Another season of foraging is just around the corner. With only three ingredients remaining in the list of wild plants we wish to sell in our wild-crafted tea blends over at Ashtree Wildcrafting, we are already thinking of how we will continue to bring locally foraged, wildcrafted loose leaf tea to market. At worst, we will be stuck with craft fairs and online. At best, we will earn enough to purchase business licenses and get our products into local stores.
With organic and non-GMO being the current fads out there, sometimes claims cross my screen that haven’t been thought through too well. For example, a new hair care company is claiming that you take care what you feed your body, now do the same for your hair. The only issue with that statement however, is that by feeding your body correctly, you are, by extension, also feeding your hair by giving it the nutrients it needs to grow. Perhaps I am one of the few people out there who have noticed that anytime I start eating better, my hair gets thicker and longer, faster. Less stress also helps the hair grow better while more stress causes me to start losing hair. Needless to say, with how stressful 2018 was for the latter half, I am currently relieved that my hair is on another thicken-and-grow stage with very little being lost to the brush now.
Can you feed your hair with shampoo and hair care products? Most hair care products are unnecessary and contain chemicals you don’t want anywhere near your body. Those ingredient lists are almost too tiny to read on purpose, and when you can read them, many of the ingredients are on the banned-but-allowed-under-a-certain-threshold list on the Canadian government website. It has been the experience of my daughter and I, that making our own shampoo and conditioner eventually reduced to shampoo and an Argan oil blend as needed. The oils and the castille soap are purchased at the store. However, we infuse the water with a blend of herbs that we’ve harvested from the forest and meadow. These herbs treat the scalp more than they treat the hair, which is necessary due to my daughter’s flaky skin issue on her head. Nettle for example, does almost as good a job as Head and Shoulders in treating dandruff. The high Vitamin E content of the Argan oil blend feeds the skin directly as well. Mint, Dandelion, and Burdock have anti-inflammatory properties that calm the scalp as well. The recipe we use calls for a tiny bit of olive or jojoba oil, so we infused some olive oil with a similar mix of herbs, swapping out the mint for plantain.
These herbs help the skin of the scalp to function better, resulting in healthier roots for our hair. Researching shampoos and conditioners led us to believe that it would roughly a month before our hair stopped looking limp and oily all the time. For us it was the better part of 6 months to get past that phase depending on the season of the year (seasonal changes can result in brief bouts of ongoing oiliness), and another year and a half before we both began noticing our hair getting thicker, healthier and longer.
It is important to remember that once your hair leaves the skin and flops around on your head, the part you brush and wash is actually dead. The roots in the skin follicles are what you are feeding whether directly through the skin itself, or via your diet and lifestyle. Having said that, Plantain and Burdock aid in darkening your hair colour, while Dandelion aids in lightening it. Needless to say, the streaks my daughter gets in the summertime don’t go away half as quickly, and her un-died balayage treatment in the lower half of her hair sticks around throughout the year now.
Two-thirds of the way through our first year or so of making our own shampoos and conditioners, we began to discover we didn’t need the conditioner as often. For the past year we haven’t used any conditioner save for the occasional squirt of Argan oil rubbed between our hands to touch up the ends of our hair or a squirt along the part on top to keep the skin from drying out. This has led us to another conclusion, that the hair-care industry has largely manufactured its own market.
Studying the origins of hair care as we know it in the modern-day, led us to discover that the lie was perpetrated that your hair was greasy and needed cleansing. That was followed up by, your hair is brittle and too wispy, and full of knots, tame it with conditioner. The shampoos that were made commercially were responsible for the brittleness and the development of knots. Both my daughter and I have long hair by today’s standards, and neither of us are using conditioner now, even of our own making almost 3 years later.
One of the things that you will be taught if you take a marketing course, webinar, or spend time educating yourself on the topic via articles, books, etc, is that if you have a product for which there is no existing market, create it! You create your market by creating the problem that your product will fix. You then tell people they have this problem and that you have the solution for it.
