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together,” she says. “Sometimes I just enjoy it like this, and sometimes add a bit of honey or maple syrup and milk to make an especially comforting hot tea for supporting digestion and liver health, both of which can get a little sluggish in the winter when we’re not getting as much fresh produce in our diets.”
In the summer, she prefers simple iced teas of hibiscus, peppermint or pine needles. “These are all yummy and fresh-tasting, all deliver vitamins and minerals and help us to stay hydrated,” she says.
According to McMullen, there is a huge body of evidence for the efficacy of herbal remedies, when I press her for medical evidence.
“Some folks like to rely more on traditional knowledge, and there is some wisdom to this, since humans have found ways to keep themselves healthy and address illness and imbalance in the body for the entire history of humanity,” she says, adding that the modern scientific community is catching up to some of this traditional knowledge, with countless studies proving the efficacy of different plants to address disease.
“Many of our pharmaceuticals come from isolating and sometimes altering compounds found in plants,” she says. “Sometimes, herbs take a long period of consistent use before a person can feel that they are having a beneficial effect on them. But sometimes, you can feel the effect instantly. If you’ve ever eaten too much hot sauce or wasabi, you know how they work. Hot peppers make you feel hot and sweaty by moving circulation to the periphery of the body. Wasabi opens the sinuses in a very powerful way. Have you ever inhaled the steam from a hot cup of peppermint tea? Then you know how it feels as if it is opening and clearing to the mind. Engaging with herbs through our senses and our felt experience is one of the best ways to understand that they do have real, immediate and profound impacts on our bodies.”
HERBAL CSA
There is a CSA partnership between grower and consumer for everything these days, and herbalism should be no different. It’s a great niche market to expand your hobby farm. People love the convenience of receiving a box monthly or quarterly of items they can’t grow. McMullen dabbled in an herbal CSA program for a little time and has advice for the herbal entrepreneur.
She only advertised on social media as she didn’t want to grow too big too quickly. She needed to balance business with family. She included five products in each seasonal box:
• a tincture;
• a topical preparation, such as an infused oil, a salve, a facial cleansing mask or a bath blend;
• a food item, such as an infused vinegar, herbal honey, soup mix, seasoning mix or culinary infused oil; • a bulk tea blend; and
• an emotional/spiritual support item, such as a bundle of herbs for burning, a flower essence or a tincture blend meant for emotional support.
McMullen also sent out a multipage newsletter with an introductory message about what was going on seasonally in her garden, her personal life and the larger cultural experience, about each preparation and the main herbs included in them.
“Balance long-term planning and preparation with improvising based on what happens seasonally with the herbs you’re working with,” she says. She also advises that because tinctures take four to six weeks, plan far in advance, and grow more than you think you’ll need. Plus, make sure that the products you’re making are ones you’d be happy to find in your mailbox. Think about how the different elements you include in your box fit together. Include information
on how and why to use the items. Finally, if you’re a beginning herbalist and thinking of starting your own CSA, don’t get too complicated. Work with simple, or single herbs, rather than blends.
BIOREGIONALISM
Bioregionalism is the practice of knowing and working with the organisms in your bioregion. For herbalism that means knowing local plants, native and invasive, and those easily cultivated.
Like studying a plant that you cultivate in a garden gives you a fuller understanding of it, so does witnessing wild plants growing in their natural habitat. Whether you watch plants move across a yard or field over several seasons or by noticing which growing conditions different plants thrive in, you’ll begin to have a greater connection and relationship with the plants and local ecosystem.
“It is increasingly important to remember and tend our connection to place and to the other beings living near us,” McMullen says. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we didn’t only find our friends and communities through our devices, but if we could walk outside and be greeted by our dear friends growing out of the ground?”
I, like McMullen, live in subtropical Florida. Bioregional herbalism brings awareness of how prolific different plant communities are. McMullen says those who live in regions where well-known plants in Western herbalism — chamomile, dandelion, chickweed, nettle, burdock, Echinacea, etc. — don’t grow wild shouldn’t fret, as we all have unique herbs that we can’t find at grocery chains.
Although she equated choosing a favorite wild herb like asking librarians what their favorite books are, she was able to come up with a few. Her list included; Spanish needle (Bidens alba), plantain, wild violet, pine, usnea (a lichen), reishi (a fungus), Florida betony, goldenrod and pine.
“Just as many people feel called to grow some of their own food or to support local farms, growing or tending wild local plants and supporting local herb growers and herbalists shortens the supply chain into something much more sustainable,” McMullen says. “In this age of instant online purchases and of separation from and ignorance of how our material goods — including food and medicine — are made or grown, remembering how to find, grow and sustain deeper relationships with the food and herbs we consume and the people who help us source them is increasingly crucial.”
McMullen also teaches herbal classes. She hopes that students walk away with a renewed enthusiasm for working with herbs and have an openness to develop their own personal relationships with the herbs.
“We often have the impulse to ‘master’ things, to learn as much as we can, to not feel like a beginner,” she says. “When learning about herbs, this often looks like buying or growing a ton of different herbs and using them all at once, without the time and space and attention to really learn about how each one interacts with our individual bodies.”
McMullen advises to lower your expectations. Grow one new herb each year, and spend that growing season really focusing on its development. Work with it fresh, dried or as a tincture.
“Spend a much longer time than you think you need to focusing on that one new herb,” she says. “Be humble. Let the plants and your own experience guide you, but also don’t neglect to find resources about the herbs in books and respected herbal teachers as well as scientific literature, if available.”
Finding a teacher that is knowledgeable in local herbs is also a great resource. McMullen says those teaching from experience will share better, wellrounded and responsible offerings than those who regurgitate information available online.
The tropical and subtropical plants that grow in southwest Florida where McMullen lives are particularly well suited to supporting health. But even more than this, she feels that if we can build up our home herbal apothecaries with local plants that we have relationship with, we are relying less on large scale cultivation and wildcrafting efforts from far flung places whose practices we may not be able to learn much about. We’ll also be reducing the amount of fossil fuels expended to ship our herbs to us.
With COVID-19 freshly in our minds, Caitlin’s next statement is particularly comforting. “I don’t feel isolated and disconnected when my human relations are absent,” she says, “because I always have a larger community of plants, animals and fungi around me that I know and have relationships with,” she says. Kenny Coogan is a food, farm, and flower columnist. Coogan leads workshops about owning chickens, vegetable gardening, animal training, and corporate team building on his homestead when there isn’t a world pandemic. His gardening book 99 ½ Homesteading Poems: A Backyard Guide to Raising Creatures, Growing Opportunity, and Cultivating
Community is available at www.kennycoogan.com.