MEDICAL MONDAY - Herbal Medicine for Preppers - Growing Herbs for Headaches

Hey, welcome this week's show. Today we're going to talk about some herbs you can grow for headaches, very common complaint, one that just about everyone's going to encounter. And you know, this is part of your survival garden because if you couldn't get what you needed from the drug store, you'd have what you needed on hand. And remember all this information is from my book, Growing your Survival Herb Garden. Be very pleased if you'd buy a copy, because that's how I make my living. So here we go. Six herbs and one tree for headaches. You know, headaches have various causes. They can be different natures. You know, you can have a tension headache that's different from a sinus headache. A maagrain is different from a virus related headache, stress headaches. I mean, there are a lot of different reasons you might get a headache. So it's good to have a few of these herbs on hand. A real go to is peppermint and spearmint the mint family. If you want to know a lot about the mints. I did a whole big podcast on the Southern Appalachian Herbs podcast a week or two ago, and they have really great medicinal uses really good anti bacterial properties. One of the main reasons you might want to have these on hand is according to Thomas J. Elple, who wrote the book Botany in a Day, he's a serious outdoorsman, primitive skills guy. He will pick peppermin or spearmint, and before he takes a drink out of say a creek, if he doesn't know it's clean, maybe contaminated with bacteria and such, he will take the mint and rub it in his hands and choose some in his mouth and then drink the water. And he says it makes the water safe to drink. I'm not going to recommend that, but I think he knows what he's talking about and actually has several books on herbal antibiotics and herbal anti virals, just various serious clinical herb books. The mints have been shown to have very strong antiseptic properties. I feel pretty comfortable with that. So for headaches, though, what we would normally do is use an essential oil of peppermint diluted with olive oil. It's just really important. You don't want it to burn your skin. Obviously, that's something you can have in your medicine cabinet, but for actually, you know, growing the plant and using it when needed. You can take fresh leaves of the plant and rub them on your temples. You can take a fresh plant tincture of mint and rub it on your temples. Again inhale it through your nose also seems to help a lot. The way you make a fresh plant tincture. I discuss a lot in herbal Medicine for preppers, home starers, and permaculture people. My other book that is sort of you know, the first in this series. It's the second in this series. You take the leaves real fresh, you know, nice summer day in the morning before the noonday sun hits them, but after they dried from the morning dew pick them. You get a blender, gone going put in the highest proof alcohol you can get because you're using a fresh plant, and the alcohol will pull water from the plant. It will actually dilute the tincture and cause it to rot. So when you're making a fresh plant tincture, it's definitely worth it to get the Ever Clear or something higher than eighty proof or forty percent. If you're only going to use this topically, and I have to stress only use it topically, you could use rubbing alcohol, but you need to write on there because it's good, can be very poisonous. You get put the alcohol in the winter first, turned it on, drop your herbs in there, slap the lid on, let them. You know, liquefy essentially in the alcohol. Put it in like a mason jar and put a lid on it. Stick it in a dark cabinet, and in a couple of weeks you got a fresh plant tincture. So you could obviously make a rigor tincture using the dried herbs, but they're not as strong in essential oil. So if you want quick relief from headache, that's what you'd want to do. The thing about mints, you'll always hear from any gardening show, gardening book, any master gardener, or whatever. They're going to warn you don't plant mint, it takes over. Well, that's not necessarily true. I have mint that grows in my yard. It has not spread. I do simply mow around it when I cut the grass. It doesn't spread. Granted, it's sort of in a shady spot, a damp spot. It's not ideal for growing mint. So keep that in mind. If you want to keep your mint, you confined to an area. You can plant it in an area that doesn't really like, where it doesn't really thrive. It's hardy and weedy enough that it would do fine, but it's just not going to get out of control. I also plant mint in pots, very easy house plant essentially to grow, so you always have some fresh mint. I like to use it culinarily as well as as an herbal medicine. Really, I use it in a lot of ways. You might be surprised because we think of mint as like a sweet herb, something we'd have in cookies or peppermints or something like that. But actually mint is delicious. Put together with like tomatoes, onions, garlic, it loses its mintiness and really becomes almost more like an a regano or a marjoram flavor. In fact, just the other day I was watching an old episode of Justin Wilson here, the old Cajun chef that used to be on television. I really loved his show, and he recommended using mint in place of bay leaf. He said he would give it the same flavor, but it wasn't as strong as bay. So it's a really