This wasn’t just done with shampoo and conditioner early on, it was also done with deodorant and antiperspirant. As those have aluminum in them, we are now finally experimenting with homemade deodorants that will replace the commercial brands. A few years ago, I began only applying the commercial stuff a couple times a week because what I was buying had long periods of active behaviour. The latest commercial antiperspirant in my drawer says it will last up to 90 hours!!! It’s also motion-activated, so I would apply it on Monday and find myself fighting with the soap to get it off on Thursday before I shaved or it would gum up the razor. However, even with the slowed pace of application, I am having to use a Ph-rebalance solution first, because the deodorant we made was causing me to rash out. This rashing is normal when moving from chemicals to natural, but the Ph-rebalancer aids in the transition, and is to be used anytime the homemade deodorant causes rashing in the future. Homemade deodorant has baking soda if you can’t afford Bentonyte clay. Some recipes combine the two, or use corn starch. Ours uses corn starch and baking soda to reduce the environment necessary for bacteria to grow, but because baking soda does this via its alkaline nature, the need to rebalance your skin’s PH balance will crop up from time to time. My son and I are having to start with the rebalancer. One source said that for some people, that’s all they will ever need. We’ll see how this experiment goes. The skin’s pores need to a) unclog from years of being deliberately clogged, and b) calm down and not work has hard as they used to, to do the same job of removing impurities from the body.
But the point is that in an effort to create markets and sales for products we never needed, companies have created problems we didn’t know we had and have sold us the solution. We only make lifestyle changes in this house when it fits within our budget to do so. As we’ve noted in the past, we are saving quite a bit of money not buying commercial hair care products, toothpaste, and now deodorant. We do buy the castille soap, our carrier oils that fit our budget, the baking soda, etc. But we forage for the herbs we put into these products.
Overall, we are healthier for the changes we’ve made, including our hair.
I like to use chokecherry in making vinegar for salads, pancake syrop, and using the leaves, dried crushed berries, and bark in 
Foraging in my part of the world has received quite the setback thanks to a very wet spring. The plantain plants are only now in enough abundance to start harvesting. Wild strawberries are several weeks behind as well. Domestically, we were blessed with a huge amount of Lovage, a cousin to the celery only stronger in flavour. I managed to dry and crush most of the leaves to make a very nice celery spice! After being given some salt, I intend to take some of it and turn it into Lovage celery salt.
We were also given some very nice Rhubarb that has already made one beautiful batch of pancake syrup and seen entrance into batches of scones and pancakes themselves. I plan to make several more batches of the syrup as that will save money having to buy it at the store. Not only will it save money at the store, it will cut down on the chemicals and preservatives being ingested as well.
Sometimes doing things yourself is not always a money-saver, healthier perhaps, but sometimes more expensive. Around this house, we are about both saving money AND eating healthier! So being able to make celery salt without the additives and make syrop without the extra ingredients as well, hits the best of both worlds. Some of my readers might laugh, but I’ve decided to ensure I have enough sugar for baking, cereals, pancake syrop and a pine needle syrop intended for lung ailments. I therefore divided up my current sugar stores into several containers!
We have wild parsley growing up in the hills and have made two harvests so far. One has been nicely crushed into just under half a usual spice bottle. The other harvest still needs to be washed, dried, and crushed. It is currently in the back of the fridge freezing. Gotta love it when fridges do that, not merely their freezer boxes.
We also found Prairie Sage growing on the property where we live. It is a milder smelling sage than what is bought at the store, but still a pleasant smell. It’s first use has been in a bottle of home-made fly spray for the two horses.
Our dinner salads have finally come back full swing. Plantain, dandelion, false solomon’s seal, purslane, and finally chickweed and a ground vine for good measure. I need to make more chokecherry vinaigrette, but that won’t happen till we are harvesting those berries this summer. One major thing we learned over the winter months was that we hadn’t harvested nearly enough chokecherry to get us through till the next harvest season! We hope to change that sad state of affairs this summer! Nor had we harvested enough purslane! Needless to say when my daughter was asked to weed a garden at her place of work, she came home with a huge haul of both purslane AND chickweed! Both have been divided in half for either immediate consumption or drying and crushing for use in teas, baking and medicine.
Near our home and up a logging road, there are many chokecherry stands, so we hope to overrun the house with them until they are either boiled, frozen, or dried. Those same harvesting areas are also crawling in oregon grape, kinnickinnick, and surprisingly the wild strawberry as well. Our home could be very interesting as we end up with stuff drying all over the place at various times in the season.
