitter with the curly doc slash yellow duck i grind everything up together chaff and all and he gives you roughage oh yeah i picked 30 gallons out of one field didn't touch it all that make it easier this makes really good uh cake oh yeah tommy had a case two cases actually where doctors in the 1930s sent children to him with eczema so bad from head to toe that they said if you don't if you can't do something they're going to die and they survived you always use it on a small area first make sure no sensitivities and then just keep a thin coat several times a day okay i got eight more going if anybody wants them well you're welcome i hope you like it now if anybody wants to try some straight hickory nut syrup there's a little bit in there try that put that on the pancake that's hickory nut syrup that's in the batter but that wouldn't hurt to put some on there and that's the chaga syrup that's the chaga and you take the the mushroom itself the fungus rather and boil it until it makes coffee yeah you don't use it so one oh okay um and you just boil it and actually when it's done you can dry and boil it about five or six more times and keep using it until it finally quits giving up its color and flavor you're still good to go i'll go online just don't fall for the siberian chaga thing because it's pure and it's the wild it's the best chagas chaga wherever it comes from and don't get chaga that's been cleaned where they take that black crust off that's where a lot of the medicinal value actually is so if you take that off you're not getting really what you need you're getting lesser quasi 12 to 20 a pound is fair price just throw in some water and boil it as i say down alabama boil the hound out of it and until it's as dark as you like your coffee and then add whatever sweetener you use and you're done now i make a double extract when i do medicine because i pull out water-soluble and alcohol-soluble chemicals but as a general beverage you just boil it and if you're just going to use it as a general anti-cancer thing or a maintenance you can just make tea out of it and drink the tea every day but if somebody's got an active case of cancer i'd do the my double extracts if they want to try it all they gotta do is contact me and i don't charge for my services for people with cancer and i'll ship it to them free got my cards on the table over there on the table sorry no i get it i gotta clean up here anyway uh a plant called winter huckleberry also called sparkleberry farkleberry uh i've that i use it for that in sugar issues really really effective made is just made into a tea into a decoction it's to me it smells like bold cabbage when it's done but you know and i don't like that but it's boiled cabbage but it's very very faintly a boiled cabbage which winter huckleberry look up it's vaccinian arborescens or arborines and um it's a pretty big size hickory i mean a huckleberry the berries get ripe in the fall no you're using the branches but that's when that's when you can harvest the fruit is in the fall that's when they get ripe instead of in the spring and summer huh vaccinium arborescens or arboren's one or the other but if you look up winter huckleberry or sparkleberry vaccine is just a vaccine in v-a-c-c-i-n-i-u-m and then put tree huckleberry or sparkle berry it'll it'll come up all right now i cooked a slaved over a hot griddle down i need to eat these these are the nice fresh these are the nice fresh ones too huh good isn't it oh uh i didn't give these away first come first serve well no because everybody's scattered if y'all want it fight over it this way i don't have to take it back now the yellow root looks a little puny this one's real healthy these are not so much but they'll come back a lot of it is yeah what's that for oh okay thank you yeah if you go to my website get my card go to my website and it's under the store resources i think resources store and it's and it's there yeah just go to the southern herbalist.com you're welcome hope you enjoyed it you

Channel: Homesteaders of America

Views: 566,070

Keywords:

Id: mXb0Mrt9snI

Length: 72min 33sec (4353 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021