Useful and Medicinal Trees of the Eastern Woodlands 3

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[Music]

afternoon guys

Dave Canberra at the Pathfinder school back with another segment in our medicinal trees of Eastern woodlands you know a funny thing happened here is just a lucky circumstance I guess all the way around not really for me but the next tree that I was gonna discuss with you guys in this series is gonna be willow for its pain relieving properties and you know willow was used especially white willow throughout the last few centuries as a pain reliever just like aspirin black will on the other hand which grows a lot prevalent in Eastern woodlands around water like the bark that I'm getting ready to harvest now was not so much used for pain relieving properties as it was for male libido and things like what viagra was used for in the 19th century but it has the same pain relieving properties does white willow bark but it has none of the side effects of aspirin so it's a very good handy plant and you could process it several different ways you can make a decoction from the bark which is what we're gonna do today or you can make a hirable tea from the bark depending on how strong you want it to be or you could make a tincture which means that you soak the bark the inner bark in alcohol for a given period of time and let those oils absorb into the alcohol strain it off and then you take it drop by drop and that's called a tincture we're gonna make a slight decoction out of it today and mix it with another plant that we'll talk about the reason I say this is kind of fortuitous yes you know I just got back from an Everglades advance class and obviously after four days of sleep deprivation food deprivation water deprivation your body seems to lose its immune system or its ability to fight off common germs and I got home and both of my grandchildren had the flu and now you know I woke up this morning and I'm aching all over taking all the way to the bone it hurts to walk it hurts to talk it hurts to move I'm getting a lot of chills so we're gonna mix another plant but I'm gonna talk to you about in a few minutes with the willow to make ourselves a concoction for influenza but let's get some of this willow bark harvested first and then we'll move on to the next plant stay with me boys so this is our willow tree and you know as you can see in the beginning of this film there's not a whole lot of bloom left on this tree because it's toward winter months so it pays you to understand the properties that what the inner bark looks like what the bark looks like what the branches look like in the wintertime where it grows understand where that resource might be this resources on the Pathfinder property I know exactly where it's at it's about seven or eight acres into the property around the pond but I know where it's at in time of need so now what I'm gonna do is I don't want to kill this tree so I don't want to wring the bark off of it but I do want some inner bark so I'm gonna have down into this thing a little bit and just take a strip off of here if I can just like that and you can see now I've captured that cambium layer of bark inside I've got that inner bark right underneath the outer bark and that's what I really want now I think it's back to my camp and I can dry this out and obviously I can use that inner bark for fire tinder as well but this inner bark is what I'm really looking for at this point this also makes very very good cordage but for now it's gonna make it pain relieving medicine for us [Music]

okay guys so let's talk about the other plant give you a pretty up-close-and-personal video of this thing a minute ago and this is called boneset okay and boneset is a plant that I would suggest you have in your top eight if you follow the Pathfinder system and you have eight medicinal plants and eight wild edibles that you keep in your toolbox for use all the time

boneset should be very high on your list of medicinal plants the reason for that is you know boneset is a plant that is used for influenza and malaria it's used for things that cause you to run a high fever this plant was found all over the eastern frontier in 18th and 19th century in every farmhouse in every kitchen hanging from the rafters drying out just waiting for somebody to get sick and get the chills and get a flu coming on and this is what they gave them because the Native Americans introduced the Europeans to this very early on when they started suffering from influenza because they didn't have tolerances built up to it when they first came to the Americas so the Indians taught this plant to the whites and it was used prolifically throughout the frontier in the eighteenth nineteenth century the thing with this plant is it does a lot of things okay this is a very powerful plant you have to understand that too much of this plant will make you vomit it's not necessarily poisonous but it will make you vomit in some cases that's a good thing but it will make you run a high fever which will help you to break a fever it will make your body sweat it will open up your pores it'll thin out your blood and it will cause you to break a fever okay and you know another name for this plant or another acronym that they gave this plan or another nickname was that it was used for bone break fever you know and you get that aching in your body that it feels like your bones about to break every time you walk and this is what they used boneset okay so remember this now we're going to take this back to camp with our willow and we're going to make ourselves some medicine with it I'm going to show you what I'm gonna do to prepare that so stay with me okay so we're back at camp now and I got to tell you just that walk you know if you get those couple plants heated my body's core temperature up made me feel a little bit better so sometimes just get a little exercise you know when you really feel down can help you have a lot to just to heat that core temperature up and kind of fight that fever and infection but anyway so back here

