What are some home remedies for homesteaders?

What are some home remedies for homesteaders?

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At some point you will injure yourself or get sick. It is part of life. You don’t need to run to the doctor for everything, and you don’t have to run out and buy an over-the-counter salve or medicine. There are several remedies you can grow, forage, and make yourself. This will be a brief overview, as each category could be an entire blog itself.  Read all the way to the end for my best owie slave recipe. 

 

First prevention is the best medicine. Feeding your body what it needs to fight off and heal itself before you become symptomatic ill. The best way to do this is to eat good food that nourishes your body. Avoiding processed foods and sugar is the biggest tips. Eating a much of a whole food diet as you can is the next. 

 

Herbals are my next line of defense. This includes essential oils. Essential oils are essentially concentrated versions of the herbs. Quality matters here, especially when using them for medicinal purposes. I use the essential oils to help build and support the body fighting off whatever infection and assist in the healing process. A favorite in our house as well are hot teas. Perfect herbal remedies to sip on when feeling sick. 

 

I buy my essential oils. I do not have the knowledge to properly distill them, so they have the most effectiveness. For my top pick on essential oil company for quality and experience, click here. The herbals for tea are a mix of purchased and home grown. Many herbs I simply do not have the ability to grow. So, I just need an easy button an buy a pre-mixed herbal blend.  Top herbs to keep on hand for illness, cinnamon, lemonbalm and lemongrass (bonus these also repel bugs when alive), clove, rosemary, and lemon. 

 

Tinctures I often use in conjunction with herbals. A tincture is a plant soaked in alcohol, then strained off. The benefit to these is they last nearly forever, where a dried herb is only good for 1-2 years. To use the tincture, a small amount of liquid is placed under the tongue and then held there for a few minutes. The herbs that are harder to acquire, or spoil quickly are made into tinctures for long term storage and use. 

 

The part I’m sure most of you have been waiting for! My homemade owie salve. I use this salve on all kinds of owies, from cuts, to abrasions, to diaper rashes, to burns (after it has cooled off and the outer skin is healing. The best part is it is easy to make and grow. The two herbs in this salve are Calendula petals and Plantain leaves. You’ll also need olive oil for infusing, and bees wax to make the actual salve. 

 

Step 1: Pick the calendula blossoms and plantain leaves on a warm sunny day (the resin is strongest then). Fill a glass jar with the leaves and blossoms, I like to pick them in about a 1:1 ratio. 

 

Step 2: Fill the jar with olive oil to 1 inch from the top. Run a butter knife around to remove the air bubbles. Place in a sunny spot and let it sit for 3-4 weeks. 

 

Step 3: Strain the oil through cheese cloth and squeeze out into a sauce pan. 

 

Step 4: Warm the oil slightly (DO NOT BOIL). Add most of the grated bees wax to the warmed oil (approximately ¼ c grated beeswax per 1 cup of oil). Stirring to mix. 

 

Step 5: As soon as the wax melts, put 1 Tablespoon of the mix on a plate and into the freezer for 1-2 minutes, until cool. 

 

Step 6: Check for consistency. For a firmer salve, add more bees wax, for a softer salve, add more oil. 

 

Step 7: Put the salve into small jars or tins and allow to cool

 

Step 8: Once cooled, tighten lids and store in a cool dark place for 1-2 years.  

 

 

 

Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Helping Your Family Homestead for Food group! This community is for the Mommas, looking to stay home and raise their kids, but unsure how to keep everyone fed and make ends meet. I share tips from my journey from the office, to half the income and feeding my family from home, while maintaining good nourishing food. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision. 

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Supporting Your Family Naturally From the Inside Out community!! This community is for the Mommas, looking  to Support Your Family from Nature for Wellness. Tips range from nutrition, herbals, detoxing, natural cleaning, and essential oils. Basically all the things I’ve learned slowly over the past 5+ years if my journey. We have moved off Facebook, so to better serve our community and be able to discuss openly option for providing for your family in the best way possible.
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Prevent Vs React Technique That Changed My Life

Prevent Vs React Technique That Changed My Life

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Prevent vs React, sounds strange. How about offence vs defense? Sounds more familiar? What does this have to do with your health? Turns out a lot. Our bodies and nature are in constant motion. Laws of nature dictate that energy is required to maintain order. If you let nature happen, without inputting any energy, life or your body will decay. 

 

If you think about it in sports terms, is it easier to be on the offense side, commanding the game, or on the defense side, working to get to the offense? The offense of course! So why do we not do this with our own health? Perhaps because you do not know where to start. Let me help you! Take charge of your health, move your life to thriving, and decrease illness. Build your body up. 

 

Step one in building your body up is to feed your body well. If you give your body what it needs, most of the time it is very good at healing and defending itself. Make sure you are consuming the proper amount of vitamins and minerals (this includes the trace minerals). Many people are actually deficient in many trace minerals, even in wealthy countries. Our processed food is lacking in many of these trace minerals, and the vitamins are also lacking. Our store bought food is also lacking enzymes it naturally has fresh that help our bodies break food down for better digestion. Unless you are eating it straight out of the garden. Enzymes are very fragile and easily destroyed. It Is well worth investing in an enzyme supplement and vitamin/mineral supplement. If you need help finding an effective supplement message me, I’d be glad to help you. I talked more about food earlier in You are What you Eat. 

