New Herbal Oils and Salves

My new kitchen and craft room

I’m all moved into the new place, the business is unpacked, and I have a shiny new laptop to write to you from. I’ve been doing non-stop crafting since I finished unpacking the last boxes of books and dishes. The functioning part of the kitchen, while small, has a lot of storage and the room itself is actually quite large with a lot of floor space – I’ve already made frame drums on it, the hides stretched across the lovely slate linoleum of the kitchen floor. But mostly I have been taking up my herbwife skills again to craft medicinal oils and salves.

With herbal oils in the oven and salves in the double boiler on the stove, my home soon became fragrant with the sweet scents of balsam poplar and beeswax.

I made three types of salves using only Pacific Northwest plants and locally sourced oils and beeswax and have many more recipes yet to try. The first type is Allheal & Balsam – a gentle herbal salve for abrasions, blisters, bruises, burns, corns, cuts, inflammation, scratches, sores, sprains, sunburns, swelling, and any other external skin injuries. It is safe to apply to broken skin and open wounds and also safe for use by children and those with sensitive skin.

The second salve I crafted is Sweet Birch Balsam – a naturally anti-inflammatory salve for soothing sore muscles, sore joints, and the pain of arthritis, rheumatism, and sports injuries. It also makes a great salve for massages, but keep it away from broken skin due to all the essential oils it contains.

Lastly, I crafted Cedar Balsam – a gentle naturally antibacterial salve for treating any external wounds, MRSA infections, and fungal skin infections like athlete’s foot. If you have MRSA, trust me, and get the big jar and apply to infected wounds and the inside of your nostrils every day for a month. I’ve had MRSA infections before and there’s not much can do besides hope the antibiotics work, but this salve helps soothe the pain, the swelling of infection, and helps you heal up faster.

Then it was all about straining and even more finely straining the wildcrafted St. John’s Wort and Balsam Poplar herbal oils I made. They are rich dark gold and full of medicine. I now have them available in three sizes – a large four ounce one for crafting your own salves or as a carrier oil, a medium two ounce one for professional use for healing or massage, and a small half ounce size for personal home use in one’s herbal medicine cupboard.

And now it’s all about crafting native incense and resin blends and weighing out smudging herbs. Lots more native herbal goodness to come! I’m finding wonderful and endless possibilities of things to make with the abundance of healing and fragrant herbs living in the Pacific Northwest rainforest.

Introducing Honey Grove Farm

Here’s my latest WordPress creation – a blog for the lovely Nao of Honey Grove Farm (Nikiah’s partner in beekeeping mischief). Nao and her hubby have relocated to the Gulf Islands to start an apiary and homestead on six acres near the sea that will eventually also support a bed and breakfast. They’ll raise bees for honey, grow their own food, make their own cheese, brew their own ales… I so want to trade places with Nao and I know you do too! She’ll be blogging all about their island homesteading adventures over at the blog I designed for her; check it out and get a taste of the good life: Honey Grove Farm.

I help people set up WordPress.com and WordPress.org blogs and websites as a side job – I do custom designs and graphics. If you want to snazz up your blog with a new look or want to start a blog and feel lost in all the options and CSS code, send me an email to talk options.

Strawberry Summer

That’s what I got up to for my last vacation of the summer – belgian waffles with strawberries and bacon by the lake in the mountains with good friends. My love and I canoed over the ghosts of long dead trees sunken at the bottom of the clear lake with drops of water from the paddles splashing over our toes. I walked through the trees finding hidden mushrooms, blackberries, hazelnuts, and other forest treasures. When I got home, what did I find, but more strawberries. My wild alpine strawberries are now covered in ripe red berries.

And now we’re back home and back to work. All of my herbal supply orders have come in so I’m all stocked up and ready to get crafting. I just opened Forest Grove Botanica on Etsy with what I have in stock. I’ll be adding more goodies this week and in the coming weeks – keep your eyes peeled for healing balms, herbal oils, teas, bulk resins, and body care products.