got our black willow pain reliever male libido boneset fever influenza now if you look at some of the field guides out there they pretty much agree with this a book those recommended me to me by Mike McLaughlin he's a practicing herbalist from Michigan but I compared it with the pamphlets from Waterford press and from the eastern field guide by Peterson and they all pretty much agree and the good thing about that is is that you can take those big healthy books like you know medicinal plants and things like that that are this thick in this big and you can put them on a shelf in your hammer sack you can carry that small flip out pamphlet doesn't weigh anything and as long as it gives you the basics and it does in fact I'll open this one up right now just to kind of confirm what we talked about it says in here on the block walnut or Omni I'm sorry on the block willow that a 15-minute boiling of the bark works as a pain reliever it says with the bone set it says that steep leaves will help with flu symptoms and fever previous pretty simple pretty self-explanatory plus you got a picture of the plant now I don't want to waste resources I want to be able to do things simultaneously so I don't want to make a decoction of this bark and then turn around and steep the tea for the bone set so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to put my cup on the boil let it boil down just a little bit with the willow bark in it take it off the fire go ahead and put my leaves on my bone set in there cover it with a lid and just let it sit for 15 minutes so it's gonna take me a half an hour before I can adjust this medicine that's the important thing to remember you know the pharmacies not right down the street hopefully it's around you clothes you should identify those resources as you're walking in your area of operation but part of the understanding of all of these medicinal trees medicinal plants all these local resources that you have is that's what enables you to thin down your kit it's easy for me to say oh just take a 10 piece kit it's easy for me to say oh you don't need a first-aid kit you got duct tape a bandana and cords what else do you need well I'm telling you that because I understand how to use the local resources so I don't have to carry things like ibuprofen amphetamines you know bacitracin ointments all those kind of things that you add to a first-aid kit and you say well that doesn't weigh very much well near there's a tent when it's by itself but when you add it to your kit it becomes more weight and that's what we're trying to reduce is the bulk of items that we really need because they're not going to be that multifunctional other than iodine these plants are multi functional that's what we want so stay with me we're gonna go over here to the fire we're gonna make us up some tea chug it down I'll try to stay with you to see what happens might make me vomit if I take too much but at the least it should make me break a sweat really good so we'll find out okay so I've got my water on the boil here you can see and I don't have my willow bark in there yet when do we call that water got nice and hot so I don't waste any the volatile oils law it's eaten up from evaporation steam I could cover that if I wanted to but at this point you know I get to put my couple the top of that's what I wanted to do not that worried about it I'm trying to make a fairly weak treatment right here to begin with because I'm not sure how my body's gonna react to the bone set in just an offhand dosage like this where I just drink something down so I'm not trying to make you know a quart of this stuff it's recommending to take most of the stuff to three times a day most herbal medicinal people that practices stuff for living used tinctures when they've concentrated their stuff down in alcohol you know in the woods we don't have that luxury all the time so we have to make teas and that's what I'm doing right now and we'll see how it works out okay you know in the water for pres guy it doesn't really specify inner bark or outer bark of the willow so I've just taken some of the inner and the outer I'm just gonna throw it all in there I don't figure it can hurt too much it's not poison so I'm not gonna hurt to do that we'll put that in there first my waters not boiling you're not gonna put my bone set in there Todd let that boil down a little bit for about ten or fifteen minutes you know an interesting side note on this willow bark is it was an 18th century or 19th century herbalist out of Appalachia an Appalachian medicinal doctor who thought that the willow bark decoction worked much better or the willow bark tincture worked much better that the willow bark was burnt in the fire until it was ashes and then the tincture was created from those it's an interesting sidenote obviously you don't have that kind of time to mess around when you're in the woods but it's just another little bit of knowledge that you learned when you do research on stuff like that so I thought I'd pass it on to you okay so I've waited you know 10 or 15 minutes and I'm gonna get this pot off the fire now or this you know Diet bottle I don't want a piece of cords real handy I could dig one out of my pack or something but I thought I'd show you interesting real trick I'm just taking a stick off the ground here and it's about I'm gonna snap it off to a little bit less wit or write out the same width as the shoulders on this on this bottom right here so about like that I'm hoping will work then I'm just gonna take a piece of this willow bark that I had saved and I'm just gonna tie a couple half hitches in here just like I would do if I were putting a toggle on a trap exactly the same for incident half-inch on one side half that's on the other side to create like a clove hitch knot on a piece of wool abort cooler Jenn I'm just gonna drop that down inside my bottle it's like this make my bottle up out of the fire and set it down now if I set that up right won't be too tough to get that right back out of there