interesting herb to use in that way. So yeah, you can grow it in pots. You could also grow it in the ground, but put in barriers. Essentially, it essentially sends out like runners, you know, like almost like grass does, and it spreads by growing that way. And if you dig down, you know, around your bed of mint, and you put in some boards or some old roof tin or something, you'll keep those from spreading. You can do what we do with bamboos. If if you want to grow a bamboo that's not a clumping bamboo, it's a running bamboo. It's called root trimming. It's actually I guess these are rhizomes really, but those runners, just like you'd have with grass. You plant it in an easily controllable area like a circle or a square bed, and then just a couple of times a year, take an edger and go around on the edges and cut all those runners so they don't spread. You need to cut them before they spread, actually, you know, obviously, because if you cut one off on one side and one on another side, they just comes two different plants. So you need to be a little careful with that. But I honestly, mint is a plant you can use so much so often. It smells great. It actually helps your pole, mosquitoes, and several biting insects and pests that would eat your vegetables. I don't know why anyone has a problem with mint spreading, So what if mint takes over, It's just more meant to enjoy. I mean, really, I like plants like that. Plant them once and you don't have to work about them again. It's a perennial. So let's talk about the well the specifics were really peppermint and spearmint are the strongest, well, the strongest commonly used mints in herbal medicine and culinary uses. Penny royal and water mint are actually stronger, so strong they can actually be dangerous. So I'm really just talking about improved peppermint and spearmint. The essential oils have been developed over time thousands of years. Literally, the ancient Greeks and Egyptians were breeding mints to get a stronger minty mint, your scent and taste. Mint was very important in ancient Greece. It had a lot of religious significance. So these are essentially hybrid plants. If you grow them from seed, you're probably not going to get a very strong mint. What you need to do is buy or or get a plant from a friend peppermint or spear mint that has a good strong mint smell and flavor, take cuttings from it and root it or pull off part of their plant and just transplant it, you know, the way it spreads. It's pretty easy to do, and you probably gonna find it pretty easy to get our wild mints that grow around here in the mountains. Like apple mint is a nice one, very very mild, night and day indifferent, so definitely you want to take cuttings or divisions on this. And mint is hardy from USDA Zone three B to eleven, so that is essentially Alaska to Florida. You're probably going to be all right. And there are about one hundred and sixty varieties of mints. There are actually lemon mints and chocolate mints, and mints are fun to grow, they're easy to grow, and they kind of a lot of great uses. Lavender is another plant where you want good, strong essential oils. There's a few varieties of lab under there's basically your French lavender and your British lavender, and they have the pros and cons, they have their strengths. I am particularly allergic to lavender, so I go with the British version that has less strong scent, and of course in my climate it does a little bit better as well. Lavender really does not like wet feet. Lavender is originally a Mediterranean plant. It likes sun, It likes dry soil, it likes a rocky soil. It can be a little hard to grow for that reason, but it is perennial and once you get it started, you got it. I mean it's coming back every year. It's going to be a nice, big bush, really nice. Lavender is particularly good for tension and stress headaches because it has a mildly sedative effect just from the scent. If you live in a rainy area, you might try to grow lavender in pots and just you know, control how much water they get. They do like a lot of sun, like I said, a light, well drained soil, sandy, gravelly soil, never overwater it. Lavender can grow up to about two feet tall. Most people love the plant. I mean, it is a very nice scent, and again it's an interesting culinary herb as well. But you'd use lavender just the way I described using mint, and it can be very effective for many people. It does have a low germination rate, only about fifty percent of the seeds will sprout and then So that's another one that's good to take cuttings from an existing plant. But you know, if you cold stratify your seeds, they only need a couple of weeks of cold stratification, start them inside. You're gonna get about fifty percent germination, which isn't too bad, but you've got to remember a lot of those plants are going to be kind of weak and a lot of them won't make it. If you can take clippings from an existing plant and root them, you're going to have a lot more success. The English lavender is hardy from zone five A to eight B, which is why I like it because I live in zone five A. Actually I live in zoned five B. They've changed it just a little bit, but anyway, eight B that would be from like New York to South Georgia, so it's just down a pad's range, seriously. But the French lavender is far less hardy. It's only hardy from eight eight to nine B. So that's the one you would want to grow if you live in a