Our Household Foraging Rack, and Recent Uses to Regain Health

Introducing our nutritional/medicinal dried goods rack! As you can see, it has spilled out on top of the shelving unit, below at the foot of the shelving unit (the bag contains pineneedle sprigs), and in the foreground, one bag contains more sumac berries, and the three tubs are also dried foraged goods. This doesn’t count the tub of dried pumpkin that was behind me on the table. Each of those shelves are two rows deep and get used in some way throughout the year whether in tea infusions, oil infusions, or added to cooking and baking. The mallet visible in front of the carbon monoxide detector (the light dot at the back of the bottom shelf) gets used to crush some of our dried foraging that we bring home, and it is resting on a box barely visible behind the bag, containing 8 small jars of oil infusions my daughter made.

Those infusions were originally intended to eventually make her own version of a natural body spray she buys from the healthfood store, but I ended up making a blend from them to treat a massive vascular/muscle tension migraine that sprung up out of nowhere on the poor girl a couple weeks ago. She had been taking a rest from her cup-a-day kombucha as her liver and kidneys kicked up a major fuss after almost 3 weeks on the regimen, and that rest had hardly been two weeks as her liver finally calmed down and her kidneys were still calming down, when the migraine hit alongside a series of events that literally landed on her like a pile of bricks within 2 days of each other! Work had suddenly gotten quite stressful for two of those days, including potentially losing 2 days worth’ of pay hours on the pay sheet (those weren’t lost we’d later learn, but it was stressful at the time for her), her horse got bit way too close to the jugular, with a very nasty bite from another horse. Both of us nearly freaked right out over that potential loss, then being told hardly 2 days later that if things weren’t working out for us at that barn, we were welcome to find another place! I’m still not sure I can talk to the barn owner after that statement, our horse nearly dies, and we are the ones being told to move! We are looking for places still. . .

So there my daughter was, with all this landing on top of her, and now a migraine so bad she was in tears and could barely think through it to do her job. We are a high pain-tolerant family, so others in her condition probably would not be working.

A blend of the oils from that hidden box on the shelf was an instant, literally instant, relief to the balled up muscles in her neck and at the base of her skull. Our Bella’s Oil blend was immediately useful in calming the temples and membrane on the forehead and down into her sinuses. When I learned the relief around the sinuses, I also had her use the oro-nasal spray several times, which seemed to pick up a secondary battle in her body prompting a discussion with her and her brother about their coworkers and the “vaxx”. It turns out, two of their coworkers had gone for boosters over the summer, one the Sunday before the migraine hit (which hit that Thursday). It’s been two weeks now since that discovery. The migraine is gone, but skull membrane bruising is a reality and thankfully, mostly healed up now. Another region of balled up muscle in the neck has been discovered and is being treated with this oil blend.

But this oil blend, Bella’s Oil, and the oro-nasal spray weren’t the only solutions. We also reached for liver and kidney supporting food too, mostly in the realm of green salad fixings, and foraging ingredients in salad-tea balls. Things like Dandelion, Burdock flower, 3-Flowered Avens, pine needles, mint, etc. We also gave her cardiovascular system some support as well with Hawthorn berry (that big green/white container in the back of the shelf above the mallet), cinnamon, cloves, and ginger too.

Her body systems are almost back to normal now, and we credit God our Great Physician for pointing out what He’d already provided to us both in knowledge and in stored goods, for her recovery. Meanwhile, another coworker of theirs has a wife who got rushed to the hospital with a bad case of Celiac-related illness, only to be waived off and sent home! I’ve told my kids to get this coworker to bring his wife to me so that we can work on eliminating the aggravating foods, and work out a support system for her digestive tract that will bring it back to functional health. I don’t know if they will come to me or not, but my textbooks God helped me pay for, have information on dealing with this condition. Your digestive tract must be working properly for food to be your medicine. So it often needs the natural recommendations first.

God has led us to knowledge from various sources old and new, that resulted in this storage rack and the resulting spill-over onto the floor. This knowledge isn’t just available for maintaining the health of my own family. As a Natural Health Practitioner with a focus on food as medicine, I am able to help you and others maintain or regain your health naturally, in a God-honouring way. Yes there is a cost involved, just as there is for other medical services out there. I had to pay for some of the knowledge God gave me as well. Scripture says the worker is worthy of his hire, from those who offer the knowledge to those who deliver the results of that knowledge. Teaching courses, publishing books, and making that knowledge available to others is something we pay for all the time in colleges and universities, such as the college where I got my NHP Diploma from. So don’t be weirded out by the idea of paying me to help you maintain your regain your health, naturally.

As my own Dad has pointed out, offering natural health using the means God has provided in the wild, is a combination of knowledge and services that he hasn’t found where he lives, and doesn’t think too many are offering out there. Indeed, most of the natural health textbooks I have, while they DO mention wild foods, often mention them in relation to their already harvested forms sold in healthfood stores, as opposed to actually going out into the wild (or even just your back yard) to bring them home.

My daughter wanted me to point out that pad of paper in the shelf below the thermometer readout. That pad gets used to make lists from older books we have on hand (as in, from the 1600’s or other eras), lists we compare with newer information, and some of which has been entered into my natural/medicinal wholefoods database, which is for sale with updates at a cheaper price. That pad holds some of those lists.

This rack represents almost 8 years of accumulated knowledge, learning, foraging and processing. As a tub gets low, we forage for more of it. If a tub gets too small for what we brought home, the contents move to a larger tub. The jar of pumpkin seeds up on the top shelf beside my coastal raccoon stuffy puppet, just got added to this morning from last week’s pumpkin efforts. I’ll be adding to that and probably a second jar when I do this week’s pumpkins. But I can’t start that today as I need to get up and bake more flatbread, do a garbage run, and other tasks today as well. So on that note, I should stop writing, and go get busy here.

God is Good!

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