Living in a rural area with very little access to health care I feel that growing herbs for medicine is totally an essential task. So many of the herbs that were scattered throughout this land I brought together just outside my kitchen door where they are on hand at any given moment.
Today I want to talk about THREE of these herbs that are particularly important to me during the fall: Catnip, Rosemary, and Echinacea.
There is so much conflicting information about when exactly to harvest echinacea. Here in Argentina I have heard of herbalists who harvest year old plants, using the leaves, and especially the flowers as the base of their tinctures. Most North American herbalists put an emphasis on harvesting the roots for medicine once they have reached three years maturity.
Anyone familiar with herbalism will have heard of echinacea's use in supporting the immune system. I love that echinacea has broken into mainstream culture and has a reputation for healing, even among those that don't tend towards herbal remedies for their illness.
According to Alma Hogan Snell - an herbalist steeped in the traditional her Crow ancestry as well as a life-long student of "western" herbalism - echinacea root is very helpful in the case of snake bites. In her book "Crow Indian Recipes and Herbal Medicine" I read of how she re-habilitated a man who had been bitten by a rattle snake but was unwilling to go to the hospital. She washed the wound with echinacea liniment (a topical tincture) as well as administered the tincture orally with frequency. He recovered but, she suggests, that taking echinacea regularly and avoiding snake bites all-together is the best course of action.
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