hotter area, if you live, you know, anywhere north of I don't even know an anywhere north of the well, the south, because I'm thinking, you know, like the coast of North Carolina, central North Carolina is going to be eight A, even into parts of Virginia. Anything north of that, forget it. The mountains where I live. Like I said, I'm at five B and nine B is going to take into Florida, North Texas, so you know, it's not as broader range. For French lavender, cama mil is an excellent one. Camra mil would be actually my preference over lavender for us stress, for attention, headache, because like I said, I'm allergic to lavender and I'm not allergic to cammel camomile. It's a wonderful plant. If you've only experienced the tea in the story, you have no idea what cammel smells like. The actually comes from a Greek word meaning earth apple. The flowers of cama mill, especially when they're freshly dried, you know, sealed away, and you open it up, they smell just like apples, like apple candy. Actually wonderful, wonderful scent, very relaxing, especially good for fussy babies and colic and all kinds of stuff like that it's a good digestive herb, but it's a mildly sedative, tension relieving herb. It can help with sleep and it can definitely help with tension, headaches, stiff neck, you know, all kinds of stuff like that. The two versions, there's row and cam mil and there's German camramel. Roman is perennial. German camra mill is an annual. Other than that, they're very similar. They both like full sun, moderate water. They don't like wet feet. Roman camameal grows a bit of a half foot tall, the German grows up to about two feet. Very pretty white daisy like flowers, real yellow cone. This is one you can put in an ornamental garden, no problem. You can grow at indoors, you can transplant. It's really easier just to sow the seeds directly in the garden. These this one grows pretty easy once established, little self seed. I'm talking about the annual, the German Camramel. The perennial will actually self seed too, but it's you know, the same plants are gonna come back every year, so put them where you're gonna want them. The other one, the annuals, could tend to walk around your garden a little bit. Uh. It could also be propagated by root division, you know. How however you do it. Once established, these are weedy, they'll grow. They'll take care of themselves, no problem. Roman camomeal is hardy from zone four eight to nine. Big big range and German cannon meal can grow be grown as an annual anywhere because it's going to be killed by the frost. So no matter no matter how hot or cold it is, you can grow a kamma meal. Feverfew is a plant especially good for migraines. Fever Few is an excellent anti viral herb. It's one you're going to want to have on hand anyway you look at it. It helps break a fever, it has antiviral properties, and it's great for migraine headaches. It the flowers are daisy like. They actually look a lot like camomeal. So if you plant the two of them close to each other, put a little tag, you know, marking one is feverfew and one is camameal. Feverfew is perennial. In some areas it may be biennial, but generally it's considered perennial. It likes full sun departential shade. It needs moderate water. Seeds should be stratified, but they they'll germinate it very quickly. I mean just one week of stratification. And as I've said before, cold stratification is either storing your seeds in the freezer or a cold refrigerator or just sowing them in the garden in the fall and letting nature take its course. It's just a matter they need some cold, so you can you know, you can grow it indoors and move it out as a transplant, or you can just sew it in the garden early spring or even in winter. Whatever. It does like a fertile soil, so it does like a better soil than lavender. It does like a well drained soil. It doesn't like wet feet either. Really very little care on's established can be propagated by cutting some root divisions space about a foot and a half apart. Because of the growth pattern, they will grow about two feet tall, so a little taller than Cameron Mills sometimes. And it's hardy from zone five eight to nine B, so that's a pretty good range as well. Ginger is you know, the common culinary herb. It's in all your Asian cooking. It's in ginger snap cookies. It's really good for headaches. It's not effective for everyone, and it requires growing conditions that everybody doesn't have in the garden. So I mean it likes. It's a hot weather plant, really easy to grow in pots of ginger and turmeric, which is its cousin, can easily be grown in pots. It has antiforal properties. Like I said, it's delicious and food, but it's only hardy from zone eight B to eleven. So that that's you know, that's South Georgia. You know, I'm more into the East coast. If you're somewhere else in the country, just draw a parallel line across and figure out what I'm saying. That's that's like, well, yeah, that's gonna be like Middle Georgia actually and ben south. So is a very hot weather plant. But like I said, easy to grow in pots. All you have to do you can buy some ginger from the store, a fresh ginger, and the what do they call those? I guess it's a rhzome. No, I can't remember, but anyway, the root of it looks like a hand sort of and it has these little knobs and from those little knobs from each one ideally would grow a little green shoot. Well, when you buy some