Tag: natural remedies (Page 1 of 3)

How to Make Lavender Glycerite

June 7, 2020 / Lindsey / 2 Comments

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In the evening time before bed, after I take all my nasty-tasting pills and potions, I squeeze a dropperfull or two of my homemade lavender glycerite onto my tongue and savor the delightful sweet floral lavender taste.

It’s a wonderful way to wash a bad taste out of your mouth and reward yourself for getting all that stuff down the hatch. It will often physically bring a smile to my face, it tastes so wonderful!

It’s very simple to make, and lavender season is upon us.

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(This really is an easy project, but if you don’t have access to fresh lavender, may I suggest the absolutely heavenly Rose Petal Elixir made by Avena Botanicals with roses from their own biodynamic gardens. They also sell a Lavender Glycerite which I haven’t tried.)

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Lavender Glycerite

Ingredients:

Fresh lavender flowers and flower buds

Pure food-grade vegetable glycerin (widely available online or at health food stores — vitacost.com is where I usually get stuff like this)

Supplies:

Glass jar with lid

Mesh sieve or funnel

Coffee filter

Clean dropper bottle (1, 2, or 4 oz size)

What to do:

1. Remove most of the stems from your lavender, and chop up the flowers and flower buds with a knife.

2. Place the chopped lavender into your glass jar. (In the pictures above, I’m using an 8-oz wide mouth Mason jar.)

3. Pour vegetable glycerin into the jar until it completely covers the lavender. Stir a few times to release any big air bubbles and top it up with glycerin if needed. Be sure all the lavender is submerged.

4. Screw the lid onto your jar, then label and date it with masking tape and a sharpie.

5. Place the jar into a dark cupboard where you will see it often…

6. Shake the jar once a day, or every couple days.

7. Let it sit in the cupboard at least 2 weeks (I leave mine 4-8 weeks).

8. When you’re ready to strain, place a coffee filter inside a mesh sieve (or funnel). Place the sieve over a bowl, a measuring cup, or another glass jar. Pour the lavender glycerite into the coffee filter and when it has all been filtered, wash your hands and gather the filter around the remaining lavender and gently squeeze to extract the rest of the glycerin. The finished lavender glycerite will look like honey — a light amber color.

9. Pour an ounce or two of your strained glycerite into a dropper bottle to keep in your bathroom. If needed, transfer the rest into another glass jar (or the same one that’s been rinsed and dried), cap it, label it, and date it.

10. Transfer the jar into the refrigerator to store it. It will keep at least a year, and probably significantly longer.

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Make a Fruit Fly Trap!

August 11, 2012 / Lindsey / 2 Comments

Is your kitchen full of fruit flies?

Try this handy little trap:

1. ) Roll a piece of paper into a cone shape, and secure with tape. The opening should only be large enough for a fruit fly to fit through.

2.) Place a piece of fruit into a tall jar.

3.) Set the paper cone into the jar. Tape the paper to the jar so the flies can’t escape around the edges.

4.) The flies will fly in, but can’t get back out. Release them outside, or dream up your own creative way of getting rid of them.

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Nettles!!

May 1, 2012 / Lindsey / 3 Comments

As I mentioned in this post, I found nettles! This was really very exciting because now I can collect my own instead of continuing to purchase my usual dried nettles for tea. And for the very first time, I had freshly cooked nettles and they’re amazing! A mild and pleasing taste. I cooked them in some salted water, and ended up drinking every last drop of the broth too — it was thick and delicious — almost meaty. They’re so good for you, too. High in protein, vitamins, and minerals.

