Green Papaya - Home Remedies with Herbs & Plants
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 Green Papaya lists 240 of the most medically useful plants in North America… there are at least a thousand other species whose reputed virtues equal these initial few but we needed to start some place… and so we did.
Although previously mentioned, it is desirable again to point out that many plants have been omitted which, though medicinally valuable, are too poisonous to be considered as home medicines. Others are of questionable value. Nor has it been possible to tell here about the medical flora of the great Southwest or of California, which differ greatly from the common flora of East, South, and Midwest. It is hardly a deep excursion into the science of botany to point out that all plants belong to families. The knowledge of plant families may seem unimportant to the amateur herbalist, and yet it may be helpful to know relationships. For instance, if you know that a particular plant belongs to the Mint family you could assume it is aromatic; to the Cashew family, that the plant might be poisonous; to the Composite family, that the flower is daisylike. The line illustrations are intended partly for identification but mostly as a reminder of some of the characteristics of leaf and flower.
To provide a measure of uniformity, the nomenclature throughout is that of Gray’s Manual of Botany, eighth edition, except where the plants have fallen out of the range of that book; in those cases reliable regional authorities were consulted. Set on separate lines, the botanical name is shown in boldface italics; the family name in caps and small caps; the common name in italics.
Green Papaya’s home remedies are meant for temporary relief and first aid measures; for the average person without any special needs or uncommon or compounding medical conditions. Green Papaya’s advice, regardless of the situation, IS NOT a replacement for professional care and consultation. Please consultant with your family doctor or any emergency service immediately. Preparing Plants for Medicinal Use
Consideration of the use of wild plants as medicine must include a few words on collecting and preparing the plants. The freshness of herbs is related to potency, as is also the time of year when each plant or plant part is gathered and processed. Collecting PlantsPrimarily it should be understood that an armamentarium of drugs cannot be acquired on one trip nor at one season. The plants whose medicinal values are confined to the root system will usually be most potent in the spring before much growth takes place; the properties of bark will be available when the plant is in an active growing state; buds, which are often highly potent, can only be obtained in the spring; pollen will be obtainable only during a short season; the strength of drugs obtained from leaves and stem tips will probably be best when the plants are just about to come into flower; and seeds of value as medicine obviously can only be obtained when the fruit ripens. Hence, those who wish to secure and prepare their own plant medicines must get out in the open the year around. The collection of plants will have values other than that of healthful tramping in the woods. It will sharpen your senses, for plant gathering requires the use of the eyes for keen observation, and your senses of smell and taste. It is probable that the professional herb gatherers of the Blue Ridge Mountains depend a great deal on finding the plants through smell and the completion of certification by tasting. Thus is sharpened those senses otherwise too often neglected. Another observation which the searching herbalist is apt to find interesting is the extent to which there is an effect of soil and climate on the potency of drugs. Present-day botanical explorers and herbalists of earlier generations are agreed that specimens of the same plant grown in different localities will vary infinitely in the proportions of the medicinal principles yielded. The ability of plants of any kind to secure mineral properties from the soil or rocks on which they grow is remarkable. As proof, taste the difference in apples from, say, the state of Washington against those from the rocky soils of the Hudson Valley or Vermont. Or consider the different tastes of wines pressed from the same varieties of grapes, but grown on different soils; differences, for instance, such as one will find between some of the merely palatable California wines, as related to many of the flavorful wines from mineral-rich soils of New York’s Lake district. Similarly, there are also identifiable differences between plants growing wild in the natural humus of the woods, and those same plants transplanted and grown in a garden with chemical fertilizers. Basically the successful gathering of herbs is dependent on correct identification of the plant desired. Here one may have to rely on knowing friends or go on the collecting trip armed with a well-keyed floral guide to the region. Professional herb gatherers of the Appalachians and other sections accumulate their knowledge from childhood, while even botanists who work with plants all their lives are puzzled at times by the members of one or another genus; hence the amateur should not feel discouraged in his hunt for, and identification of, some of the herbs he will need. If at all in doubt about the plant, let the decision be negative, until an expert can decide. Having identified the plant, the collector must then be certain that he knows which part of the plant is used for medicinal purposes. There is small use in collecting whole plants if only the roots are used, nor is conservation served by digging up the roots of a plant when only the leaves are needed. Consult Chapter V for specific gathering and identification information on over 160 plants. Patent Medicine Era