fresh ginger in the store, you can see a little green patch or a little green bump on some of these knobs. Use the part of the herb that doesn't have the green stuff on it. Just go in and eat it whatever way you want to use it. But save those, save the ones that have the green spot, and just shallowly plant them in a flower pot. Put it in a warm spot, good sun. I think a little sandy, well drained soil steams to do better. And you're going to have ginger growing pretty quickly. And it's easy. It's really easy. Or if you've got a greenhouse, you know, you can just use that. Rosemary is excellent for head. Rosemary is good for both tension, headaches and migraines against the essential oils applied to the temples and the forehead. Scent of fresh rosemary is inhaled that helps with headaches and a lot of emotional issues. Actually an even memory. It can be dried and used as a tea. It can be made into tinctures. It can be used in essential oil diffuser whatever. Okay, Rosemary is easy to use and absolutely delicious. I mean, it's one of the herbs I use all the time. Rosemary is perennial, but it is a hot weather Mediterranean plant. It's frost tender, will be killed back by freeze in warmer climates. It's evergreen. It'll grow sort of like a bush sort of. It likes full sun light, watering. It does best in hot, dry climates, well draining soil, rocky soil, sandy soil. It will grow into basically a woody bush up to three feet tall. The leaves are green, the flowers are blue. It grows best from cuttings, and the seeds also have only about a fifty percent germination rate. I have actually never been able to grow rosemary from seed. I will plant a whole pack of seeds, a couple packs of seeds. I get one or two spinley plants that come up and just die. So I think you're probably best actually, if you were to go like I know, at Low's Grocery Store, which is a North Carolina chain. I'm sure this is true of most grocery stores, and certainly hardware stores like well Low's Hardware or you know, whatever plant center you've got in your area, right, Now you can just go down and get little potted rosemary plants for maybe three four bucks apiece, and you can take enough cuttings from that to fill a bed full of rosemary. So easy one to get going. But it's only perennial from seven to A to ten B. So if you live anywhere cooler than seven A, which is again I'm going to orient this to basically anywhere north of Washington, d C. I think that would be about accurate. You would want to grow this in a potted plant. As a potted plant, grow it in a container. And the tree we're going to do is the absolute classic willow that is the original source of sallason, which was made in synthesized and turned into aspirin by the Bear Drug Company and revolutionized medicine. So willows the salic species. Again. I've done a whole podcast on this and articles. If you go to my blog Southern Apalachian Herbs or j justsin Carrol dot com, type in willow or salex and you will see I think there's like thirty seven varieties of willow and another twenty or so of osure. Popular popular and populous has populus is popular But anyway, that has similar properties. Birch also has salason. Super easy. You can just take willow bark and chew it if you're in the woods and you've got a headache, or you've got muscle pain, you got arthritis, you sprain your ankle. I mean, it's aspirin. It's a natural aspirin. You can make a tea of it. It's simple. And the great thing about willows, especially like the weeping willow species, if they're planting in the right orientation around your porch, it's like natural outdoor air conditioning. My grandfather was big into doing stuff like that, you know. So willows are super useful for a million things, from making baskets and fish traps to herbal medicine. So definitely worth learning your willows. Other herbs that are good for headaches include violets. Violets also contain salacin, passion flower, skull cap, valerian. Theirs are all somewhat sedative. Muscle relaxing herbs say lower blood pressure, good for tension headaches. Lemon balm can be used just like mint. It's in the family, but it also has a sedative effect. Lnden flowers, or the flowers of basswood, as we usually call it in the United States. Really good butter bird is an old, old folk recipes. Some researchers saying it could be potentially carcinogenic. I'm not sure, so I'm just gonna say, hey, if you have butter bird growing on your property, look into it. Borage is really good. Borage has a flavor like cucumbers. You're gonna enjoy putting that in salads and such, cooking with it. Also good for headaches. This spice, allspice seems to relieve especially tension migraine headaches. Catnip which is also in the Mett family and has a slightly setive effect. Horse radish, the hot spicy horse radish, that's so good, and you know brown mustard on a hot dog or whatever. Horse radish is great for sinus headaches. It opens the sinuses. If you've ever had some horse radish or wasabi, you know that opens the sinus. Lemon, verbena, sage, verveine, and probably half a dozen others. But if that ought to give you enough to choose from and seriously great to have on hand, because you know, anything that's gonna be good for a headache, it is probably gonna be good for a lot of other different kinds of pains and such as well. So y'all have a great week. Please buy my books if you are so inclined, and I will talk to you next time.