Materia Medica INFUSIONS The Woodsman's Expectorant 22

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

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morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the pathfinder school what I thought we'd do today in our materia medica series is divert just a little bit from the norm of going out looking at a planar tree talking about the constituents of that plant and then talking about possible uses for that plant tree and divert ourselves today to actually making an infusion that's an expectorant which we'll call the woodsman's expector and we're going to use goldenrod for this infusion which is a very good antiseptic as well as an expectorant type plant it has a fairly long growing season so it's available for about seven eight months out of the year here in Ohio to be used but really the best time to use the goldenrod has an expected is when its flowering so you really only have about a five month period right there that you can use goldenrod which goes right back to what I said about the trees being a four season resource but for an infusion you want soft type plant matters you can use some routes for infusions but for the most part once you get to inner barks and routes you're gonna want to do a decoction so today we're going to talk about an infusion of goldenrod called the woodsman's expector stay with me one thing that we should understand is the onset of this infusion is that if uses are very powerful medicinal preparations for the woodsman for thousands of years people have been using simple infusions and decoctions to use medicinal properties of plants either internally or externally and it's only been recently within the last 100 years that we've got this big movement in the herbal industry to tinctures and refining the chemical properties within a plant and things like that and James green talks about that quite a bit in his book the medicine makers handbook and this is a very good book and I would recommend it if you're going to start making herbal preparations this book goes into a lot of in-depth study and discussion about all the different ways to prepare her so understanding that we have a very powerful action in an infusion the other thing that we need to think about is why infusions are so good and why we talk about them as being something that's so great for the woodsman well one thing is they're simple it doesn't take anything but the raw herb and hot water to make the infusion remember that once we synthesize chemicals from a planet to make a drug a pharmaceutical grade drug we basically are isolating one chemical from that plant or one constituent from that plant it's probably a better word that treats one certain thing and we're getting rid of everything else and plants are Nature's Way of giving you medicine and they balance themselves out within your body because they have lots of inner properties that we don't get rid of if we use them in their natural state that helped them to be more usable within your body and a good example of that would be something like aspirin where if you take aspirin a lot that's non buffered it can eat the lining of your stomach but willow bark which has the same chemical salicin that is refined into aspirin we can take willow bark to our hearts content with no side effects and that's the whole key to that refined drug scenario are the side effects versus the whole heard with few - no side effects and I think that's an important thing for us to understand but for us as woodsmen well we need to understand is that by using the whole plant we get the whole medicine and that's why we can take certain plants and use them for lots and lots of different things because there's lots of chemical constituents within that plant or lots of healing properties within that plant that may not only address one thing they address the summer and the goldenrod is a good example of that we're gonna use today because it's an expectorant it's antiseptic it's a styptic so it's good to stop bleeding on the surface of your skin if you have like capillary or bright red blood bleeding if you have dark red blood bleeding or heavy bleeding you want to go to a jar oh but understanding the different things that these plants will do for us allows us to utilize them as if we had a medicine cabinet in just a very few plants and again James Green talks about the very few plant theory in his book and I teach that in the Pathfinder system all the way back to when we developed phase one of the Pathfinder system we talked about learning eight plants very very well that are common in your area that have no poison look-alikes

and if you learn eight to ten plants that are local to you and I would say add five trees to that and you know them inside and out what you can use them for you've got a powerful medicine cabinet at hand as a woodsman to just walk out and pluck when you need it okay for any infusion you're really going to need two containers with lids you don't need one that you can boil water in and one that you can use to pour hot water over the herb whether you trap that herb in something like a bag or bandana or whether you just put it loose into the container so I've got two Bush pots here one bigger than the other and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use one Bush pot to get my water over the fire and I'm gonna use the other Bush pot to make my herbal so the bush pot that I'm gonna use to make my herbal I'm gonna set aside then I'm going to get my materials out here that I'm gonna use really quick to work on my herbal with I've got several goldenrod tops here and this is really what I want are the tops of this plant for something like this and I'm going to just cut them up as far as my patience will allow me to do it in other words there's no set rule to this part off line has to be but the more surface area I can expose in this plant the easier is going to be to draw out what I want from the point and that's important to understand so cut this thing up as fine as you can get your finds out of the way the tops are really what you're after you want to make sure anytime you pick a bunch of plants like this that you don't have any other plants mixed in because that can be bad news it can also give you big things happen to you that you didn't plan on happening and you don't understand why so it's really important you make sure you're only using the plant that you chose so that when you have reactions to the plant your body reacts to the plant you understand why it's doing that that's important all right so we can just get rid of the rest of this and this portion of a infusion is called the mark or decoction or a tincture this is called the mark and the minstrel is what we're going to use to extract the nutrients from the mark or the chemical properties the healing property from the mark in this case we're going to use water