Already, we’ve harvested, dried, and begun putting to use the nettle in our area. Nettle gets used in baking, tea, shampoo, conditioner, and its seeds are also a wild seasoning. Again, we almost didn’t have enough once I began using it in crackers and more teas, so we need to get far more this year to last through until next Spring.
Last November, we had to move yet again, for the second time in two years. When we were house-hunting, we reached a stage where it became humanly impossible to find a place to live. We made up an impossible list of needs and preferences, then laid that before God. Included in that prayer was the request to be near foraging grounds so we could continue our wild adventures. FrontcounterBC had shown us that our new location was near crown land and when the snows began to recede, we began exploring. That crown land is going to be a treasure trove of berries by the time June rolls around! Its crawling with Oregon Grape, Kinnickinnick and Chokecherry! We took a couple treks out to our old stomping grounds near the regional park and came home with one evening’s salad roughly. But those weren’t the biggest surprise.
The grasses and hillside around our rental property began to grow and lo and behold. . . we are LIVING in the middle of a foraging ground! Yarrow is growing in droves up on the hillside above us, along with barley (read quack) grasses and Arrowleaf Balsam Root. However, down around our portion of the yard we didn’t give the horses, we have dandelion, chicory, alfalfa, and another salad leaf I am still trying to identify, growing in such abundance that we can have several days’ worth of mixed green salads in maybe 10 minutes of picking! The alfalfa is blow-overs from the hay field below us. As we are up on a hillside now, the dandelions are slower in getting their flowering heads up, but I saw one today.
It’s nice to have the salads again as we discovered that winter salad teas, while they may have a similar nutrition count, are not as filling and were missing the phytochemicals that we need.
They come in all shapes and sizes. Some come with attitude, some come placidly. But ALL are at the mercy of critters, birds, and now US! Yes, the wild adventures continue as we realize summer is turning to fall in our neck of the woods, and we have to consider how we’ll continue trying to save money as plants wind down for the year.
After posting that meme, I turned on the oven the next day to actually dry them, then went to get my daughter from work. Upon entering the house, she promptly declared the place smelled like apple pie! I had neither seasoned, nor made apple pie, only dried the bearberries in the oven! So not only do these little things look, taste, bruise, and core like miniature apples, they also smell like them!
I sit here tonight drinking a test cup of nettle, dandelion, chokecherry leaves, semi-crushed dried berries and stems, and homegrown mint leaves and stems. I mixed one part dandelion to two parts of everything else more or less, and one part mint roughly. The resulting tea had a very grassy taste with a decidedly nettle scent, but with a bit of honey, tastes very mellow. Not bad as it grows on you. That mix of tea is now in a little labelled container up in the tea cupboard. There’s enough chokecherry crushed to make tea for a long time this winter! Nettle has a decent amount in the cupboard too, but I only had enough dandelion root for the blend I put together this evening.
The first bottle of infused shampoo is in the shower now as well, along with infused facial scrub and leave-in conditioner. We also made more of the chokecherry vinegar as well, meaning I need to pay back the VISA for yet more buckets of salad mix and salad dressing. I also need to pay back the VISA for a second bottle of shampoo as shortly, all of us will be using the same shampoo instead of different bottles. I’m looking forward to updating that spreadsheet needless to say!
Facial cleanser, shampoo, conditioner, tooth paste, window cleaner, bathroom cleaner, tea, salad dressing, salad greens. . . all a mix of foraging, vinegar, baking soda, and more liquid glycerin soap than I thought I’d end up making. . . eucalyptus oil thrown in here and there for good measure. . . eventually I’ll be able to clean both the house and myself using far fewer chemicals! The wild salads have more nutrition in them than what we were doing before as well. Add to that saving money on those aspects of grocery shopping, and it’s a win, win, win situation.
We did eventually get the nettle, bringing home a full grocery bag’s worth of leaves and stalks. Taking care to pick them clean of the stalks resulted in filling a salad spinner! The wet leaves didn’t take up much room, but as the leaves were spun dry, they fluffed out to fill the entire thing! I’m looking forward to making some infusions with the nettle, one of which I will try drinking as a way of assisting my adrenal health, hair, etc. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t know if we picked enough for the full experiment, or if it will be “as supplies allow”, but we’ll see.