Honey Lemon Rose Cake

It was my birthday last week and I was suitably spoiled with a dinner on the patio of Horizons restaurant overlooking a gorgeous view from the top of my mountain with more mountains as far as the eye can see and the setting sun shining on the sea to the West. It was a beautiful day of a delicious locally-sourced dinner in the park with a view of the Ainu totem poles aptly named “The Playground of the Gods”, the mountains, and the sea inlet with crows flying overhead.

After a walk in the Burnaby Mountain Conservation Area my sweetie and I headed home for a slice of my delicious homemade honey lemon rose cake with lemon butter icing. It’s a recipe I wrote many years ago and almost forgot about until my birthday when I decided I wanted to change things up and have a cake that wasn’t chocolate. I’ve included  the recipe if you want to taste its deliciousness too! Omit the rose water and rose petals for a purely lemon treat. I chose lemon for happiness and prosperity and rose for love and healing for my next year of life on the mountain.

Honey Lemon Rose Cake

Mix ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened
1 2/3 cups honey, unpasteurized
3 egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp rose water
1/2 cup wild rose petals
1 cup lemon juice (freshly squeezed or diluted Realemon)
grated rind of one lemon

Then add the dry ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose or cake & pastry flour
1 tsp sea salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda

Lastly fold in:

3 egg whites, beaten until stiff peaks form

Preheat oven to 350°F. Blend the wet mixture (you may need to heat the honey with the lemon juice to get it to blend) and then sift in the dry ingredients through a sieve (sifting makes baked goods lighter and fluffier) and blend. Beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form and then gently fold them into the batter. Pour right away into two greased 8″ cake pans and place in your preheated oven. Bake for 20-30 minutes until an inserted toothpick comes out clean. Gently tip the cakes onto a cooling rack and allow to fully cool before icing. Because the cake is so light and fluffy be careful when moving the layers around so they don’t break.

Lemon Butter Icing

1 cup butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla
1/8 cup lemon juice, or to taste
1-3 tbsp rose water, to taste
3-6 cups icing sugar, sifted

Stir and play with the quantities of sugar and liquids until you get the perfect, creamy, easily spreadable texture you want. Ice the cake, decorate the top with candied rose petals or lemon peel if desired, cut and eat! I’ve decorated the top with candied pansies before and it was gorgeous and tasty. Happy baking!

New Pacific Northwest Kyphis

For my challenge of crafting traditional incense using only botanicals native to the Pacific Northwest I decided to try my hand at not just one, but two kyphi recipes: Hawthorn Rose and Rocky Mountain. My recipes were crafted with Pacific Northwest botanicals using the traditional Egyptian method; a labour-intensive process which requires a month’s time to make and cure.

Kyphi is a solid compound incense of herbs and resins in a base of fruits soaked in honey and wine and formed into small bricks or pills. Kyphi incense was burned for evening prayers and as a folk medicine in ancient Egypt as long as 4000 years ago and, as a few of the original written recipes have survived, it is still burned today.

First I ground up all the ingredients and split them into wet (berries and oils) and dry (herbs and resins) for each blend. The dry mixtures were left to mingle for about a week and a few days before the week was up I added local Similkameen wildflower honey and my homebrewed devil’s club-huckleberry mead to the ground juniper berries of the Rocky Mountain blend and the hawthorn berries and rosehips of the Hawthorn Rose blend. In ancient Egypt they would’ve used juniper berries and/or raisins to form the wet base along with the honey and the wine. Once blended, the wet mixtures are left to soak up the liquids for a few days so the fruits become a sticky paste.

After the few days the dry ingredients are mixed in with the wet. I use my hands because the mixtures are too thick to stir with a spoon. The finished blends are then stored in air-tight containers for two weeks to fully incorporate all the textures and fragrances.

And then I shaped each blend into small bricks with my fingers and placed them on racks to cure and dry for another two weeks. I like to shape them into bricks instead of pills even though pills are easier because I think the pill shape makes kyphi look like animal droppings — it’s just a weird thing I have. I covered the tops of the kyphi bricks lightly with sheets of wax paper to keep off the dust and it worked beautifully.

Once the bricks have cured and are no longer crumbly and sticky to the touch, they are ready to package and share with the world. Because they contain essential oils, they will only smell better as they are left to age and the high sugar and alcohol contents act as natural preservatives for a long shelf life.

