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 
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.
I don’t need all three however, so if you want one, send me $30 via paypal and I’ll ship it off to you. Only two of you can take advantage of this deal. Most of that $30 will go into Canadian shipping costs, as these are heavy little units! If shipping ended up being more than $25, I’ll ask you to cover the rest via paypal again ASAP. $5 each is what I paid for them at the thrift store, although they look like they could sit in a museum case somewhere! The middle grinder is not for sale! That one is mine!
Speaking of which, we have leaves drying for use in a shampoo and for use in a water infusion that I’ll use when making the leave-in conditioner as well. Dried herbs are also useful in making an infused vinegar hair rinse.
I have an oil infusion gently boiling on the stove. The result will go into a facial cleanser/scrub. A pot of liquid glycerin soap is cooling on a back burner on the stove as well. It will be used in little amounts for shampoos, anti-bacterial hand soaps, and similar products.
Lifestyle changes are rarely free of charge. We had to buy garden gloves, because to this point we had never owned any other than those my daughter took to work all the time. The garden gloves are to allow us to pick stinging nettle for use in our hygiene products. Apparently you can eat nettle, but when I was out with my daughter gathering the other night, this is how I came home!
At the top, we found scrub everywhere and very little of the items we’d come to find. Eventually, we spotted a small burdock specimen and decided to pull out our plastic gardening spade to see if we could get at the root. When documentation you read says it looks carrot-like, they aren’t kidding! When they say the root could go down 2 to 3 feet, they aren’t kidding! What many sources fail to say however, is that the first almost foot’s worth is quite fat! My daughter dug down just below this tuber then used our tiny rose sheers to snip her way through the inch-thick root (the part the Japanese harvest to sell and cook) to remove the tuber. This took a bit of time when we realized we should head back before they close the parking lot gate where we left the van.
We got back down to our marker when Ashley discovered a whole stand of chokecherry! She began picking a number of sprigs as quickly as she could. As we speed-walked back to the van, I told her that anything she spotted ahead that she could grab before I got there, would go in the bag. So off she went! You might wonder why this article was started as if beginning a quest in a video game. Ashley kept remarking as we speedwalked back to the van, that she felt as if she was doing in real life what her characters did in her MMO’s (short for MMPORG or Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game). 
Apparently in her games, characters can be given quests where they need to gather materials before they can make things. Some games call these recipes, others call them schematics, etc. The character has to run around (and they literally run around, not walk) and when the player sees an item they need, they use in-game commands to tell the character to pick up the item. For some games, you select the item, for others, you choose a tool, then click on the item, for others, you merely come into range and the character picks up the item. So there was my daughter, running ahead of me, picking up what she could along the path, snapping up this and that on our list. Before we knew it, we saw the parking lot up ahead! Somehow, we made the trek back to the van in less than 25 minutes!
We had a good handful of narrow-leaf plantain, dandelion leaves and a couple roots, chokecherry, a burdock root, a couple burdock leaves and a couple small burdock heads. Ashley had grabbed a few clover heads along the way as well. We didn’t spot any chickweed or purslane, and cattails don’t grow along that trail either it seems. So we drove home with what we had.
Upon arrival at home, it was time to clean the greens, clean the roots, and learn what to do with the chokecherries. They literally look like tiny cherries WITH pits! I did some research and bookmarked a couple sites that shared recipes for chokecherry juice, jams, jellies, bread, muffins, etc. I need to get my hands on a hand mill of some type because dried chokecherry flour can be added to baking! I learned that you don’t eat this berry raw due to cayonogenic properties. You need to sun-dry or boil them to kill these properties. Our first foray into chokecherry processing then, became an infused vinegar salad dressing. The chokecherries ended up boiled twice as a result, first to mash them, second to make the salad dressing as the vinegar needed boiling. The leaves and bark make a nice tea according to some sources, so we kept the leaves and twigs to dry for that purpose.
It all started innocently enough. . . my daughter’s horse comes down with rain-rot on occasion and unless we want to pump her full of dewormer constantly, we had to come up with alternative methods to kill the fungal infection. Last year we had some success directly applying in alternating turns, tea tree oil and lavendar oil. This year, while walking through the “Made in Canada” bazaar downtown on Canada Day, we found a 
He suggested obtaining chickweed, plantain, burdock and optionally, violet and make a double-boiled oil infusion. We were to use the leaves of three of the plants and the root of the burdock. No turtle tongues were harmed in the making of this infusion. Promise!
Well, now it was time to see what we all thought of these plants. My daughter took the plunge first, trying out both broad-leaf and narrow-leaf plantain, and a succulent we discovered in a blog article the night before. She quickly made an additional discovery that many travelers face when eating foreign foods for the first time. Her stomach wasn’t used to the wild food and initially didn’t know what to do with it. A few hours later, it stopped feeling strange and she was fine. During her system’s recovery, I went next and made a tiny salad of dandelion heads, a couple dandelion leaves, and a few narrow-leaf plantain leaves (as that’s all that grows in our yard). I added a few rasberries and a bit of canned salmon, then used a vinegrette salad dressing. I LOVED IT! But then I had to remind myself that as a child, I used to nibble on clover tops, pine needles (which are also on one blogger’s edible plants infographic), and grass fronds. Back then I didn’t know pine needles were edible, so I chewed them for the flavour and spit them out. But my stomach was not anywhere near as upset as my daughter’s, and recovered faster from what little upset it did have. Clearly eating such things as a child had done something to prep my system that never left. Next came my son and our boarder. I made similar tiny salads for them and let them use the salad dressing of their choice. I was so excited to hear “not bad, it would taste better if it also had. . . /this needs. . . “. To me, that was a resounding success!