Show 263: Blueberry

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
The name down to the clan, the clan to the.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Hey, y'all, welcome this week's show. I'm gonna do a
couple of medicinal shrubs today, and that's because the first
one is such a short entry. It's really a unique
and interesting plant. It's called The Latin name is Thymus praecox,
which means mother of time. Now this is not a

(01:54):
plant that is native to my region, but it has
been natural in many ways. It can be used similar
to time. Time, the herb we use in cooking, which
is very antiseptic and disinfected and has anti viral properties
and expectorant properties. Time is like my go to when

(02:19):
I have a chest cold, especially you know, I have
asthma developed at the age of five. It's hereditary and
it does have environmental triggers. When I'm in an area
where I'm allergic to something like I am today, my
nose is itching like crazy. I have no idea what's
causing it, but anyway, I get either asthma or just congestion.

(02:43):
It's not necessarily spasmodic asthma. It's what you would call
inflammatory and congestive. My lungs like kind of get inflamed
and swell up, especially by the bronchials, and I get
a lot of congestion. Time is my go to. I
will go to the grocery store. Normally that would be
food Line for me, but sometimes Low's Grocery Store that's

(03:04):
another North Carolina chain or Ingles, but usually it's food Line,
And I go to the Mexican Food Style and there's
a brand called Badia that does really really good herbs
and spices, culinary herbs and spices for like nine nine
cents an ounce. I mean it's like super cheap. Yeah,
you can go online and you could buy a tincture

(03:27):
of Time. You could buy bulk time from an herb
company and pay ten or twenty dollars for an ounce,
or you can go to your grocery store and the
herbs are probably gonna be fresher because there's more turnover.
People are buying coming in there every single day buying.
You know, the herbs are coming in fresh, and you
can just go to the I mean, you could go

(03:49):
to the normal baking aisle and buy like you know,
Spice Islands or one of those brands. You can pay
a whole lot more. There's no sense in doing that,
just go to your Mexican section. Look for the Mexican brand,
usually Badia, but there are a couple brands of herbs
and spices. Get a pack of time. I do the

(04:10):
same thing with a regano basil. Let me see what
all herbs I buy there? And now I use these medicinally,
I don't just use them for cooking, and I do
quite like the taste of time, and cooking time is
Thyme and onion are like the perfect combination to bring
out the flavor of chicken, of turkey, sometimes certain types

(04:35):
of fish, any kind of meat, pork, beef, Tyme just
enhances that flavor. Love time. It really is one of
my favorite herbs. Parsley all by there if I don't
grow it, which I do grow a lot of parsley
bay leaves. Definitely Saffron. They have saffron literally legit saffron
for like super cheap. I mean it's just like it's

(04:58):
a small amount, but it's still a whole lot cheaper
than you'd pay for the same small amount elsewhere. They
have some good curry mixes, They have whole spices, They
have aniseed, clove, cinnamon, so many things. So Corey inderseed
deal cheap. I'm talking ninety nine cents. So if i

(05:20):
think I'm coming down with a cold or I've got
really bad allergies, I need a decongestent. I need that
expectant quality, and I also want something to help prevent
a sinus infection or bronchitis. Time is like a go
to for me. So I go and I get just
a little pack of Time for nine nine cents. Swing

(05:43):
by the ABC store, grab a bottle of vodka, come
back home, put the Time in a jar, pour the
vodka over it, or even just like pour a glass
out of the bottle and put the Time in the
bottle of vodka. Cap it up, and you know it
takes well. Most people will say it takes thirty days
for a tink sure to get to full strength. You

(06:05):
can start using it almost immediately. I mean within twenty
four hours. There's going to be enough time all or
the extract the oil of time in that vodka that
you can start taking a sip of it once an hour,
tea spoon an hour. It's gonna last you probably a
full month before you finished. Well, even if it only
lasts you a week or two, because to get another
bottle started. It is my go to, I'm telling you,

(06:28):
and it has. It has helped so many times. I
even when I get my Swedish bitters, and I make
a big batch of Swedish bitters, which you know I
take every day, sort of as an anti viral or
a tonic, however you want to look at it. Good
for digestion, good for so many things. I'll add a
nine nine cent pack of Baby of Time to it.