Cooked nettles

Nettles & white beans

And I love nettles tea because it works better than an antihistamine pill for me. This was an accidental discovery; I’m allergic to bee stings, and I get honeybee and ‘mixed vespids’ venom immunotherapy shots every 6 weeks so that my body gets desensitized to the venom. Normally I get a big, itchy 3″ wide welt on each arm where I get the shot, and I take a Claritin pill the morning of the shots to help counteract that. However one day I had some strong nettles tea before my shots, along with the pill. No welt! No redness! No itchy! At first I didn’t realize it was the nettles, until another time when I’d forgotten to take the antihistamine pill and only had nettles tea, and same thing! No welt. Finally I realized it was the nettles tea, and the pill wasn’t even really necessary. So now I make sure to have nettles tea before my shot, and every day for at least about a week afterward. It’s quite magical. If you have seasonal allergies (mercifully, I don’t), you might try nettles tea!

My favorite nettles tea:

2-3 Tbsp dried nettles

~1/2 Tbsp dried mint

~1/2 Tbsp dried lemongrass

In a mug, pour 8-12 ounces boiling water over herbs, cover, and steep about 15 minutes.

So anyway, back to the fresh nettles. I couldn’t believe my luck with finding patch after patch of them, and while I often travel with an empty plastic bag (you never know what you’ll need it for!), I didn’t have one with me on the walk. However my mom had packed snacks in a bag, and thank goodness she had! Precious, precious bag. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to collect any. Disappointing!

I had an empty little sandwich baggie which I used as a glove to pick them, though still got plenty of stings on my wrists. (The stinging compounds are easily neutralized once the nettles are either boiled or dried to a crisp.) I stuffed the bag full, and also took some plants with roots and have planted those in pots outside, hoping they’ll decide it’s a satisfactory location to grow. I’ve read that nettles are particular about where they grow; you might think you have the ideal location for them — but they have the last word.

Do you cultivate your own nettles? Have any growing tips?

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As you can see, the living room was full of nettles for a while. I ended up getting about 3 gallons, dried.

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Indian Summer Watermelon Slushie

October 3, 2011 / Lindsey / 2 Comments

There are still watermelons at the farmer’s market, and the weather is still hot enough to crave them!

My Hubby’s sweet sister created this awesome recipe and sent it to me a couple weeks ago. We love it and have been making batch after batch of it! You don’t even have to be a watermelon lover to enjoy this. I’m not; they’re usually too sweet for my liking. But this…this is just right. It’s so refreshing.

I should add, too, that this is a really good drink for someone who’s sick; it’s very light and hydrating, which is important when you don’t feel well enough to drink or eat much of anything. It’s like a popsicle only better for you! Right now, this slushie is sometimes the only thing that my incredibly delicate tummy will tolerate. I’ve been so grateful for it!

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Watermelon Slushie

3 cups of watermelon chunks, seeds removed

2 large (or 4 small) strawberries, fresh or frozen

7 raspberries, fresh or frozen

6 ice cubes

1 cup water (or less for a slushier consistency)

squeeze of fresh lime juice (optional)

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Remove the seeds from your watermelon. (Don’t worry, this is a quick task if you cut the melon into smaller chunks first. I like to save the seeds & dry them on a plate to snack on later). One time, I didn’t remove the seeds before making the slushie. It makes for a richer, thicker (and even more nutritious) slushie, though the seeds definitely reduced the sweetness. I do like the slushie better without seeds. 🙂

Blend everything till smooth. If you’d like a slushier consistency, reduce the water, or add more ice. Also, it’s easy for the strawberry flavor to overpower, so if that happens, just add more watermelon.

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Philosophy Friday: Doing Our Best In a Complex Situation

September 17, 2011 / Lindsey / 11 Comments

Hope you’ve all had a good week… I can’t believe how quickly it went! For me this week has been full of emotion, some very low points, and a fair bit of hand-wringing. I haven’t been feeling well…I’ve been definitely-not-right for a year and a half, but especially sick for the past 5 months with fevers almost every day, painful lymph nodes in every corner of my body, and running at only 25% (or sometimes 5%) of my usual energy — plus so much other stuff too. Sometimes I’m so incredibly sick I can hardly open my eyes, and ‘whatever it is’ has slowly been progressing, affecting new parts of my body in creative & alarming ways. Watching my previously excellent health pretty much fall apart has been (and is) a scary, unsettling experience. And even after lots of tests done on (so far) 26 vials of blood, it’s still a mystery because it’s unclear whether there are two separate things going on, or if it’s all part of the same issue.

