Garden Medicine

  Fundamentally all life has the same requirements:  living things consume, respire, and produce waste.  One of the natural farming preparations I learned recently (see my post "Touching the Earth") is a health tonic that is added to other indigenous micro-organism recipes to strengthen the organisms and in turn strengthen the soil they live in.  Perhaps it isn't surprising that most of the ingredients are items we would use for our own health:  ginger, garlic, angelica, licorice.  Other possibilities include astragalus, burdock, curly dock, dandelion.  Their vital elements are extracted using brown sugar and alcohol.

The first step is to collect your ingredients:  you can find dried angelica root, licorice root, and astragalus root at any Chinese grocery.  There is usually an aisle devoted to dried medicinal herbs.  You may also find fresh burdock root for sale there.  Even better, dig its long tap root up out of your yard or field.  Burdock is a common weed in North America.  Learn to identify it, and know that you not only have a medicinal herb but also one tasty vegetable.  Learn more about the plant here  Burdock is one of my favorite things to add to stir-fries and homemade kimchees.



You first work with your dry ingredients, to rehydrate them.  Pack each one separately into jars one-third full, then cover each herb with a weak alcohol (10-15%) like rice wine.  Make two jars of angelica root.  Cover each jar with a porous cover like paper towel, cheese cloth, etc.  Let this sit for two days and the dried herbs will absorb the liquid and soften.

Now chop each of your fresh ingredients -- garlic, ginger, other ingredients like fresh turmeric, burdock root, or curly dock root -- and place them each in separate jars one-third full.  Now cover all your herbs -- the rehydrated ones and the fresh -- with brown sugar so the jar is two-thirds filled.  The brown sugar should liquify and melt into the crevices of the herbs.  This didn't happen for me my first time, so I used a wooden spoon to mix the sugar and herbs.  Now the herbs will ferment in the sugar for two weeks.

When this is done, it is time to fill the last third of the jar with a strong alcohol (25-35%) to extract the healthful properties from the fermented herbs.  The jar is covered with a non-porous lid this time (to keep the alcohol from evaporating).  Every day for the next two weeks, use a wooden spoon to stir the mixture so the herbs release as much as possible into the alcohol.  After two weeks, decant the liquids from all the herbs and mix the liquids together.  Store the liquid in an airtight container out of light. You can then add alcohol again to the herb mix up to 4 more times for further extraction.  The resulting liquid is a health tonic that is added in minute amounts to other preparations to stimulate the indigenous micro-organisms being cultivated. 

I would hazard (though definitely not recommending or prescribing) that this tonic would serve human health equally well and that a daily sip would probably do wonders.  Life is life, and we all consume together, respire together, and produce waste together.