Jean Rudd

In my continuing saga of the echinacea that broke my irrigation system:  Short version -- I had to dig up some, so I harvested it.

As it turns out, there was a crack in the drip irrigation line that was below the surface and the echinacea was taking complete advantage and overrunning the patch.  I harvested with multiple purposes.  This will show the drying of leaves and flowers.  I also dried some roots, but they take longer to dry, so they are not shown in final jar.

When I started drying the herbs, I did not know that echinacea is more potent if it dries somewhat quickly, so I opted for low temperature (95 F) in a dehydrator.  The leaves and flowers only take a few hours this way. The roots will take 48 hours.

I will likely save the dried echinacea for when my elderberries are harvested to make a nice syrup for winter colds & flus.

So I harvested a bunch of echinacea today.  I'm drying some, making some tincture, decoction, and infusion.  Some of the harvest photos will be repeats.

I have some splendid patches of echinacea that I've been growing for awhile, trying to get some decent sized roots.  I leave the plants up all winter for the birds to eat the seeds and it seems they spill some seeds.  What started as one little plant now covers a 3' x 10' patch in one location.  Unfortunately, it's a bed of 10'x10' and half the bed has nothing that stays alive.  It looked like a watering issue.  I'm in Zone 5 Colorado, so I have a drip irrigation set up, even though echinacea is pretty hardy and drought tolerant.

Upon investigation, the drip line may be cut into or torn a bit by the roots.  It dives under the concrete walkway so it's hard to tell.  Right where it goes down a small clump of echinacea was growing over it, so it was time to harvest some to get to the root of my problem.

I dug up the clump (which turned out to be 3 small clumps) and prepared it for various futures.

The simplest and fastest is of course a n infusion.  I harvested leaves, flowers and roots, but only used leaves and flowers for this infusion.

Delightful.

Hose repair really is easy.  The hardest part is finding my screwdriver.  Don't worry -- I put it back in the right place when I was done.

I had a leaking hose end right at the spigot.  I had at some time in the past duct taped it.  But clearly, that wasn't enough.  So I broke down and bought the right repair part.

I sliced off the faulty end with a box cutter making a nice straight cut. Then shoved in the new brass end making sure to float the crimp over the hose first (not that I've forgotten to do that once before.)  I used the kind that had 2 Philips head screws to clamp down the metal crimp.  Voila!

Actually that won't be the end of the story.  I had a feeling more than one leak was there because water kind of spurts out from all over the frost-free outdoor spigot.  I had hoped the new hose end with a new washer inside the female end would fix the likely second leak.  It did, but there's one or 2 more leaks happening.  It looks like the vacuum breaker is leaking and probably the knob of the faucet.  But... at least my hose is not leaking anymore.

I love mint tea.  I have a crazy amount of mint in my suburban backyard.   It seems to love the clay soil.  I guess it loves every soil?

For this infusion, I crushed some mint leaves and threw in some lavender blossoms because I had tried them last week with my first ever lavender infusion!  It's a new favorite combination.

You'll notice my bunch of harvested mint is kind of large.  I like to harvest continually through the growing season and dry it as I go.  I'll clip a bunch and then use the best lower leaves which gives me a nice clean stem to tie up the dry.

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Note:  I accidentally submitted this twice!  Oops.  I have a lot of mint.

I set aside some comfrey leaves to dry when I was making the last batch of poultices.  I've never used dried leaves before (only fresh) so I'm looking forward to using them in something.  

I made a thyme infusion (hot) with fresh thyme.  It's very pleasant as an infusion, but I think I like the decoction better.  The infusion is milder but still has a lot of flavor.

We generally eat all meals from scratch so we have a lot of kitchen scraps.  I have a 1 gallon compost bucket in the kitchen that I take out to the chicken yard every day.  The gals love it.  

Typical scraps include peelings, vegetable ends,  leftover rice or pasta (a favorite that they fight over -- especially linguine -- the ladies chase each other and try to steal it because it looks like a worm) scrapings from the dinner plates, stale bread ends, etc.  I will put the occasional ground beef leftovers from the fridge if no human has eaten them.  The ladies love meat sauce.  Never poultry scraps.  I was surprised but they eat potato peels and onion skins -- at least one of my chickens does.  And another one loves banana peels.  I will put citrus in the bin which they don't touch, but I throw the bucket onto (or near) the compost bin which is in their run, so citrus gets the typical cold compost treatment.  I also put in the sprout leftovers in winter when I grow sprouts for us people but they can have the roots when we are done.

I made some composite pictures of the filled buckets, because we don't usually fill it.  Daily use can vary between 1/4 bucket to 1-1/2 buckets.  I conservatively estimated 1/3 bucket per day and showed a month of scraps to give probably 10 gallons total of scraps.

I made a delightful lavender infusion.  Clipped some blossoms along with some mint.  I had a honey jar that was finished except for the little bits you can't get out of the jar and I like to make herbal teas to use up the little scraps of honey.  After bottling, I've been drinking it over ice -- so cool and refreshing.

Lavender Mint honey Infusion.

I needed more comfrey salve because of an injury to a knee in my family.  So here is what I did.

I followed Rosemary Gladstar's book Medicinal Herbs which basically says to make a salve use 1/4 c beeswax to 1 c infused oil.

I'm going to show me making some more infused oil, but this time I want to try a solar 2-week infusion.  I had about 1/2 c left of my heat method infusion from an earlier bb for https://permies.com/wiki/164460/pep-natural-medicine/comfrey-leaf-infused-oil-PEP#2983329, so I'm using that to finish the salve today.

For the new solar infusion, I harvested and chopped more comfrey leaves.  Then put them in a glass jar and covered them with 1"+ of oiive oil.  The jar is labeled and sitting on a sunny window for 2 weeks until I strain it.

For this salve, I used the 1/2 c of infused comfrey oil from before and added 2 T beeswax pellets, then melted them on very low heat.  I took my chances and did not test the salve consistency but wildly poured it into a small glass jar with the confidence that Rosemary Galdstar gives you.  The texture is perfect.  I labeled the jar and will be delivering it tomorrow.

This was my first decoction.  Very exciting.

I cut the herb (thyme) and gently simmered it.  I tried to simmer in a double boiler at first because I was afraid of forgetting about it, but it didn't seem to do anything so I moved it to direct low heat.  That worked.  

It was very fragrant.  I had plans to just have a tablespoon at intervals, but I ended up drinking it all over an hour.