AN HERBAL MEDICINE CHEST

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"These plants are food, spiritual food, and they are medicine."—Black Elk

Part I

When we learned that Olivia Abel—one of the gardeners at MOTHER's Eco-Village—kept an entire supply of homegrown herbs to treat her family's common ailments, we were so intrigued that we asked her to share some of her herbal expertise. Here, then, is Part I of a two-part article, which we hope you will find as informative and useful as we have.

Olivia Boyce Abel

When I feel a cold coming on . . . or my little boy is hyperactive and needs soothing . . . or my husband has a muscle spasm in his neck, I go to my medicine cabinet and pick out the herbal remedy that will help my family back on the road to health. I find this very satisfying . . . primarily, of course, because it works. The herbal remedies I use have helped—and continue to help—my family.

My homemade treatments also provide me with another important satisfaction: I know their source. And, in the realm of herbs, this point isn't to be taken lightly. Many of the pesticides that have been outlawed in America are exported to Third World countries. There, they are sprayed on crops and herbs that we, in turn, import (and a majority of the herbs sold in our nation's stores do come from such countries). When you take an herb medicinally, you often ingest large doses of that plant, so it's vitally important to make sure the herb was not grown with the help of toxic chemicals. And the best way to do so is to grow it yourself.

You can put together an herbal medicine chest that will meet most of your family's common health-care needs by growing and drying approximately 20 herbs (some of which you'd probably raise for cooking purposes anyway). However, to make getting started in this endeavor easier, I'm going to focus on only seven of my favorite medicinal herbs.

And don't be put off by the suspicion that the process will be too difficult and timeconsuming. It isn't! If you harvest these herbs at the right time and dry and store them properly, they'll have a shelf life of up to two years. What's more, if you use these plants to make your own tinctures and salves, they'll last even longer. [EDITOR'S NOTE: Olivia will describe how to make herbal tinctures and salves in Part II of this article.]

HARVESTING

It's most important to always harvest herbs at the time that the particular plant segment you're after is at the peak of its medicinal power. Here are the general guidelines you should follow:

Leaves and stems: Pick these parts before the plant flowers. Do it in the morning after the dew has dried but before the sun has a chance to evaporate any of the plant's oils. (During our western North Carolina summers, that's usually around 10:00 A.M.)

Flowers: Harvest them before they reach full bloom and at the same time of morning as you'd gather leaves and stems.

Fruits and berries: Gather them at peak ripeness.

Roots and rhizomes: Dig these in the fall as the leaves start to change color, just after the plants' sap has returned to the ground.

Barks and twigs: Collect them in the spring as the first leaves appear and the plants' sap is rising.