just a quick fifty little trick you don't have a multi-tool on you you know you can use a piece of cordage for this I just use the piece of bark it doesn't really matter but it works just the same but now I'm gonna let this sit here for a few minutes and I'm going to take my bone set and I only need the leaves of the phone set so I'm just going to take a few leaves off here like I said I'm not sure about the dosage on this so I'm kind of being careful I'm going to macerate these leaves a little bit those I'm gonna tear them up to release some of the volatile oils inside them and I'm going to put them down inside my bottle and then I'm just gonna put my canteen cups over my cup for my bottle over the top of that then let it sit there and steep for 15 minutes and we'll be back okay I took our mixture here and took it over the creek and dump the bottle in the creek so that I could pull the water down a little bit before I pulled it off and now I'm gonna take my puff and strain just mix through a piece of cotton you have to wiggle the thoughts off its saturated I've got two layers of cotton here to double this material over I could have used one but hurtin anything to use two I don't need a whole lot of it you know I made enough of this for at least a couple of doses really only two drinking couple ounces of this other time and that's the really important thing to remember when you start messing around experimenting with medicinal plants anything that you read for a dosage you know half it to begin with until you see how your body's going to react to it because everybody's different

you know if it tells you to make a decoction make an infusion if it tells you to make a tincture make a decoction and it tells you to boil it for 20 minutes you know and and boil it again just boil it once just you know what I'm trying to say is don't make it as potent you know if it tells you to take six or eight ounces of it then just take two or three see how your body reacts to it first and you can experiment from there okay I've got probably an ounce and a half in here right now and I think that that's probably gonna be what I'm gonna go with so let's see what this tastes like

because I'm sure if what I've read it probably tastes like crap it's almost an unsinkable horrible but it's got a really bitter taste to it the things that are bitter like that usually are the things that warm your body up so that's good doesn't mean you puke it makes you sweat I'm doing the right Road now you can see it started raining out here just to add insult to injury but we'll be back in a little while I'm dead Canberra at the pathline school I appreciate you joining with another video I appreciate your support I appreciate your views thank you okay guys well I wanted to go ahead and get an update posted on this last video useful and medicinal trees the Eastern woodlands we talked about willow I combine that with boneset for flu it's been two hours now I'm gonna tech but I want you to understand you know what's going on with this boneset and Willow tea that I made basically part decoction part infusion it's been two hours I didn't take very much I can feel my core heated up the pain and my joints and things like that is pretty much gone the chills have not subsided too much but the pain is gone I don't have a headache and I'm burning up it feels like my skin just on fire but I don't have a headache at all I have had to urinate twice in the last hour and that's a very uncommon for me I usually walk around dehydrated most of the time by you know true standards my urine is typically straw yellow all the time and I've had to urinate twice you know recently here and it actually almost burned both times so I don't know if that's the medicine trying to kick something out of my body you know or what it is exactly but I think that my body is reacting okay to this so I'm gonna instead of waiting the four hours that I would normally wait to take it again I'm gonna go ahead and go with two hours and I'm gonna shoot another ounce and a half of this in me real quick and see what that does like I said this is the nest this thing I've ever tasted in my entire life but if it works it'll be well worth it

the important thing with this stuff is to remember that you're trying to do it when you don't have to do it you know I don't have to take this decoction now I'm not in a survival situation I can you know go to the house and take some nyquil and hit the rack but I want to see how this stuff works now so if I ever have to use it although and that's my point I've never used boneset before I've always said that I would keep that in my toolbox I've always said that I'll use that if I have to but I've never really had an opportunity to use it until now so now I want to try it and I'm interested to see what happens once I put some more of my system well I've got another puppy ounce and a half here down the hatch he goes and I'll get back to you with the sassafras video and let you know how this turned out you