 

Step two, decrease your sugar! I have talked about this one a lot. I will also be the first to admit I need to decrease my sugar intake. I am good at minimizing my kid’s sugar intake, but my own? HA! After they go to sleep, I take my peanut butter, and some vanilla, a heaping scoop of sugar, and maybe a handful of chocolate chips and enjoy my mini-flourless helping of cookie dough. In all seriousness though, sugar fights the immune system and increases inflammation in the body. 

 

Step three, use nature to aid your body when needed. Herbal teas and blends do wonders for the body when it needs the extra boost. This is especially easy if you like hot teas. Plus a hot tea, with a little honey when you feel ill, is extremely soothing. 

 

Step four, piggy-backs off step three. If you are not a big tea drinker, you can use essential oils. I apply these daily to myself and my kids. CAUTION you must know your source to ensure they are truly pure and have the correct properties and are the correct frequency to give the desired results. Again, contact me if you would like some help here. Essential oils are much like herbs, except much more concentrated. This means you need less to do the same job as the herbs would do. I have an entire group to help you learn how to use essential oils and how to dilute for SAFE use with children. 

 

Want more information? Contact me!

 


 

Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.

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Plants, Extracts, Salves and Essential Oils

Plants, Extracts, Salves and Essential Oils

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Saving plants to use during the winter is vital. If you are going to use them for cooking or teas, you can simply dry them down. But if you are wanting to use them for more medicinal preventative use, you need a different method of storage. 
 
Tinctures, Vinegar, Glycerite, Honey, and Oil Extracts
Liquid extracts are made using the bark, leaves, or berries of the plants and soaking them for 4-6 weeks in liquid. This pulls the active plant ingredient parts into the liquid, concentrating them. When making a liquid extract decide what the use will be and find the quality herbs that fit for that use. 

  • Tinctures are made with alcohol. This is a great way to store the plants for medicinal user, as it keeps for several years when stored in a cool dark place. The concentrated liquid is also easier to get children to take when needed. 
  • Glycerites are made with glycerin.  These only store about a year but are sweeter than a tincture.  So, children may take it easier.
  • Vinegar is great for making a oxymel, which is a probiotic.  You can take these as is or add them as a dressing to salad or seasoning to vegetables. 
  • Honey infusion is perfect for a little sweet treat that is also beneficial to your health. Raw local honey has great benefits anyway. Infuse with something like elderflower and you have an immune boosting treat!
  • Oil is the best to use when making the extract into a salve.  Olive oil is the preferred oil for most skin care salve.
Salves
Salves are excellent for wound or rash care. Let the herbs soak in oil for the desired time (varies depending on the plant), strain off the solids, warm to melt bees wax and pour into jars. I will occasionally add essential oils, if I am making the salve with a specific purpose. My personal favorite is the calendula salve. It is great for healing the skin and promoting tissue growth. Another good salve is pine, which is good at drawing infection out. 
 
Essential Oils
Essential Oils are extremely concentrated and keep for nearly forever, IF THEY ARE PURE. They are very tricky to make however as slight differences in pressure or temperature or time can make a big difference in what active ingredients are pulled out. When an essential oil is made, it also pulls from everything the plant has gathered and stored. This means if there are chemicals in or on the plant they’re coming too. When making essential oils for medicinal use the minor constituents are very important. These constituents are also dependent soil health (more on that next week). 
 
Whatever you decide to make, be sure to label what it is and what you intended to use it for if your memory is full like mine is. 

Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.

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Plant with Purpose: Home Remedies

Plant with Purpose: Home Remedies

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A recent interest I have found is using plants for home remedies. The first book I purchased that has been very helpful and remains my favorite is “Medicinal Herbs: A Beginner’s Guide” by Rosemary Gladstar. It lays out how to know the plants, grow them, and use 33 plants. What I discovered is many of the “weeds” were beneficial! All I needed was to be able to identify them and know where they were naturally growing. If I knew that area was not going to be sprayed, I could just harvest them there! Win!! I didn’t have to take care of it! The best part is most of these are easy to grow and maintain once they are established. I like to get any seeds I can from Seed Savers if I cannot find them there, the next place is Amazon.  I try to get heirloom varieties, as they seem to start from seed and grow the best. They also are great for saving seeds for next year. 

This is still a growing area of my yard. I started collecting the information and trying plants when I was pregnant with my second, not thinking about the fact that having a baby in June greatly limits my ability to take care of the new plants. So I am still working on starting that flower bed….

Here’s what I have so far:
Aloe Vera – gel from the leaves soothes burns, wounds, and skin irritations. This one lives in my house and able to survive toddlers!

