Frugal Friday

[ecosophia]

Welcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed.

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

With that said, have at it!

Comments

Re: How to take an herb that tastes awful?

[(Anonymous)]

The best time to harvest a given herb from a physical plane perspective (as opposed to energetic or magical) depends on what part of the herb you are using (whole plant, leaves, flowers, roots, aerial parts, berries, bark etc). For a given part you want to harvest when the peak energy of the plant is in that part. For example, that means that now is a good time to harvest plants where the part you want to use is the root (e.g. elecampane, echinacea, oregon grape) because the above ground part of the plant is dormant.

If you are using the flowers (elder flower, calendula), you harvest them at their peak bloom. With California Poppy, you can use the whole plant, so I was taught to harvest at peak flower.

To learn all about this, I recommend Rico Cech's books Growing Plant Medicine, volumes 1 and 2. Each plant entry talks about when to harvest for what use. Some plants are harvested at different times for different uses like Elder flower and Elder berry.

Herbal medicine was the first useful skill I began to learn back in 2005 when I realized the world was in deep *&#$. The knowledge I have gained in that time has saved me an enormous amount of money. I avoided an ER visit recently when I cut my finger by knowing that I could stop the bleeding by packing the wound with fresh Yarrow, one of my must have plants.

Some people find this arena daunting because there is so much to learn. If you are so inclined, just begin with something you are drawn to.

Re: How to take an herb that tastes awful?

[open_space]

Thanks for the resource! If I ever get a magical garden, I will use this. It would be very interesting to experiment with the interface of both approaches, they ought to match somehow, or complement.

Re: How to take an herb that tastes awful?

[kallianeira]

Thank you.
You or someone else have mentioned Cech's books recently and they are on my must-get list. Most herb books are "nice", avoid a majority of topics and thereby don't address the real needs for knowledge to treat all types of ailment that we are going to be having to deal with, as you perceived, by ourselves. These in contrast sound like a serious resource.