6 Categories of Herbal Remedies: Herb

This is a post in the 6 Categories of Herbal Remedies series. To read the previous post, go here.
To start from the beginning of the series, go here.

The final category of herbal preparation we’ll look at is–the herb itself! You don’t need to make teas, tinctures, salves, whatever, in order to work with herbs. Just the herb itself is enough.

While there are two preparations on this list that require equipment above and beyond what you probably just have around, the others are easily done. We’ll review the equipment-heavy two first.

Powder

Powdered herbs are often a component of other preparations more than a stand-alone remedy, often mixed with honey for pastes or lozenges. They can also be added to nut butters to make ‘herb balls’, a bite-sized snack with tasty benefits. Recipes abound on the internet, especially for ones formulated to give an energy boost, but my go-to is for heart/grief support:

Heart-love Herb Balls

2 parts linden
1 part hawthorn
1 part rose petals
1 part cacao
1 part almond butter (or your nut butter of choice)
1 part honey

Mix everything together until it forms a thick dough, then pinch off chunks and roll them into balls about an inch across, roughly the size of a walnut. Then roll the balls in additional powdered herb, I like more cacao for this but cinnamon is also delicious.

These are great to have around especially for that disassociative sort of grief that leaves you feel unmoored from everything, gently enfolding you in protection so you can experience what your body is trying to show you.

To powder herbs, you need an industrial powdering device, like a grinder or pulverizer–your vitamix will not cut it. The instructions will vary by machine, but generally you will end up with a smaller bag of powdered herb than the bag of unpowdered herb you started with.

Capsule

Another remedy that comes out of powdered herbs are capsules. Making capsules yourself can be a massive money-saving strategy, and for some people, capsules are the only way they’ll take herbs.

There are several downsides to capsules though:

• encapsulated herbs tend oxidize quickly and lose their potency
• some herbs aren’t suited to capsules (like bitter herbs when tasting the bitterness is part of the medicine)
• requires special equipment to make and is still a finicky, time-consuming process

Making capsules is easy enough on the surface: pour powdered herb into the longer half of an empty capsule, then cap. Repeat so many times. This goes much faster with a capsule maker, but even with one you are likely to get powder everywhere, so put down parchment paper or something similar to catch the powder that misses the capsules. Both empty capsules and a capsule maker can be sourced and purchased online.

Poultice

A poultice is basically moistened herbs wrapped against some part of the body. While it comes to mind for first aid situations–stings, sprains, etc–poultices are also my favorite way to handle muscle strains and pains.

Both fresh and dried herbs work for poultices. I’ve used dried seaweed for ankle wraps to deal with sprains, and fresh plantain bandaged directly against a bee sting after I kicked a bumblebee barefoot when not paying enough attention to where I walked.

Poultices are quick to put together and can be transportable when correctly wrapped in place against the body.

Smoke

Cultures around the world use aromatic smoke for medicine, blessings, and cleansing. Whether you’re working with an herb you know well in other formats or working with an herb primarily through smoke, the sensory experience can help reinforce the fact that you’re doing something ancient and sacred.

Since I am not Indigenous, I don’t work with white sage or attempt to smudge things–this is not my place or practice. Instead I look to my own ancestors’ traditions for guidance on which herbs to work with in smoke, such as juniper, cedar, pine, and mugwort.

To make a smoke bundle: take cuttings, 6-10″, of fresh plant and let it begin to dry for two or three days–this helps prevent molding. Then take twine and wrap it around the herbs up the length and then back down, tying the twine at the beginning and end. Once the bundle is completely dry, you can ignite one end, blow it out, and let the smoke from the embers rise. When you’re finished, snuff the embers by crushing them against a heat-proof plate or into sand.

Food

Incorporating herbs into food is easily one of my favorite ways to work with herbs. Food as medicine is an herbal approach well-known in TCM and Ayurveda. By taking what we know about herbs and working them into our mealtimes, we can expand our understanding of medicine and acknowledge the ways in which our food might already be medicine!

A good curry, for instance, is going to have medicinal doses of several herbs depending on the recipe. Chicken soup has survived the broader (white) societal loss of herbal knowledge and is still understoodas a nourishing dish that ‘cures what ails you”. Lots of garlic ‘helps with colds’ and many people will avoid dairy when congested to avoid increasing mucous. This kind of food knowledge is still trickling down through families, which speaks to the incredible staying power of herb medicine.

If you’re new to these traditions of food as medicine, an easy place to start is parsley. A bundle of fresh parsley from the store is roughly equivalent to a multi-vitamin and much cheaper–one of my favorite go-to recipes is simply to chop a bundle of parsley and add it to scrambled eggs or a quiche. Another easy adjustment is to simply double the herbs called for in a recipe–use your judgment and taste preferences when increasing any spicy herbs! (Note: do not double salt in recipes, as that might render the resulting food inedible.)

Another easy, popular food as medicine is bone broth. Bone broth has been touted as a ‘super food’, but really it’s an ancestral food borne out of people’s desires to not waste what was available to them. This versatile broth can accommodate many different herbs–an adaptogenic bone broth is listed below.

• Bones from any of the following: chicken, beef, pork, lamb
• Juice from 1 lemon
• 6 cloves of garlic (or more!)
• 1 onion, sliced
• Vegetable scraps
• 1/4 c to 1/2 c each of medicinal herbs:
  • Astragalus
  • Codonopsis
  • Kombu or other seaweed
  • Thyme
  • Other culinary medicinal herbs as you see fit!

Cover with water in a large pot, bring to a boil and then simmer, covered, for at least 6 hours and up to 48 hours. Strain out the solid pieces, bottle, and store!

If you don’t eat meat, never fear–you can make delicious, nourishing vegetarian broths using mushrooms as the base, or fish if that’s an option for you.

That concludes both our herb section of preparations and our series on herbal remedies! Which remedy is your favorite? Which are you eager to try?

This is the final post in the 6 Categories of Herbal Remedies series. To start from the beginning of the series, go here.