Calendula – has so many uses! My favorite is for wounds. It has amazing ability to stimulate cell repair and keep infections at bay. It is also a great for yeast overgrowth, it’s astringent and antiseptic which is great for gastrointestinal problems, and great at nourishing and cleansing the lymphatic system. I love this one! Super easy to grow and re-seeds easily. I keep this on in an old tank by the house.  

Dandelion – the leaf is a mild diuretic and can be used for bladder or kidney problems and is high in potassium. The root is a liver tonic and stimulates the production of bile. It does taste very bitter though. The flower can also be eaten.   You can find dandelions everywhere but make sure, wherever you harvest them from, they have not been sprayed!

Lavender – The flower is the mainly used, but the leaf can be as well. It helps to alleviate migraines and headaches, reduce tension, stress and insomnia. This is one I got going good last year from seed and then it was killed on accident…

Lemon Balm – calms nervous and digestive systems. You can add it to chamomile for nervous exhaustion. It is also great as a spice to flavor food! Also, easy to grow and will spread. 

Peppermint – best known for its digestive aid and relieving nausea and gas. It spread to wherever it is allowed, so keep it contained.

Plantain – I didn’t know about this one, but it is everywhere! I don’t plant it because it comes up wherever there is blank dirt. It draws toxicity from the body and has properties that help check bleeding! I mix this one with calendula into a salve and use it on all cuts or rashes. 

Spearmint – milder than peppermint, but just as easy to grow. It is great alternative to peppermint for children and tends to have amphoteric properties (it moves the direction the body needs, stimulating and relaxing).

Yarrow – antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, and astringent properties. It is well known for healing wounds, bruises, and sprains. Make sure you find the wild version not a colorful hybrid. I found this one in my horse pasture!
 
Here’s the list of what I have coming:
Chamomile – anti-inflammatory and anti fever

Echinacea – aids in immune function, has antifungal and antibacterial properties

Elder – Rich in vitamin C! Great immune enhancer

Marsh  Mallow – Great from soothing inflamed and irritated tissues of the respiratory, digestive, and skin systems. 

Mullein – the leaf is antispasmodic and an expectorant (get rid of mucus). 

St. John’s Wort – strong antidepressant, antibacterial, antiviral and anti-inflammatory properties. Made into an oil, it is one of the best herbs for trauma to the skin, relieving pain and promoting tissue repair. 

Valerian – used for stress, tension, insomnia and nervous system disorders. 

Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.

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Plant with Purpose: Herbs

Plant with Purpose: Herbs

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Another way I chose which plants to start growing regularly was what do we consume the most of (excluding garden plants). HERBS!! I love to season food with home grown herbs and spices. So naturally I decided to grow them. The easiest accessible place for my herbs was right off my front door, but how to keep the dogs from destroying them? Old mineral tubs!! Or you can use any old container really. This allowed me to be able to move the plants as needed too! So what do I grow?

Basil – several varieties are available with slight differences in flavors. This is one that is an annual, BUT it does readily re-seed. In Nebraska it is difficult to get going from seed outside, but it is easy to take the seeds from the plant in the fall and start them in a pot inside then transfer outside once it is warm. Harvest the leaves as the plant grows, leaving leaves below so it will continue growth.

Parsley – This on is a biannual. IF YOU GET THE CORRECT VARIETY. Harvest from it the first year by continuing to cut leaves as they grow. The second year let the plant go and mature to seeds, as the leaves are bitter tasting. This does mean you will need 2 plants that will alternate years. I finally found the correct variety last year, so this spring I’ll let you know if it overwinters in the pot. 

Oregano – I have yet to get this one to come back in the spring, but I have it in a large pot above ground. It is however easy to get a cut going from the mature plant, for the next year. Oregano spreads very easily, so make sure it is contained. 

Sage – This does well in a pot and comes back! I was shocked honestly. It will grow to a bush size if it has the space. 

Rosemary – This one might overwinter if you have the correct variety and have it in the ground. It has also proven slightly difficult to start from seed, so I’ll get back to you on the specifics to make this one the best….

Thyme – Again so many varieties! Also still perfecting the growing of this one…. It does start fairly easy from seed but needs hot weather before it really takes off. 

Dill – Annual, but self-seeds so easy! Harvest what you what for the seeds but leave a few to drop back into the soil for the next round. I will often have 2 batches per year. 

Cilantro – Another annual that readily self-seeds. Only cut 1/3 of the plant at a time when you harvest the leaves. Leave a few seeds at the end to let them fall back to the ground. I will often have a spring and fall harvest with this one as well. 

Wanting a community to lean into? Join the FREE Courageous + Purposeful Mommas group! This community is for the Mommas, mommas to be, in the midst of raising, and kids grown, looking for tips on building your family up and providing for them through natural methods. Tips include: gardening, bulk buying, caning,/preserving, livestock, homesteading, and home remedies. Your family is precious, and this group is to help you gain the knowledge and tools to keep your family well and not reliant on outside professionals. Remedies and tips are easy and simple for the busy momma, time is precious after all, including pregnancy, birth, young kids, and illness. Trust your Momma gut again! This community offers the resources + community you need to help get started on your journey and prepare for whatever future you envision.

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