Fire Cider Awareness Week, we offer you a few recipe variations of this much-loved traditional herbal remedy. It has been a staple of herbalists for generations.

Vinegar-based tonics like fire cider and vinegar shrubs have been making a come-back as of late. What was once perceived as an old-fashioned remedy is now becoming a practical pantry staple in contemporary kitchens. And rightly so – there are many wonderful health benefits of herb-infused vinegars. Fire Cider, for instance, with it’s potent combination of warming and immune-stimulating herbs is fantastic for helping you stay healthy and strong during cold and flu season. Garlic and onions, with their sulfur-rich compounds provide an anti-bacterial and anti-viral punch, while cayenne, ginger and horseradish are warming, circulatory herbs that get your blood moving. Fire Cider is useful if you feel a winter bug starting to take hold – take a small glassful of it every few hours to increase your resistance.

One of our most beloved herbal elders, Rosemary Gladstar, published her now-famous fire cider recipe decades ago. Rosemary has been teaching about traditional herbal medicine for most of her life and has freely shared many of her recipes with the herbal community with a profound effect. One of her most popular and iconic recipes is Fire Cider, which is a simple recipe that is easy to make at home. It is as follows (shared from the Sage Mountain website):

Fire Cider

• 1 part Garlic
  
• 1 part Horseradish
  
• 1 part Onions
  
• ½ part Fresh ginger
  
• Cayenne to taste (just a few grains will do)
  
• Honey to taste
  
• Apple Cider Vinegar
  

Chop fresh garlic, onions, and horseradish into small pieces. Grate fresh ginger. The amounts and proportions vary according to your particular taste.. If unsure, start with equal amounts of the first three ingredients and roughly half part ginger the first time you make this; you can always adjust the flavors in future batches. Chop enough of the first four ingredients to fill a quart jar approximately half full. Put in wide mouth quart jar and cover with apple Ccder vinegar (keep vinegar about two to three inches above the herbs). Add cayenne to taste (just a small amount or it will be too hot!). Let sit two to three weeks. Strain and discard spent herbs. Add honey to taste (add the honey after you strain the rest of the herbs).

Watch a video of Rosemary making Fire Cider here.

There are many ways to be creative with this recipe and make it your own. Some people add in herbs like turmeric, schisandra or hibiscus. Some add in fruits. I enjoy this red-hued recipe of Juliet Blankespoor.Mountain Rose offers a recipe that involves rosemary, and also suggests additions/substitutions such as peppercorn, rosehips and burdock. Kiva Rose developed a variation for sensitive stomachs, sans cayenne peppers and with beautiful additions of herbs like hawthorn and basil. The possibilities really are endless.

So, here’s to this lovely and practical remedy, and to our herbal elders who have passed it down to us from generation to generation! We thank the countless guardians of traditional herbal medicine who have made the knowledge of recipes like this available to us all.

Submitted by Felix Lufkin.

Milkweed’s names in other European languages – ‘silk weed’ in German, ‘little cotton’ in Spanish, and ‘wadding herb’ in French – reveal the utility this plant once had to settlers. Her fibrous outer bark can be hand-twisted into a very strong string known as cordage. This can be doubled up into virtually unbreakable rope. Gathering and preparing cordage is easy – each stalk can make a foot or two of yarn-thick, 50+ lb.-test string. Two-ply milkweed cord can easily hold hundreds of pounds – a friend of mine once towed his truck with pinkie-thick cordage. Considering the sweat shop origins of the string we use daily, couldn’t we stand to take our relationship with local fiber sources more seriously?

Milkweed fiber cordage


If you’re a visual learner, check out this or a number of other videos on Youtube: Making cordage video on youtube with Chad Clifford.

Gathering stalks: For cordage, harvest the dead, black milkweed stalks in the fall on a dry day after their fruits have ripened and the seeds are drifting away. Don’t wait until the winter as the weather will break down the fibers over time. Shake the seed fluff while harvesting to help spread them. If the stalks are damp, dry them before working. Tie unprocessed stalks together to store indefinitely.

Milkweed seeds


Processing stalks: To remove the fibers from the stalks, crack each stalk between thumb and fingers all the way along their length so the stalk can be split lengthwise, into two or more parts, using a finger. You’ll see the black, fibrous, papery outer skin, and the hard, pale, brittle inner bark. If we try to peel the fibers in strips from the inner bark, they will break into small lengths. The best way separate them is to crack the stalk, core side up, along its whole length in inch long increments with your fingers. Carefully peel each chunk of inner core out, piece by piece, yielding as long strips of fiber as possible.

Processing fiber: Do as many stalks as you’d like, then gather all the fibers together and roll them in a ball back and forth (like clay) between your hands to remove the papery skin, which will flake off. This makes the cordage stronger. This fiber ball is great in tinder bundles for igniting coals.

Tease the ball apart into a yarn-like length of uniform thickness, half as thick and twice as long you’d like the cordage to be – from thread sized to shoelace size. Don’t make it longer than two feet at a time or it will tangle. Roll this yarn between your hands the way you’d make a clay snake, until it’s contiguous and uniformly thick. Move a bit here and there if need be.