(06:51):
If I have a couple of dried mull and leaves,
I'll throw them in there too. It makes the sweetish
bitters even better for my specific needs, which are generally
lung related or allergic. But anyway, this plant called Mother
of Time is very interesting. First of all, Mother of
Time is a shrub. It's not like a little little

(07:14):
herb like your little time plants, but it's very very similar.
It smells very similar, it looks kind of similar. They're
closely related. According to Plants for a Future, it says
the leaves and especially the central oils contained in the leaves,

(07:34):
are strongly antiseptic, deodorant, and disinfected. The plant can be
used fresh at any time of the year. It could
be harvest so it comes into flour and either just
stealed for the oil or dried for later use. So
while it doesn't have all the uses of true time,
it's really nice to have on hand. And there's absolutely

(07:55):
no reason why you couldn't plant this ornamentally is a
little shrub by your walk or something. I mean, you're
going to get a lot of the benefits of time
and in sometimes sometimes this way, sometimes time can be
a little too strong, especially if we make an essential
oil or you know, distillation and the mother of time.

(08:19):
Time as prey coox is not quite as strong. And
then also it's a much larger plant, it's more hearty.
Time can be a little tricky to grow sometimes depending
on your environment, this one will grow fine. You can
use a lot of it, and you can use its
disinfectant and deodorant and antiseptic properties really in the place

(08:39):
of like lysol or chlorox. I mean, you know, if
you're using it, I mean not as a bleach, but
if you're using it to disinfect, this would be a
really good one. And mosquitoes don't like it, so oil
of Time is really mosquitos and flies don't like it
at all. I would absolutely recommend looking into time as
prey cox you are a coox mother of time, and

(09:02):
get them some growing on your property. I mean it's
it's and you can use it also like you would
use time in cooking. It's not gonna be a strong
it's a good, really good plant to have a long round,
especially if you live where you have a hard time
growing time. Time can be tricky. It's kind of like
lavender doesn't like wet feet, does like more of a

(09:25):
cool environment. But if it's impartial shade, we do well
in warm temps. It's just, you know, it's sort of
a tricky one, but it's I consider it going to
be one of the essential herbs, and God willing, I'll
be able to keep getting this, you know, really super

(09:47):
cheap time from the grocery store because I really do
have trouble growing time in my environment where it rains
two hundred and seventy days a year or snows or
you know whatever, and we have some really hard freezes
I have. I have trouble with time and lavender. It's
just it's I live in a rainforest, a very damp environment.
But they both grow great in England. So if you're

(10:11):
you know, more of a maritime environment without the extreme
I guess swings in temperature, maybe it'll do a little
bit better. Also, like lavender, it's kind of hard to
keep in a flower pot. Both of them just really
do better in the ground. And it's uh, you know
it's Basil is also the case. So many people tell me,
you know, I bought a little plant from the store

(10:31):
and I you know, it got black spots or rot
and it died. And it's like, well, you know, it's
good to keep a few flower pots of fresh herbs,
like in your kitchen window if you have a sunny window.
If you don't have a window that's getting like six
seven eight hours of sun a day, forget it. It's
just like going work. You're gonna end up getting mold

(10:53):
and mildew on that plant, or it's gonna rot because
it got too wet. In that case, find the sunny
spot in your yard. Especially with basil, I mean, just
grow it from seed. Yeah, not all the seeds are
going to germinate, but you're gonna get some plants. You're
gonna get some basil. Same through time and lavender. Lavender

(11:15):
is especially it really does not like wet feet. You
want a good draining soil, but times kind of in
the middle obviouls sly time would be in the middle
of those two. It'll tolerate a little shade. It doesn't
need like super full sun, but it does well in
the full sun. It really does better in partial shade

(11:35):
in my experience. But it really cannot stand standing in water.
None of those plants can. Oregano is a little bit
hardier than the others. It can take a little bit more,
but still it's a Mediterranean plant. It does better in hot,
dry conditions. It doesn't cool wet conditions without a doubt.

