Wild plant medicine was the original source for today's modern medicine. If you're in the mood to explore medicine's roots, it's easy to make a sortie into your local fields or forests and find wild plants for medicine. But, it's vital that you're positive about what it is you're getting and use it.
Instructions
1. Familiarize yourself with what sort of wild plants might be good for medicine in your area. Your local bookstore or library is a good place to start, as are local plant clubs or societies and herb shops. The Altnature Medicinal Herb Uses and Picture Gallery is another useful place to look.
2. Pick a likely place. If you're targeting specific herbs your research from Step 1 will tell you where to look, because certain herbs like to grow in certain conditions. If you're looking for plantain, for example, you're most likely to find it at the edges of disturbed ground like driveways, yards, hiking trails and forest paths.
3. Stroll through the area you picked. It's best if you can take somebody with you that has experience in identifying wild plants for medicine; if you can't, at least take a plant field guide with you to be sure you get the right plants.
4. Pay careful attention to every characteristic of the plants you harvest. Are the leaves fuzzy on top or underneath? Are they veined? Are there chambers in the roots or not? Does anything look unusual about the plant at all? If you're not sure, do some more research or take a single specimen of the plant to your mentor for clarification.
5. Take only what you can use, and never harvest everything from a group or clump of plants. Remember that the plants have to be able to propagate at the end of the year and that you're not the only one benefiting from them.
Tags: wild plants, plants medicine, wild plants medicine