Picking mineral-rich "weeds" like
dandelion, clover, chickweed and plantain is a great way to round out your
nutritional intake during the spring, summer and fall. Doing this is
harder during late fall and winter when there's a dearth of new growth,
but there is a way to enjoy the vitamin and mineral-rich nutrition and
preventative health benefits of wild plants all year round: Put them in
storage!
Pills in a Jar
There are a number of
ways you can store various crops, including the nutritious weeds that are
first to come and last to leave in the yard and garden. But why not go a
step beyond putting away food and create your own multi-vitamin and
mineral supplements to help keep you healthy and well-nourished through
the winter months? After all, nutrition is more than just calories; you
have to have the right building blocks in the form of vitamins and
minerals, too. That's one reason why people spend big bucks on
multi-vitamins, but if you've got weeds in your garden you don't need to.
Many plants can be
frozen or dried and stored for winter use, but you can more fully enjoy
the benefits of your weed "vitamins", as well as know they're safe from
dust, moisture, or power outages, by storing them in tincture form.
Tinctures are
basically ready-made tea in concentrated form, but since water-based
extracts of herbs (typical tea) won't keep for more than a few days in the
refrigerator you should create your tinctures with a vinegar or alcohol
base. I like to seal mine into sterilized glass jars so that I don't have
to worry about whether they'll keep all winter long or whether a bottle
that hasn't been sealed might get contaminated. The heat that comes from
processing them in a hot-water bath also speeds up the solvent process
that extracts the vitamins, minerals and phyto-nutrients from the plants
into the vinegar. If you didn't subject them to heat at all you'd need to
turn the tincture jars over periodically, letting the ingredients mix, for
six weeks or more before they were ready to use. By sealing them in a
hot water bath you can get away with just tucking them into the
refrigerator or a cupboard and using them as needed.
Dig it Good
The first time I ever
dug dandelion roots was in the middle of a huge dandelion fight. What had
started as innocent flower flicking turned into a full-on battle with
whole dandelion plants, roots and all, being tossed back and forth. I
might not have participated if I'd known that I was basically throwing
multi-vitamins; lobbing a little vitamin A, B and C at your buddies
doesn't sound like half as much fun as just throwing flowers.
We were lucky with
our dandelion pulling back then, because the soil was very loose and the
plants very healthy; their robust roots came out of the dirt with the
stems, looking for all the world like upside-down Easter trees. Odds are
good that when you head out to dig dandelion roots for a vitamin and
mineral tincture you're going to have to put more work into it.
While some people
recommend digging dandelion roots with a full-size shovel, this can leave
you with a pot-holed moonscape in no time, where once you had a yard or
field, and makes it hard to get a close-up look at how healthy the plant
is before you dig it up. I find that digging dandelion roots with a sharp
hardened steel hand trowel is much easier and, in the end, gets you more
root for less effort.
