This Week's Herbal Experiment--Witch's Brew and Keeping it Simple

Today is a foul cauldron of a storm day, sideways sleet, snow higher up, appointments cancelled. But yesterday, we enjoyed crisp, blue skies and the odd juxtapositions of icicles and seeping water on the bluffs falling to our beach.

We're caring for our neighbors' dogs (and chickens, turkeys, ducks; their horses may end up back here too) and these two girls had a great time running on and through the ice and ocean water: they're apparently impervious to the cold.

 Here's another view of our home from down on the beach. I hope you can see the red mountain ash berries on those trees right at the edge.

For this week's herbal experiment, a witch's brew seemed in order, given my upset stomach of earlier in the week and my self-acknowledgment as a witch on Hallowe'en (albeit disguised as a blonde)!

I decided to make a potent combination of herbs to knock out the upset stomach on many fronts. Here's the formula I used:

3 tb nettles

3 tb peppermint

3 tb chamomile flowers

2 tb lavender flowers

2 tb fennel seeds

2 tb milk thistle seeds

2 tb pau d'arco 

1 tb cinnamon chips

1 tb fresh chopped ginger

1 tb triphala powder

1 tb kelp powder

I wanted to soothe the discomfort (peppermint, chamomile, fennel, cinnamon, ginger, lavender). I wanted to cleanse (milk thistle, triphala, nettles, pau d'arco). I wanted it to be somewhat nutritious also (nettles, kelp). The cinnamon, lavender and peppermint were also intended to make it taste at least somewhat ok, given the potent medicinal combination. 

I combined this with two and a half quarts of water and made a reduced decoction, which meant slow simmering until the volume of liquid was reduced by half. 

The flowers and greens all looked so pretty in the water.

 But the end product wasn't so pretty.

Man, that stuff was nasty! Even with some sweetener added! It's true, I drank about half of the reduction right away, and part of the point of making a reduced decoction is that you can consume smaller doses. I drank it late afternoon, and was definitely better by the next morning--but I might have been better by then anyway. 

So, not an unmitigated success by any means. I'm sharing it anyway, because it taught me something. Several things, actually. For one, decoctions may be better in smaller doses. For two, using every cleansing herb in the cabinet, and every carminative herb, etc, may be overkill. I might have been much better off with a simpler peppermint/ginger/milk thistle combination (or nettles, pau d'arco, cinnamon, lavender) rather than trying to get everything in. For three, if you're going to use triphala at all, make it a tiny proportion of the entire brew, and expect it still to make the whole thing nosepinchingly bitter.

But perhaps the most important lesson of all is that it's ok to fail at this! I wouldn't have put together a brew like this for another person, experimentally--I'd have done something that I knew would both work and taste good. It's ok to experiment on ourselves, so long as we know the potency of the herbs and don't use them inappropriately. This is how we learn.

I'm excited to be back in the business of teaching myself to be an herbalist, although I'd definitely adore the opportunity to study with someone who really knows their stuff.

I'm back on the "learning from failure and being ok with it" theme, folks! Any good stories you'd like to share?