Hawthorn Rose Kyphi Incense

A rich floral kyphi crafted with ambrosial native berries, flowers, roots, barks, and resins. Wild rose petals and sweet flag root mingle with sickly sweet bee propolis and wild cherry resins in a base of hawthorn berries and rosehips traditionally blended with honey and homebrewed honey wine.

Rocky Mountain Kyphi Incense

A complex Pacific Northwest kyphi recipe of fragrant evergreen forests and snowcapped mountains. Wild harvested Western Redcedar, Western Hemlock, and Spruce needles with local Pine resins in a base of Juniper berries traditionally blended with honey and homebrewed honey wine.

Both are now available for purchase in the Etsy shop.

Wild Berry Shampoo

Yes, you read the title right –you can make shampoo using berries harvested from the wild! The resulting shampoo doesn’t have the soapy lather or shelf life of commercial shampoos, but it gets the job done and you know for sure you’re only putting wild berries on your head and not any mystery chemicals, toxins, or preservatives. Even if it’s not something you’d do every day, it sure is a fun activity while camping. As usual, practice ethical wildcrafting!

• Devil’s Club - good for dandruff, dry itchy scalp, and lice
• Snowberry - good for blond or light-coloured hair
• Soapberry - good for red or brown hair

To make wild berry shampoo you will need 1 cup of fresh berries or 1/2 cup of dried and 1 cup of freshly boiled water.  Pour the hot water over the berries and mash or put through a blender. If using dried berries, be sure to let the mixture sit for 15-30 minutes, or more if needed, to allow the berries to soften for easier mashing and blending. The mix will last 2-3 days in the fridge and will only last that many washes as well. You can always freeze the fresh berries or the shampoo mixture to have enough for regular use.

To use, massage a portion of the berry mash into damp hair and rinse. Rinsing with cool or cold water keeps hair moist and shiny.

Tips and Tricks: Devil’s Club and Snowberries can only be picked in the wild and cannot be purchased, but Soapberries can be purchased in bulk from some retailers such as Richter’s.  Like the idea but don’t have access to any of the berries? Try making a soapwort infusion instead to massage and rinse your hair with.

If you have dandruff and are making a berry shampoo with Devil’s Club, also try adding 1 Tbsp of apple cider vinegar to the blend. If you have oily hair, try adding 1 Tbsp of baking soda to 2 Tbsp’s worth of the berry mash.

Want to take the recipe further? Try adding wild harvested nettles or mints, all-purpose hair tonics, by making an infusion with the hot water before adding it to the berries. Also try adding peppermint oil for a stimulating experience great for dry, itchy, flaky scalp.

Warnings: The berries of Devil’s Club and Snowberry are poisonous so make sure to keep the berries and/or the shampoo away from children and pets and keep the shampoo out of your eyes. Soapberries are edible in moderation and are the safer option, especially if you’ll be making this recipe with children.

Forager’s Guide to What’s In Season Right Now

Due to climate change the weather has been playing roulette past several years shortening and lengthening normal growing seasons making it near impossible to know exactly when wild herbs and foods will ripen and be ready for harvesting. For those who live in the same climate as me, I hope seasonal updates of what is ready for foraging might be handy –especially for those who don’t have the forest literally right in their backyard like I do. Most herbs are in season right now until the fall so I am only including fruits in this post.

If you do have the opportunity to regularly go for walks in the wild I highly recommend it as it’s a great way to keep an eye out for wild foods and herbs to better determine when they’re in season. I never know what I’ll stumble into on my forest walks. Last night on a walk with my sweetie I found devil’s club growing beside a nearby stream when I have never seen devil’s club on the mountain in the five years I’ve lived here –and believe me, I’ve looked! The poisonous berries are ripe right now making it easy to identify.

Gooseberry – This tart large berry comes in many different colours from green, to light red, to black. It is traditionally used for desserts, to flavour drinks, to make teas and wines, or pickled preserves. If you’re not up to hunting them down they can often be found at farmer’s markets from farmers or wild harvesters.

Huckleberries – These tart and delicious red and black berries are in abundance right now so make sure to pick what you need before the animals get them! They can be dried or eaten fresh and are excellent for homebrewing (for beers, meads, and wines!), jams, pies, tarts, muffins, quickbreads… Use them for anything you’d use blueberries or cranberries for.

