A while back I wrote an article on identifying Poison Ivy vs. Wild Sarsaparilla. I wrote it because when I went searching for how to ID both plants by their roots I came up empty. I won’t repeat that info here, you can read the post if you are interested.…

During the summer, bittersweet grows up any plant it can find – it loves saplings and small bushes – twirling around the host plant’s stems like a snake, choking out the host tree if you let it have its way. I usually say uncle to the wildness of our land…

Wild sarsaparilla and poison ivy can, as they are emerging in the spring, look alike. They both have that reddish, brownish, shiny look. Even though wild sarsaparilla ultimately has 5 leaves per stem, on younger plants they sometimes appear as three. Since I have both in my woods, and since…

People ask me what the difference is between chicken and duck eggs. Duck eggs are bigger. The whites are clear The shells are a bit harder The ducks lay them on the ground and step on them. I have to wash them but I don’t scrub off the protective film.…

This summer, for the first time in my life, I got mites in the chicken coop. If you haven’t ever experienced this, consider yourself very, very lucky. And what I’ve learned from this is that, like everything, prevention is the key. But….if you are finding yourself in a similar situation,…

Last year I left a nice-looking plant growing next to my lamp post. It had big green leaves. I tried looking it up, and my best guess was that it was Common Burdock. I even wrote about it in the personal stuff I put at the bottom of my materiamedica. This…

I’m really not sure what is happening, but I like it. I get a feeling for a plant and want to leave it because it speaks to me in some kind of way. And then I find out about the medicine it contains. Sometimes that medicine is food, like the Autumn Olive…

I always thought my first post on this blog would be about dandelions. Or something related to what I wrote on the “about” page. Like why I started this blog. Or welcome to this blog. But it’s not. My opening post is about a plant that I discovered this past…

Today I harvested nettle for the first time. And made nettle pesto with it. And documented the whole thing with my camera. With no CF card. So all those pictures? They didn’t happen. (Too bad, there were some good ones.) But my adventure with nettle did, so I’ll write about…