Jean Rudd

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.

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.

I made some comfrey poultices for the freezer because my comfrey plant is (once again) bountiful!  The plant itself flopped over.  I think I have to divide it to get it back in control.

I harvested the good looking leaves and collected the other leaves & stems to use as mulch in the garden.  

When I harvest comfrey, I try to make as many poultices as needed for the year and I store them in the freezer. 2 people in my household regularly use them to help long-term deep tissue injuries. So I'll do 2 or 3 choppings during the growing season. Once I have good looking leaves, I chop them smaller and then blend them with some other ingredients.  This time I had solomon's seal root, so I added a bit of that before blending with some water.  Then I flatten the paste like a thick pie crust and freeze it.  Once frozen, I'll break it into smaller pieces and return to the freezer until they are needed.

Congratulations!  I love my echinacea.  I started with 2 transplants and now I give away divisions every year after I find some good roots for the medicine.  It loves it here in Colorado.  I'm pretty sure my 2 patches are spreading from seeds that fall from the flower heads which I leave up all winter because the birds love them.  Last year I made the seeds into Fukuoka seed balls, but I haven't seen if they worked yet.  Enjoy your coneflowers!

Button Tin!  I've actually had a button tin for many years, then got rid of it for many years, and now it's back due to an inheritance of buttons.  So I thought I would look for some more matching buttons to add to the tin.  Found some on some scrap fabric (formerly a well-loved baby jumper worn to shreds!)

Collected the 4 remaining matching buttons (one was a replacement that did not match) and they are now happily in the button tin.