Salal Berries – These sweet mild berries are yummy picked right off the bush, but can also be dried for later use or used to make jams, pies, muffins, quickbreads and more. There’s no need to remove the seeds. Salal berries mix well with black currants, blackberries, and wild Oregon grapes. They can be used for anything you’d use blueberries for, but of course the taste will be different and wilder.

Saskatoon Berry – These sweet delicious berries are a West Coast and Rocky Mountain favourite. They can be used dried or fresh for just about recipe under the sun whether it be for baking, canning, or brewing. Sometimes they have little white grubs in them, so be careful when you eat them fresh!

Thimbleberries – These tart delicate berries resemble raspberries in appearance and taste, but are seedier and not as sour. They do not keep their shape when picked and so are best eaten right away or made into juices, syrups, jellies, or for homemade meads and wines. They’re a favourite of wild animals and disappear fast. One trick is to pick them when the green berries first start to blush pink (dont’ remove the berries, pick the whole stem) and hang them in a breathable cotton or burlap bag and let them ripen in the safety of your home (this doesn’t really work with the other berries though).

Wild Oregon Grapes - These tart sour grapes have just started blushing a ripe blue. Most people find them too sour to eat fresh on their own. Used alone the wild grapes can be made into pie filling, an amazing jelly, wild grape juice, or a divine homemade wine. They also mix well with other berries especially blackberries and salal berries for pies, jams, jellies, wine or mead. They are quite seedy so only use them for recipes that require cooking and straining.

WHAT’S DYING OFF

Salmonberries made it very late in the season this year due to the cool weather in the PNW, but they have almost completely disappeared now. The Indian Plums are shriveling and drying on the bushes and soon will be inedible. The wild roses have all lost their petals and will bloom no more, luckily, rosehips are next on the menu!

WHAT WILL BE READY IN 2-3 WEEKS

Now green blackberries will start to ripen including the native trailing blackberry. The beaked hazelnuts should be ready to harvest in two to three weeks and you might want to gather them before they ripen or the squirrels will beat you to them! Try hanging them in a cloth sack to ripen and then roast when ready for ultimate deliciousness. Crab apples should be ready soon if you can get to them before the critters. Rosehips should start to ripen in 2-3 weeks. Rowan berries will be perfectly ripe in 1-2 more weeks for your jelly or wine making projects.

The Herbwife Visits the Royal City Farmer’s Market

I wanted to check out the local Burnaby and New Westminster farmer’s markets not only for delicious local foods and the amazing craftspersons, but also to see what it would be like to vend there as Forest Grove Botanica. So I headed to the Royal City Farmer’s Market by New Westminster’s city hall. There were mainly food vendors consisting of farmers with fresh fruits and veggies, live plants, organic meats, eggs, and dairy, as well as a few jewelers, street food vendors, and some very good live music. I followed my nose… how could I resist the booth of freshly made samosas and pakoras!? I bought a couple dozen and baked them for dinner with a spinach salad tossed with the heirloom tomatoes and gooseberries I bought. The hard-to-find black currants will either end up in a small batch of mead or in tarts with salal berries, mmm.

I, of course, bee-lined it for the honey as soon as I saw the jars of gold. I bought one kilo of blackberry honey, a good staple honey, and a small jar of maple blossom honey. I have never seen maple blossom honey before (from the green flowers of big-leaf maples) so I had to bring some home. It tastes strong and medicinal with a very mild aftertaste. I think the bees snuck in some birch too as it has a bit of a wintergreen hint to it. I’m pretty impressed with the quality of Honeyview Farm honey and as he sells his honey in 3kg buckets I can get enough to make mead!

After purchasing all my goodies I sat down under a hazel tree in the park and ate my samosas and pakoras with some gooseberries while listening to the music and enjoying the sunlight filtering through cedars onto the green grass covered in the tiniest daisies. It was beautiful. Then I headed to the park on the other side of the market which is styled like a beautiful Japanese garden full of endless water features. Under the delicate Japanese maples were an entire team of female mallard ducks swimming in one of the many ponds with waterfalls. They swam slowly with sleepy eyes and were ambivalent to the humans walking the paths.

