Latest Blog Posts
Not all herbs live on the land! This week we’re featuring kelp, bladderwrack, and all the brown seaweeds. Minerals in Kelp Seaweeds are superfoods, if anything is. All seaweeds used as food or medicine are extremely mineral-rich, often carrying a complement of minerals and trace elements not found easily in land plants. Seaweeds are renowned…
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Our first book is here! We’re so excited to present our first book, and appropriately for a first book, it starts at the beginning! Herbal Medicine for Beginners is a great book for folks who are completely new to herbalism – and our students have said that it’s also a great, concise reminder of how to keep it…
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The St. John’s Wort card in my oracle deck says: blooming at the height of summer, St. John’s Wort is like solar batteries, ready aid when everything is grey and damp. St. John’s Wort has been touted for depression, but its function is more about the gut than the brain – and so are our…
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Winter is the Fennel time of year! Fennel is a warming herb that improves digestion and liver function, which is why you see it in recipes for sausage and other heavy or fatty meats. Fennel is particularly suited to the cold, stagnant digestive conditions that we see so commonly in our culture today. A lot…
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If you listened to last Friday’s podcast, you know that Ryn was sick last week with what we affectionately called the “Lung Crud Plague”. If you’re also sick with lung crud, Elecampane is the herb for you! But before we talk about the why, let’s just get this right out in the open: Elecampane tastes…
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Ashwagandha is one of my very favorite herbs: it supports the adrenals and other endocrine organs, improving the function of those organs and helping the body to better cope with stress. You’ve probably heard about the “HPA axis” – which is the connection recognized between the hypothalamic, pituitary, and adrenal glands. But I submit that…
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Pain in your toe? It could be gout. This relatively common issue presents as recurrent attacks of acute inflammatory joint pain. The big toe is the most common site of pain – up to half of all gout cases only show up there. What is Gout? Gout is caused by the buildup of uric acid…
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Hawthorn is often categorized as an “exhilarant” in old herbal literature – strongly uplifting to the spirit. Along with Rose, Vanilla, Vetiver, and others, Hawthorn is a great “rescue remedy”. Whether it’s sadness from a deep loss or just baked-on, caked-on gloom and doom, Hawthorn can help. I love to make an elixir of Hawthorn…
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OMG, these are delicious! This all started because I saw a recipe for Paleo Pecan Bars, and I was excited! Delicious, I thought! But there was a lot of stuff in there that just wasn’t food, in the name of “it’s not really sugar”, and there was a ton of cream and butter – two…
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Self Heal, Prunella vulgaris, is one of those plants that seems able to do everything. Writing in the 16th century, Gerard said that no herb equals Self Heal for healing wounds, and a whole host of other things. Self Heal is used all over the world – by Native Americans, Europeans, and all across Asia,…
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