My head has been over and under and around ‘this thing’ so many times…churning on it, studying it, considering what to do about it, weighing western approach against eastern approach…and ultimately feeling paralyzed and unable to see how best to address it. We each have our values, don’t we… the values we create during times of wellness & happiness. I value alternative medicine…and prefer & feel most comfortable in that arena. Though, I pick and choose carefully in that area…having observed that there are indeed diamonds out there, but there’s also a lot of rubbish.

But desperate times call for desperate measures, and I’ve had to compromise my preference for natural-only. Or…is it a compromise? Maybe it’s just a value adjustment, based upon the new information I’m gathering as I’m navigating this new territory — because I’ve never been this sick before. And I find myself glad to have the technology of western medicine to (hopefully) find out what’s up (or at least rule out what’s not up) — and at the same time, repeatedly hoping that I’m doing the right thing by following this particular route at this particular time.

It’s a complex situation. And I’ve finally decided that in this case, what I feel best with is a combination of western & eastern. Western, because I feel like that’s what’s called for in this extenuating circumstance. And eastern as a supplement — to support my body in the best way I can while it’s trying its hardest under these less-than-ideal conditions. (Excellent nutrition is a big part of this!)

And so today I had a full-body CT scan — from mid-head to pelvis. It’s the next step in trying to suss out what’s causing all this. I’ve been having trouble settling it in my mind…knowing it’s a lot of radiation on my sensitive body. But also knowing full well that it’s a risk-benefit thing — and the benefit outweighs the risk right now. Part of the CT experience was drinking 32 ounces of barium, as well as receiving two separate doses of contrast dye through an IV during the scan. And a week prior, I had an MRI with gadolinium contrast through an IV. Gadolinium is on the Periodic Table… and is not something I want in my body for any longer than necessary!

Readi-Cat barium drink, (c) The Herbangardener

Readi-Cat, drinkable barium. Cute name & I actually liked the taste! But it made me nauseous.

The assortment of heavy metals and dyes also make me feel quite ill for the rest of the day after receiving them, so the best thing I can do for my body is help it get that stuff flushed right out. So today, I came home and started chugging water with fresh lemon juice…and 8 hours later now I’m finally starting to feel less yucky. I also juiced a ton of cilantro (and have been eating heaps of cilantro lately anyway) along with parsley and garden celery, since it’s been found that fresh cilantro binds really well to heavy metals in your body and carries them safely out. I’ve also been drinking my beet kvass tonight, since that’s a great blood purifier…in addition to eating my everyday fare of lots of fresh, organic fruits & veggies, which is pretty much all my body wants & can tolerate right now. (Oh and some chocolate too, ya know…for medicinal purposes only, of course!)

Cilantro, parsley, & celery juice

And for the radiation, I’m thankful to have my kit of Australian Bush Flower Essences because I mixed up the Electro essence blend right when I got home. Interestingly, this blend was used in a clinical trial of bodily radiation levels in children affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Radiation levels were measured before and after 2 weeks in a control group, plus a group that received spirulina, and in a group that received the Electro flower essence blend. After 2 weeks, the radiation level in the control group decreased 3.5% and the spirulina group decreased 25.3%, while the radiation level in the Electro group decreased 43%!

Anyway, I guess it’s all a big learning experience (like everything else!), resulting in a constant stream of adjustments being made to our inner selves along the way…forcing us to re-evaluate ourselves and our values and the things we previously thought we had “all figured out.” And ultimately we gain compassion and perspective and first-hand experience, along with plenty of opportunities to practice surrender and acceptance. And we find out, again, that things are never really black-and-white once you’ve actually experienced them and put your previously-perceived values to the test.

This is an intense one…and I have to wonder what the ultimate purpose of it will be. My fear is that I’ll feel like this forevermore. I probably won’t, but at least I hope there’s a higher purpose to it all!

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