One of the ladies with sleepy eyes swam right up next to me probably hoping for breadcrumbs. When she realized I wasn’t going to feed her, her and her girlfriends swam to the other end of the pond. I continued exploring the garden and found hidden treasures that hadn’t been planted – a large burdock plant beloved by honey bees, wild lettuce under the maples, and a female yew tree which looked intentionally planted, but very old and was probably there before the garden. Yews are my favourite tree even though they are very poisonous. I think they’re gorgeous and they are planted all over the Greater Vancouver Area as an ornamental shrub.

And then it was time to say farewell to the farmer’s market and the beautiful garden and park to head home and decide what to do with my delicious spoils.

Breakfast in Squamish

On Sunday morning we got up bright and early, made tea and coffee in our travel mugs, hopped in the car, and drove out along the sea to sky highway to have breakfast at Big D’s in Squamish (super yummy café). It’s one of my favourite drives because of all the mountain, sea inlent, and island chain eye candy that looks like scenes out of prehistory for miles and miles.

After breakfast we drove to Porteau Cove, a gorgeous provincial park in Howe Sound along the sea inlet with campsites, a boat dock, and scuba diving. We walked along the beach looking at the water and the wispy clouds roll over the mountains. It was so lovely to leave “Mount Gloom” behind for a gorgeous sunny day at the beach.

I didn’t see too much wildlife, mainly mussels, barnacles, seagulls, crows, and ravens. One Raven was laying low blending into the driftwood, while the other made the mistake of being noisy and had a whole family of crows on him in an instant diving at him and heckling him. Poor thing. Crows do that all the time to Ravens and Red-Tailed Hawks on my mountain too.

Elderberries, huckleberries, wild Oregon grapes, salal berries, and thimbleberries are all in season right now just asking to picked and eaten fresh in the sunlight. We’ve had such a cool summer in the Pacific Northwest this year that the ferns, mosses, and more delicate plants are still lush and green and flowering. It was gorgeous no matter where I looked – one way the ocean and impossible tall mountains, the other direction tall evergreen trees and a beatiful lush forest of flowers and fruits.

After soaking up as much sun, salt air, and beauty as we could, we got back into the car and drove home just in time to have missed the rain.

The Botanica’s Back!

I finally finished my mad alchemical work in the kitchen and a crazy run of packaging to bring you all some native herbal goodness! The Etsy store for Forest Grove Botanica has been restocked with herbal products as of last night. New packaging, new photography, and some new products that will become regulars. The website and the products have undergone a renovation and makeover. I hope everyone likes the new look!

Most of these goodies were made before my supply orders came in so if you’re wondering where the salves or some of your favourite incenses are they’ll be coming back soon now that all my orders have come in. There will also be many new products added as I gradually expand the botanica including a whole line of herbal home remedies and body care as well as bulk native herbs for those who like to craft their own concoctions.

Right now I have loose incense blends, loose smudge blends, solid artisan resins (Pine Forest and Bee Propolis), wild harvested smudging herbs, ritual oils, my remaining ritual salves (only one Aves Salve left!), herbal smoking blends for medicine, pleasure, and ritual, herbal teas for dreamers and diviners, as well as the animal skull fetiches and reliquary necklaces.

New incense and smudge blends include California Desert loose smudge, a mix of wildcrafted sagebrush and white sage with mugwort and yarrow, and Rocky Mountain loose incense crafted with native evergreens, juniper berries, and local wild tree resins. A few incenses have changed names for good – “Bee Smoke” is now Bee Propolis Amber Resin, “West Coast Smudge” is now Northwest Coast Loose Smudge, “Forest Smoke” will now be known as “Pine, Poplar & Propolis Loose Resin” (once it has been restocked), and two of my older incenses are back and now made entirely with native herbs — Ancestor Incense and Red Earth Incense (was “Spirit Feast“).

Note: When it comes to Balm of Gilead, as the hot sauce lady says, “I put that shit on everything”,  (as a natural local preservative) so if you’re allergic to aspirin you may want to do a patch test before using any of my oils or salves and avoid using tinctures or teas with Balm of Gilead in the ingredients. For external use, you may have no reaction based on the level of your allergy.