once we've got our water on the boil and it's getting heated up we can just go through here and make sure that we've got this as finely chopped down as we can get it we're seeing bigger pieces in there we can break them up with our fingers what we're going to need to do with this we're gonna need to let this steep what that means is we're going to leave this pot away from the fire we're gonna bring the boiling water over and pour it over the mark and then cover it with a lid and let it steep for a certain contact time and that really depends on experience on your part but a good rule of thumb is 15 to 20 minutes 15 to 20 minutes you should have everything drawn out of that plant now but a couple of things you can do here to either make it easier hard if you're doing this on the fly you're doing it really quick you don't have a lot of stuff to play with you can just put your mark inside the pot pour it over the top of it and then strain it off into a drinking cup or something like that you could also wrap this in a material like a bandana tie it off and put the bandana in the pot pour the hot water over top of that and seal it in that way you don't have to strain anything off you can just pour liquid straight from the pot you could also use some type of a canvas bag like the ones that I've got in what I'm calling the woodsman's apothecary and we talked about that a little bit yesterday and what I did with that and again this is not a kit that I'd be carrying short term so in the short term I'd be doing something like this we're using a bandana but in a longer-term scenario I can make it a little bit better on myself or easier on myself by taking like a canvas reusable bag like this one that I can wash and filling this with the mark and using this as a tea bag to drop into the water and it doesn't hurt to just let that thing float on top of the water because this placement will soak that up and it will sink to the bottom that'll give you a pretty good indicator of hey I've extracted everything out of that hood that I'm gonna get out of it so you can do it that way as well there's really no specifics in it it just has to be pretty much the hot water has to contact the mark and it has to draw out the good properties within that herb that you want to ingest into your system again this is antiseptic and it's an expectorant so it's going to make you cough it's going to be an antiseptic in your throat your larynx and down into your dodj

system so that's a good thing because you want that and you could also just use it for a gargle if you have a sore throat because it was saying the septic properties so goldenrods a really really good plant to understand and it's really one of my top ten golden rods in the top ten of plants that I use a lot now let's get some hot water over there and pour it in

we just really want enough to cover the plant and then we want to lid on it okay so while we're steeping this herb in here let's talk a little bit about this woodsman is apothecary because we drug a couple items out of that we talked about we could use to make infusions and we also have honey in here so we could use that to sweeten this infusion so it's not so harsh when we drink it let's put it that way there's a goldenrod most green dry plants that have some astringency in them which is what makes this plant such a good stiff Nick is the tannin astringency of the plan most of those type of plants have a bite when you drink them and you can alleviate some of that with honey or sugar out of an MRE if you had it but in this case I'm carrying honey so I can use it the woodsman's apothecary is really not meant to be something that would use all the time it is a kit that we carry in a longer-term plan scenario that gives us some quick purples on the fly if we can't wildcraft we're supposed to wildcraft these herbs anytime we can to utilize them as fresh as possible and that's what we did with the goldenrod so in a scenario like this I'm going to conserve the resources that I would use normally from this kit I like the white oak bark and things like that that are already dried ground those are emergency items I'm saving those because I've got something right here

available that I can use for the exact same thing I might have to use a little honey out of here but I can replace that when I get back home from scouting the trip or whatever I'm doing and ready for the next time okay so now that we've let this infusion set for about 15 minutes we can go ahead and strain it off into a drinking vessel or cup you're going to drink about eight ounces of this three to four times a day the other advantage in my mind to something like a decoction or an infusion is that you're actually ingesting water at the same time you're trying to ingest the medicinal properties of this plant so you're hydrating your body which is very important especially with illnesses anyway and in any scenario that might become an emergency if you are hydrating you're doing something right so that's another side benefit of this drinking this infusion or a decoction of any sort is that you're hydrating your body at the same time you're trying to add medicinal values so now what we're going to do is we're going to treat this as if we were doing this in emergency and we're going to just take some kind of a t-shirt or a cotton rag and put it over a cup and we're going to pour our infusion into that and this filtration will just catch any of the flower tops and stems and things like that that might be in there still and you always have to kind of peek under there and see how cool you've got things as you go we're pretty full now okay so there's a full cup of strained infusion of goldenrod okay so one thing we should discuss real quick just as a side note is that once we get to the point where we understand the constituents of different herbs and what they'll do for us and for our bodies and we have picked our 10 and we know them inside now we can then begin to create formulas or triangle formulas as they were called to attack certain symptoms that we've got and in this case if we're trying to get rid of a cold scenario we've got a stuffy head we've got some mucus in there that we can't get out things like that what I would probably do is I would combine the goldenrod with mullin as well as yarrow and I would mix those three herbs in equal amounts most likely chop them up and add them to the pot about one cup of chopped herb to a half a bush pond water which is about what we give it a goldenrod and this is this is just a coca cup I'd like to use to focus stuff for measuring because I carry it a lot so I'll use a full cup oka cup as a measurement I used a kabocha guilt cup as a measurement and I use a Kotoka spoon as a measurement because I carry the guilt cup and the spoon inside my apothecary and I generally got the Kotoka cup on my adult somewhere or on my hammer sack so I use those as my measurement devices you can choose what you're gonna use for your own so in this case we took about a Kotoka cup of the herb the fresh herb - about a half of Bush pot of water and if I were going to make a triangle formula I would use equal amounts of those three herbs that we discussed the yarrow the Moen and the goldenrod to make that same one cup to a half bush pot and drink that is we're still pretty hot now goldenrods not too overly nasty it's definitely got a green taste to it like a for lack of a better word chlorophyll taste to it but it doesn't really have the after bite or the acridness of yarrow once you put yarrow into an infusion like this or bone set and you add something else to it maybe like Moen so that you raise your body's core temperature a little bit and help things flow then you are gonna have to do something to sweeten this up or you're gonna have a hard time belting it down for sure but with just the plain goldenrod it's not really that bad it's drinkable it's not the most enjoyable tea in the world but it's drinkable

and if you are experimenting with things like this which is what you should do if you're experimenting with a tea like this and you take gold around you really feeling fine and all of a sudden you start to get a runny nose or something like that and some mucus that you might add in your head is getting broken down and liquefied it's probably the goldenrod doing now so don't be alarmed folks one Dave Canterbury of self-reliance operators in the Pathfinder school and I appreciate you joining me today for a quick video on the woodsman's expectorant making a goldenrod infusion I appreciate your support

I appreciate your views I thank you for anything you do for school or family important business follow our sponsoring instructors affiliates and friends and I'll be back to another video as soon as I can thanks guys