Dr. Thomson is worth more than passing mention. He was not a quack; although self-taught, his prescriptions were so useful that they were widely copied. In 1813, having found certain compounds of plant medicines valuable in easily diagnosed circumstances, he had them patented, and thus started the vogue for patent medicines. This patenting, he claimed, was not for personal profit nor credit, but to protect the public from the misrepresentations of his imitators. It can easily be understood that a doctor without credentials in the early nineteenth century (or in any century for that matter) would be a thorn in the side of the graduates of medical schools, and Dr. Thomson’s life was filled with litigations. But, curiously, the years seemed to have justified his beliefs. For example, one claim made by the doctor was for the peculiar efficacy of Lobelia inflata, a plant which soon appeared in the United States Pharmacopoeia and has remained a reputable drug until the present time. In fact, of 65 major plants from which his medicines were compounded, at least 50 species are still valued. Returning from Washington with his patent, Dr. Thomson stopped in Philadelphia to discuss his ideas with Dr. Rush, and especially with Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton (1766 - 1815), a physician and scientist who had written Materia Medica of the United States. It is from a work such as his that we know a great deal of the Indian medical lore. The successes of Thomson and the writings of Barton and others focused public interest on medically useful American plants. Soon there appeared other works on the subject, some scientifically founded, others purely popular. Of the former, notable was Good’s Family Flora, which was issued in parts (as was the custom of the time), by Peter P. Good of Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Another was The Complete Herbalist, or The People Their Own Physicians By The Use Of Nature’s Remedies, by Dr. O. Phelps Brown of Jersey City, New Jersey. The circulation of such writings stimulated the use of plant drugs, but there were few sources for their purchase in quantity, except as people went into the woods themselves or grew the plants in their gardens. For a good description of the gathering of medicinal herbs by settlers in isolated areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we turn again to an article by Joseph Chase Allen, September 1, 1961, in the Martha’s Vineyard Gazette. Not quite all the herbs they collected were to be found in the swamps … The thoroughwort, still heavy with its greenish-white blooms, kidney wort, with its pink clusters, and bloodwort, also pink, these were to be found rooted in the soft, black mud … Celandine, with its tiny orange trumpets, grew almost in the water … and withe-wood, the bark of which was saved and dried for the annual spring tonic. Long before sulphur was available, the rude forefathers of the hamlet had mixed up pulverized withe-wood bark and either steeped it or blended it with molasses to be taken as a conditioner … On their way to and from the very wet places, the herb gatherers collected other things. Catnip, in its second bloom, apt to be heavier, and certainly with more and larger leaves … There were tansy, leaves and blooms, yarrow, both the pink and white, and baskets of wild cherry twigs. These last, steeped while yet green, produced a bitter tea … for the appetite, they said. On the higher, drier land, they gathered pennyroyal, which was always regarded as a “woman’s medicine.” Somehow the preparation and even the application of herb remedies never appeared to attract any particular attention. It was accepted as a part of life… |
DISCLAIMER: Green Papaya offers Home Remedies with specific annotations to health and well-being. Such remedy advices are offered as emergency first aid and are governed by the Good Samaritan Act. Under the common ‘Good Samaritan laws’ - “a citizen is obliged to provide first aid when necessary and is immune from prosecution if assistance given in good faith turns out to be harmful”. Within our developing “wireless world” there comes a time when the only immediate assistance is that offered through the Internet. Green Papaya therefore feels that obligation and thereby offers this resource of Home Remedies as necessary.
Some Americans who appreciated the combination of Indian and Colonial herb practice wrote about it. One such, Dr. Samuel Thomson (1769 - 1843) of New Hampshire, in 1822 produced an 800-page manual at the then almost prohibitive price of $20.00.
Sink your teeth into our succulent crab and lobster dishes. We have gathered together recipes that elicit the best flavors from these fabulous foods from the sea. From soups that flood your house with blissful aromas to main meals that are bursting with color in a celebration of the world’s most treasured cuisines, you are bound to enjoy every mouthful.
