Backyard Pharmacy: Plants as Medicine - Plant, Grow, Harvest, and Heal

Description

This compact yet complete guide to herbal medicines shows you how to transform common plants into remedies that heal. While using herbs as medicines can often seem complicated or costly, the Backyard Pharmacy gift edition offers a way to learn that's simple, effective, and low cost. Plants you once believed were just seasonings for sauce in the kitchen or scents for your home are in fact medicines that can help heal and soothe, if you know what to do with them. This book shows you how easy it can be to make your own herbal remedies for life's common ailments. Profiles of common healing plants offer advice on growing, harvesting, preparing, and using these herbs in healing tinctures, oils, and creams. You'll find all-natural, low-cost herbal solutions for a range of common ailments, such as: Learn how to grow and craft a poultice to soothe mosquito bites. Make an herbal tincture to fix sluggish digestion. Brew up some lemon balm iced tea to ease a stressful day. Craft echinacea drops to support immune system health. Use elderberry to ease cold and flu symptoms. Blend a cayenne salve to relieve inflammation. Steep chamomile tea to aid with insomnia. From the common cold to a nasty scrape, headache, or digestive issue, simple, all-natural home-grown ingredients can make you feel healthy and happy. With guidance from this useful yet beautiful book, you'll be able to match properties of each plant to your own medicinal needs. And with this new, more compact gift edition, you can share the soothing essence of herbal remedies with everyone you love.

Elizabeth Millard is the author of Indoor Kitchen Gardening and Backyard Pharmacy. She and her partner, Karla Pankow, also own Bossy Acres, a 100-member community-supported agriculture farm in Minnesota that provides seasonal produce to members and area restaurants in an effort to build a strong and sustainable local food system. Millard often leads workshops on vegetable and herb gardening as well as herb preparation, fermentation, and cooking with seasonal ingredients. As editor of local sustainable food site Simple Good and Tasty, she encourages readers to connect with the state's abundance of organic growers, ranchers, food artisans, nonprofit agencies, and each other, forging a stronger food landscape. In addition to farming, teaching, and editing, she has contributed articles to Hobby Farm Home, Experience Life, and Urban Farm magazines, along with many other publications. She and Karla live in south Minneapolis.