(11:58):
So now let's get onto the kinym. The kinem that blueberry.
The A, C, C, I, n U M. Sixty varieties
of blueberry have document used herbal medicine, so there's absolutely
no lead need to list them all. Okay, So blueberry

(12:20):
is a member of the aircacier family. The Aircacia family
contains several poisonous shrubs that we've talked about. We have
talked about azelien, we have talked about lamb kill. We
have talked about or what's that also called kalmia. We've
talked about rhododendron. We've talked about heathers, yeah, and how

(12:45):
sometimes they have even hallucinogenic properties, narcotic properties. Blueberry is
the pretty safe cousin of all those kind of useful beauty,
absolutely beautiful, but somewhat toxic plants, sometimes extremely toxic plant

(13:05):
in the case of Kalmia that was used by the
Cherokee to commit suicide in a really brutal fashion. Blueberry
is not gonna poison you unless you took a lot
of it. Blueberry is not gonna make you sick. It's
not going to make you hallucinate. There are also certain blueberries,

(13:31):
the ckenam that are called cranberries. However, those are two
different plants. Again, they are somewhat related. There's also billberry,
my word, there are several. Okay they think you know billberry. Gosh,
there's one more on the tip of my tongue anyway,

(13:55):
another basically variety of blueberry. Now where I live up
in the mountains, we have the most wonderful wild blueberries.
I absolutely love these things. They're what some people call
buckshot blueberries, or some people call them rabbit bird's eye
blueberries or rabbit blueberries. They are They're just the tiniest

(14:16):
little blueberries. They like to size a buckshot essentially, and
they grow all over the mountains, especially at the higher elevations.
You'll get up there, you'd be on the wind swept peaks.
There be eagles flying around. They're eating the blueberries too,
of course, anything that eats the blueberries. And I mean
they'll eat rabbits, so eat mice, so eat squirrels, you know. So,

(14:38):
but they'll just grow straight out of the mountain, you know,
straight out of the rock. And the flavor I mean
is so intense because you know, they're not getting fertilized,
there's no fertilization whatsoever. They're growing straight out of solid rock.
They're high end, you know, minerals. They're high in acidic content.

(14:59):
The the sugars are very developed because they're in the
intense sun and there's just these little shrubby things. And
you get up there, like five thousand, six thousand feet elevation,
even a little lower, maybe three to four thousand. You
get out there maybe around July, and if you can
get off trail where they're not a lot of people,

(15:20):
and you want to, of course, be sure. There's no
prohibition against harvesting the blueberries. You don't want to be
on the Blue Ridge Parkway. You want to be more
in the National forest or in private property. Of course,
if you have permission, take a bucket, go up there.
And I mean these little bushes will usually yield thousands
of berries. It's not like, you know, the big bushes

(15:41):
were just a few big blueberries that are cultivating somebody's field.
I mean they have hundreds that you can just strip
them off by your hand and just fill your bucket,
and the flavor is amazing. I mean, it's beyond If
you think you've tasted blueberry, you owe it to yourself
to go to a high elevation in July. And it

(16:02):
could be the Appalachies, it could be the Rockies. It
can be anywhere. You can find a good mountain where
somebody says blueberries grow, and you can go out and
the cousin of blueberry, well, billberry, there's one more and
sometimes its berries can be red. It's on the tip
of my tongue. Grows a lot in Canada. But anyway

(16:23):
you go out and you find these plants, you'll know
it by the obovate leaf. It's like oval shaped, and
of course the berry it looks like a blueberry. It
smells like a blueberry. The flower sort of has that
aircasier bell shaped to it if you see it in flower.
If you can get there before the birds, get yourself
a bucket of those blueberries. You're talking like the most