Preparing cordage: Find the midpoint of the snake, and go a few inches to one side. Twist this between your fingers until it gets tight enough so it relaxes to a “support our troops” folded ribbon if you move your fingers together slightly. Twist the loop tight and pinch it with your non-dominant hand. Hold the string so its two halves aim outwards towards your other hand, at right angles to each other like the arms of the letter K – with a top one and a bottom one.

Twisting the cordage – in three easy steps:

• Take the top string with your dominant hand, pinch it an inch from your other hand, and twist it until its tight as your thumbs roll up (not down).
• Keeping it tight, bring the top string down to become the new bottom string, between you and the other string (not behind it).
• Then pinch the new juncture between the strings with your left hand, and repeat.

Keep going until one of the strings is running out. Then take another length of yarn like fibers, and twist them around the short end to incorporate them, then keep twisting. Being slightly weaker than the rest of the string, splices are offset from each other (and therefore not doubled up) by not folding the fibers exactly in half when you start.

When you want to end, tie a knot. Keep in mind you will end up with cordage half as long as your original fibers. By doing this technique, the cordage comes out 20 times stronger than the original fibers. Doubling the cordage up (2-ply) and flipping the directions so as not to undo the original twists, will make it 400x as strong, then 8000x, and so on. You can use a lighter to quickly burn off the small fuzzy hairs if the cordage comes out ragged.

Submitted by Henry Kesner of Herbstalk.

Hello out there. Let me start by stating very clearly that I am not an herbalist, nor do I claim to be one. However, I do love plants and those who study and practice herbalism. It is through my encounters and exchanges with friends and the herbal community that I have developed a deeper appreciation of our natural world and the power of plants that surround us.

That being said, there has been no greater teacher and guide to the herbal universe for me than my girlfriend, a practicing herbalist. We live together and through her daily rituals, cooking, tea making, and our conversations I have enjoyed 3-year crash course in herbalism.

It is from this perspective that I would like to present to you here on the Herbstalk blog, an ongoing series that I have lovingly entitled “Living with an Herbalist.”

I hope that my stories and observations will provide some insight, comfort and laughter to those who know, live with, and/or love an herbalist or herbalist-in-training. As you read some of my anecdotes, lists, realizations, etc., I hope that they may spark a story to share of your own.

a typical scene on the kitchen table


Part I: “Don’t Touch My Herbs”

First rule of Fight Club is “Don’t talk aboutFight Club.” The first rule of living with an herbalist is “Don’t touch my herbs.”  I know – it seems a little harsh but it is a golden rule to live by – no, survive by – when living with an herbalist. In any given day, at any given time there may be a new something bubbling, boiling, sitting, seeping, straining, or drying on your kitchen counter, stove top, or next to the sink.

As someone who tries to keep the homestead nice and tidy, it is very tempting to clean and compost all the variety of plant materials accumulating around the kitchen. In one, typical instance I once encountered what seemed to be two-day old tea mixture sitting soggy in a pan on the stovetop. In a quick couple of motions I had the pan in my hands and the tea remains into our compost container. It was a swift, noble attempt to get rid of clutter, or so I thought… Wrong!

a typical scene on the stovetop


No sooner did the saturated herbs enter the compost bin did my girlfriend appear in the kitchen in search of the said herbs in order to reapply water and regenerate her tea concoction. “Where are my herbs?…” she inquired. And with my hands still in the compost pail, she knew the travesty that had just occurred. “Hey! Please don’t touch my herbs. Never touch my herbs before asking…”

It was another good deed gone awry but in my guilt I learned something that fateful day. As all good herbalists will say, there are many ways to tease out the good, nurturing essence of every plant part. Herbal work does not have to be allotted a given time frame; it is at the mercy of the plant itself and what energy it holds. As someone who prides himself on eating everything on his plate, wearing out his clothes into rags, and in general avoiding waste at all cost, I too should keep in mind the enduring power and use of herbs – dried, wet, or otherwise.

I also learned that when living with an herbalist and you see something in the kitchen, say something. Simply ask, “Are you still working with these herbs?” Chances are that those herbs have something left in ‘em after all.

Submitted by Felix Lufkin

Milkweed in flower


Milkweed (Asclepias spp.) is a great wildflower to make friends with – offering a number of delightful, tasty and nutritious foods at many times of the year. She is a well-kept secret and it’s time more people got to know her better.

An early succession plant, milkweed seeds sail with the wind to new areas where landslides, fires, beavers, humans, or insects have recently killed an area of late succession forest. They provide habitat and food for many insects like bees, butterflies and spiders, as well as their predators. Many pollinators enjoy milkweed’s sweet nectar, and her leaves are the sole source of food for Monarch butterfly children (who make their own poison, not by concentrating milkweed’s sap, which is not poisonous on its own).

Milkweed stalks


Milkweed is a perennial herb growing 4-6 feet high. Each year her stalks poke out of the ground in the spring – smooth skinned with opposite, simple, ovoid leaves with smooth edges and reddish veins. Her sap is bright white, containing sticky latex, recognizable in spring from the wound of a gently torn leaf.