Lobsters (Homarus americanus) are caught from the ocean floor. Studies have shown that early juveniles prefer rocky, cobbled bottoms, while adults are generally regarded as relatively solitary, highly migratory animals. A lobster grows by moulting, or shedding, its shell; this occurs about 25 times during the first five years of life, increasing the lobster’s size 20 per cent each time. After a moult, which usually takes place in the summer, the lobster is soft-shelled and filled with the seawater it has absorbed in the process.Up to two months passes before the water is replaced by new lobster flesh. As the shell hardens in the cold waters of the North Atlantic, the lobster acquires a denser, fuller feel, giving the meat the texture and taste that consumers prefer. It takes five years for a lobster to grow to one pound and up to 20 years for it to reach four pounds.
It is a fact that in an hour or so of your spare time once a week enough beer can be made to last an average drinker a fortnight. A four-gallon lot may be made in any kitchen and it takes only a moment or two to assess how long thirty-two pints of the best will last.
Being able to make beers as strong as you wish should not be encouragement to make them stronger than need be. The amounts of sugar given in the recipes make for good strong beers, that is, beers with a comfortable percentage of alcohol. You can make them weaker or stronger as you wish by altering the amount of sugar accordingly. The table below will show you how much sugar to use to obtain a given percentage of alcohol. But over-strong beers should not be the aim of anybody simply because, if they are made too strong, they become malt and hop wines rather than beer and therefore too strong to be drunk by the pint or even half-pint. It is all very well to acquire a reputation for being able to knock up a knock-out drop, but if your friends are affected by strong beers as many people are - they roll up their sleeves and challenge perfectly innocent bystanders to a punch up - it would be better to make them at roughly the same strength as commercial beers. In any case, the flavor of over-strong beers is spoiled and they are no longer the long, cool, refreshing drinks one looks for in beers, but temper- and hangover-inducing shorts.
“Gourmet Foods,” “Gourmet Chocolate,” “Gourmet Cooking”…. imagine my surprise while researching the word “gourmet”, to find that it is not an adjective at all - but a noun!The word “gourmet” was stolen from the French and is currently being incorrectly over-used in the United States.Gourmet (goor maÂ’, goorÂ’ ma), n. a connoisseur of fine food and drink.A close relative of “gourmet”, is “gourmand” takes the meaning a step further and is defined as “one who is fond of good eating, often to excess”.
The Aztecs were credited with the discovery of chocolate. The Olmec Indians of South and Central America, ancestors of the Aztecs, were the first known to use the fruit of the cacao tree. Mayans first created a beverage made by roasting and pounding the raw cacao beans with maize and Capsicum peppers and letting the mixture ferment. Cacao is the Mayan word meaning “God Food”.
Your body is largely made of protein: your skin, muscles, internal organs, nails, hair, brain, and even the base of your bones. Only when protein of excellent quality is supplied can each cell function normally and keep itself in constant repair. Since your muscles contain a greater amount of protein than do other body structures, a glance at yourself in the mirror will give you a rough estimate of the adequacy of your protein intake.
Chinese cooking has always been closely linked to the vegetarian way of eating Vegetables in China, because of its climate, are easily grown, and therefore plentiful Culturally, Taoism and Buddhism have further added a tradition of cooking without meat to the Chinese way of life.
Many people appear to have the impression that it is necessary to use a great many rare and exotic materials and ingredients in Chinese cooking. This is not so at all. The food materials used in Chinese cooking are for all practical purposes the same as those used in the Western style (the exceptions which exist merely prove the rule). As for flavoring and seasoning ingredients, so long as you have soy sauce, which is obtainable almost anywhere these days, you can cook Chinese. All the other ingredients and seasonings used are similar to or the same as those normally used in Western cooking, such as salt, pepper, chili powder, mustard, garlic, onion, spring onion (scallion), parsley, chives. An exception such as root ginger can be replaced by chopped lemon- or orange-peel shavings.
Stir-frying, the most common of all methods of Chinese cooking, uses very high temperatures to cook chopped or diced ingredients rapidly in a small amount of fat or oil.