(16:47):
intense berry flavor you've ever had. About the same time
the blackberries will be coming in the raspberries. Berrying in
the mountain is absolutely fantastic. If you can get enough,
you can make wines. You can make jams, you can
make jellies, you can make blueberry muffins. If you want

(17:07):
to do it with the Cherokee and such, you used
to do, make pemmican. Dry them out, dry them to
hydrate them, dry them in the sun, and mash them
up with a little fat and ground nuts. Yeah, seriously,
bear fat, tallow, whatever you got, ground nuts, that's pemmican.
That's what people used to live on in the winter
or in journeys. It's it's actually quite good. It's sort

(17:29):
of you put a little dried beef or dried meat.
It would have been like, you know, bear meat or
venison or something. It's like a cross between beef, jerkey
and fruitcake. I know that sounds bizarre, but it's actually
quite good. It really is quite good. Make some real
blueberry pancakes, make some blueberry syrup, I mean, fantastic, fantastic stuff.

(17:52):
And it doesn't only have to be in the mountains.
There are also blueberries that grow in the swamps. Swamp
blueberries are actually really really good. They're not as good
as the one that grow out of bare rock at
like five thousand feet elevation, but swamp blueberries still have
a ton more flavor than cultivated bushes that you know,

(18:13):
are fertilized and watered, and you get those big plump
berries that just don't have a lot of flavor. They're pretty,
they're certainly more efficient. You get, you know, a pretty
predictable number to a pint, and you know you can
sell them by the pint. Wild blueberries are like night

(18:35):
and day to cultivated blueberries. It's the only way I
can tell you. And there are some good blueberries, So
you can cultivate. If you grow blueberries, if at all possible,
try not to fertilize them or watering. Let nature run
its course, and you're going to have fewer berries, smaller berries,
but better tasting berries, and probably a few less issues

(18:58):
with plant diseases as well, because when the plants get
a lot of water and you know, they just well,
it's like somebody who ever eats, they get weak, they
get fat, and they get susceptible to disease. So the
blueberries in resource southern fields of forests listened to them

(19:18):
as the billberry tribe. And the first one was they
mentioned American cranberry. This is not, to the best of
my knowledge, is not the same plant that we eat
as cranberries in at Thanksgiving. This is not the cranberry
cranberry sauce up in the Northeast. This is actually more

(19:42):
of a blueberry, and it grows in the swamps of
North Carolina. And yes, it's quite good. Now I could
be wrong. It could be that the plants just grow
differently in the South than they do with the North.
I honestly don't even know what the Latin name is
for the cranberries, like ocean sprea he does or something.
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, But they definitely don't look

(20:05):
like the same berry in the North Carolina swamps. Okay,
they also had sparkleberry. That's that's a very common name
for some of the wild members of this family. He
found it from Charleston down to Florida, so that's more
of a Southern variety wordle Berry is another one. Yeah, interesting.

(20:30):
He talked more about the root and bark of these plants.
It contains its trendency, and it's good for diarrhea and
excess in minstrual bleeding, basically stuff like that. And so
sometimes is the root is stewed in milk and given
his children for diarrhea. And really, you know, that's probably

(20:51):
the most common use of the blueberry plants. As far
as the leaves and bark. However, somewhat like raspberry and BlackBerry,
they can be you know, tone offying to the uterus
of different definitely different properties. But King's Medicinal Kings American

(21:13):
Dispensatory of eighteen ninety eight says Action's medicinal uses in
dosage blueberry or the chinum and really a whole family
is diuretic as stringent. The fruit is very useful eaten
alone with milk or sugar in scurvy, dysentery and derangements
of the urinary organs. Yes, high enviyme sea good for scurvy,

(21:35):
goods stringic good for dysentery, derangements of the urinary organs,
good for all bladder and kidney issues, and from there
on out says the berries and roots bruised and steeped
in gin form an excellent diuretic which has proved a
much benefit in dropsy and gravel. Diuretic means removes excess fluid.