Flower buds appear in May as clusters of small pale green buds, maturing to large, plum sized clusters, pink to purple in color, each the size of a wild blueberry and looking like a small origami package. They open into firm and neat, white and pink, 5-petaled flowers resembling gummy starfish slightly smaller than M&Ms with a delightful, sweet jasmine fragrance.

Harvested buds


Once pollinated the flowers become tiny, pale green, gherkin-like fruits, growing in size to fat okra pods in August. Spiny and soft, they are filled with soft white unripe seeds, like spaghetti squash. The pods ripen later in the fall, getting tougher and when open reveal a multitude of fruits folded together – each a small tuft of silk with a brown and black seed attached looking like a flattened tick. As the pods die, the seeds drift out and can be blown great distances by the wind. After settling, the seeds drops off the silk, spending winter under the dead grass and hatching in the spring. Thus, the plant’s body spreads across the Earth. By November the above ground portion dies, drying to a pale black with grey and white streaks, bare of leaves, and stands as a skeleton stalk for a while before falling down to the earth again.

Mature milkweed pods


Most field guides warn about milkweed’s bitter taste and poisonous constituents. Sam Thayer, in ‘A Forager’s Harvest’ , clarifies this as a case of mistaken identity where foraging hero Euell Gibbons gathered a ‘mess’ of dogbane, and even after many changes of boiling water, pronounced it unpalatable. Since then, other authors have perpetuated this misconception. Thanks to Thayer, folks are rediscovering milkweed as a delicious vegetable as tender and tasty as spinach – requiring no special processing or boiling to remove bitterness (of which there is none), or toxicity (of which there is none).

Comparing milkweed to its toxic cousin dogbane is easy. Dogbane’s central stalk branches into several sub stalks, where milkweed’s is single and straight. Dogbane’s stalks are thinner like pencils and are green to reddish brown – while milkweed’s are thicker, like magic markers with green skin in summer and black in the winter. Dogbane’s compound flowers are more dispersed, empty and whitish yellow, while milkweed’s are pink and purple and fairly compact. Dogbane’s fruit is thin and long like vanilla beans, milkweed’s are thick and fat like okra. Dogbane’s leaves are thin, short and bitter where milkweed’s are wide, long, and pleasant tasting.

Milkweed flowers


Dogbane flowers


Milkweed is food – delicious cooked or raw, and safe to eat without any processing.

• Shoots: Young spring shoots and leaves, while floppy, are entirely edible and tender. They are great raw, in fritters, omelets, in quiches, or cooked any way you would asparagus.

• Stalk tips: The floppy tips and leaves at the top of the plant, when bendable enough to snap off, can be treated as above. As milkweed ages, her stalks and larger leaves become tough – so focus on the smaller leaves.

• Flower buds: Like broccoli, the buds are nutty and taste like spinach. Great as savory fritters, pickles, stir fries or soups. These dry well for winter use in soups.

• Flowers:  The sweet flowers make excellent infused honey, mead flavorings, sweet donut-like fritters, pickles, or a cooked veggie.

• Milkweed fruits: The unripe pods are excellent raw, pickled, cut and dried for winter use, blended for soups, battered and fried, or steamed and stuffed like jalapeno poppers. Keep harvesting them at any size until they become too fibrous and tough for your liking.

• Immature seeds and fluff: Inside the soft unripe pods is a whitish mushy mass which can be eaten out of the pod and reportedly melted down into a cheesy treat.

• Nectar: The sweet flowers are energy rich, can be fermented, and are a good trail food.

• Sap: After drying, chew the sap like gum for an interesting, nutty tasting nibble.

Milkweed, Part 2: String & Rope will be posted next week…

Happy January folks! Now that the new year is upon us we have five months to go until Herbstalk 2014!!! Our planning crew is raring to go and already getting things organized for the big weekend on June 7th & 8th.

We are officially putting out the call for all teachers who wish to offer an herbal class at Herbstalk, and for vendors who want to sell their plant-based products in the marketplace. We are also seeking like-minded businesses and organizations who wish to partner with us as sponsors of the event.

In addition to getting things up and running we are thrilled to share with all of you a teaser video which captures the spirit and fun vibe of Herbstalk… Enjoy!

As you know, at Herbstalk we offer a variety of perspectives on herbalism and health, with classes given by teachers who are deeply committed to herbalism and who are passionate about sharing their knowledge with a greater audience. Our goal is to create an event that will inspire, uplift, challenge, and call people to action. As an educational event we are committed to putting useful herbal knowledge into the hands of people who are ready to take it, use it, and make it their own.

We invite you to help us build a strong, connected, and supportive herbal community.

Our teacher application can be found HERE, and our vendor application can be found HERE. Please note that we must receive all applications no later than February 15th. We do fill up quickly so we regret that we cannot accept all submissions. There are more details on the applications, but please let us know if you have any questions.

We look forward to collaborating with you and to creating a memorable Herbstalk 2014!