(21:58):
Used to be very common to see blueberries include in
gin formulas gin recipes. So you've got blueberries and you've
got at least juniper berries in there, and really the
two together are just very powerful for the urinary and
kidneys and all that. It's a he said it was

(22:23):
good for drops and gravel. We said that so kidney stones, bladderstones,
et cetera. Dicocia of the leaves and bark of the
root is a stringent maybe used in diarrhea or is
a local application for ultcers, lukeria and ulcerations of the
mouth and throat. So also very good for mouse sores
and swollen tonsils and all kinds of stuff like that.

(22:46):
They mentioned wortleberry as having similar properties. We never see
those in stores anymore. Those are those are wild. You're
gonna find those in the wild. Combined with you ver
RSI was good for a lot of minstrual issues. Peterson
Field Guide the Eastern and Central Medicinal Plant States. American

(23:11):
Indians use leaf tea as a blood purifier, also useful
for colic and labor pains, and as a tonic after miscarriage.
Fumes of the burning dried flowers were inhaled for madness.
Now I have no idea what that means. Petersonfield Guide
is a fairly modern publication, but they don't define what

(23:35):
kind of madness this is and why fumes from the
burning dried flowers would help with it. I can only speculate.
You know, this family is I mean this plant, the
blueberries and the whorl berries and the billberries and all that.
It is in the same family as your other members

(23:58):
of the Racahia family, which some of some of them.
In fact, most of the toxic ones have some psychoactive
properties and some sedative and narcotic properties. So if you
inhale fumes of dried, burning blueberry flowers, what would it

(24:21):
do to you? I don't know, Probably not a lot.
But if it has that somewhat narcotic, somewhat sedative, somewhat trippy,
always say, slightly hallucinogenic property as some of the heathers
and all that. Could it have an effect on, you know,

(24:48):
the brain and the emotions and all that. I don't know.
I'm not going to suggest in any way, shape or
form that you experiment with it could be quite dangerous.
But you know, if that's something to interest you, do
your own research. You know. The honey made from the
flowers of these plants generally carries the same properties, but

(25:11):
in smaller, less less toxic doses, with a few exceptions
with the heathers especially, and there's one I can't remember
the name of it. I think it's actually called wild time.
Believe it or not. The honey made from it can

(25:31):
be hallucinogenic and cause death, so not always. But maybe
honeymade from blueberry flowers, I know I've had that before.
I've had blueberry honey before. Had I don't remember it
having any side effects, but you know, it may be
slightly sedative. Maybe a safer way to go with that
if you wanted to check it out. But anyway, blueberries

(25:55):
are fantastic, especially the wild ones. I look forward to
them every year. My grandfather grew blueberries. I have blueberries
in my yard. I have blueberries on the mountain behind
the house. I know where I can go with the
swamps when I'm down east to get blueberries. They're fantastic
blueberry wine. I mean, so good, so good. Anyway, y'all

(26:15):
have a good one, and I'll talk to you next time.

Speaker 3 (26:19):
The information in this podcast is not intended to diagnose
or treat any disease or condition. Nothing I say or
write has been evaluated or approved by the FDA.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
I'm not a doctor.

Speaker 3 (26:30):
The US government does not recognize the practice of verbal medicine,
and there is no governing body regulating herbles. Therefore, I'm
really just a guy who studys IRBs. I'm not offering
any advice. I won't even claim that anything I write
or say is accurate or true. I can tell you
what earths has been traditionally used for. I can tell
you my own experience, and if I believe in herb
has helped me, I cannot, nor would I tell you

(26:52):
to do the same. If you use an herb, anyone
recommends you are treating yourself, you take full responsibility for
your health as their individuals, and no two are identical.
What works for me may not work for you. You
may have an allergy of sensitivity and underlying condition that
no one else even shares and you don't even know about.
Be careful with your health by continuing to listen to

(27:14):
my podcast or read my blog you read it. Be
responsible for yourself, to your own research, make your own choices,
and not to blame me for anything ever.

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