Materia Medica Yarrow 3

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Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning folks I'm Dave Canterbury with self-reliance outfitters in the pathfinder school welcome back to our series in materia medica and the point we're going to discuss this morning is yarrow the problem with discussing yarrow

is that it's past its season for blooming yarrow generally blooms about May June timeframe so really the flowering heads are gone by now which is late July

one thing I would encourage you to do when you're making your materia medica is to list in there what time of year you find the plant flowering because that's important as well but again it goes back to can identify that plant when it's not flowering can I find that plant amongst all the other plants in the area when it's not flowering and can I recognize it well enough just by the leaf to make a proper identification because there's lots of leaves that look very similar I have a nice good sized yarrow plant right here that I'm going to show you a close-up on in just a minute that's only the leaf structure of the plant because the flowering head is now gone but it's mixed among lots of other plants and because the yarrow here has a white flower on it it could be confused by some people with Queen Anne's lace which is growing all around this yarrow but it's not yarrow we'll talk about Queen Anne's lace in another day alright so here's a close-up of our yarrow leaf so that you can see what it looks like and again the flower is gone and the stem is gone stalk here but we can use any portion of this plant from the ground up for our medicinal if we're using this for bleeding we can just harvest these leaves we can Masek ate them and we can pack them onto a wound in a poultice with a bandage to help stop bleeding or we can pack the wound it's also an astringent so it's going to help close that wound traditionally the yarrow was used for four main things medicinally the first one is bleeding again remember Matthew wood said cuts to the bones

Oh deep cuts is what you'd want to use Yara for shallow cuts there are other plans that are better like to heal all that we discussed yesterday and things like goldenrod that we'll discuss tomorrow it was also used as a sedative to help one sleep or to alleviate insomnia it was used for cramps within the lower digestive tract to help relieve stomach cramps and then it was also used to raise the body's core temperature to induce sweating to help alleviate fever and that's another one of those degree things and this plant is probably a third degree plant when it comes to cooling because it actually raises the body's core temperature and induces sweating which helps you cool down through evaporative cooling from the sweat coming out of your body so those are the four main things that this plant can be okay the next thing we need to discuss when we're talking about herbalism is we need to talk a little bit about the taste of plants because in traditional Chinese herbalism there are five tastes associated with plants you have sweet sour you have bitter and acrid and then you have salty and those five things can tell you a lot about what that plant may do both inside and outside your body depending on how you react to it now the other things that I look at the other two factors that I look at and they're closely associated with these five one of them is does the plant have Musil edges and slimy when I put it in my mouth because it's going to be lubricating if it is and the other one is is the plant astringent and a lot of plants that are sour or astringent and if it's a stringent it's going to be good for things like stopping bleeding and closing up your pores it's also going to be good for tightening and binding things inside your body if things are loose like you have diarrhea and you ingest an astringent it's going to help close things up a little bit and alleviate diarrhea so there are lots of other ways that you can look at plants to understand the possibilities what they may do for you other than just the obvious so once I've identified this plant

and I know that it's not poisonous even if I don't know exactly what it will do for me if I put it into my mouth the yarrow is a little bit aromatic and this may be different for every person but to me it's a little bit aromatic I can taste a spicy feel in my mouth which means it's going to be good inside my stomach it's not really bitter but it does have a little bit of an after bite to it but it is also very astringent it dried my mouth out almost immediately and kind of puckered me up a little bit not to the point of being sour but just at a point of being drying so that tells me that it's going to be something good for wound closure as well and generally things like that are also antiseptic in nature something that dries your mouth out like that immediately is generally an antiseptic in nature as well if you think about things like sage and you put that in your mouth and immediately dries your mouth out and sage is a very good antiseptic so you can tell a lot about a plan just by tasting the plant as well as understanding the chemical properties already if you're looking at a plant that you're not sure what it will do but you can readily identify that so we've taken a look at two plants in the last two days that are both associated with bleeding and tomorrow we're going to look at goldenrod goldenrod is another plant that's associated with capillary type surface wound bleeding and it's very good for that and the reason I'm kind of staying with some of these themes of common ailments is because that's what I want to concentrate on I want to look at what these herbs will do for us in the immediate sense like I said grab and go yesterday the 10 piece kit the whole you know three to four day survival scenario if I have to find something that will help me that's close by what's it going to do for me and what can I take care of that's going to be common if it's a burn a cut an upset stomach a sleepless night a headache those are the things that I want to look at and understand very very well and then I'll worry about the more complicated things later but when at first learning I want to worry about the things they're going to happen to me while I'm in the woods for a short amount of time okay I found a yarrow plant here factor several of them right here in this area but this is one that's just about gone right here so you can see the upper structure of the plant I'm going to pull this off of here and bring it up a little bit further for you can see it's got the same feathery leaves on it that we had out there in the field but let's look at the flower top itself okay it's got a white flower and a few petals left on here that's in a cluster at the top and this would be all white when it was in bloom but now it's dying off so you still have all of the same leaf structure on the plant that's just like the one that was basil on the ground basil leaves that were on the ground out there that we looked at originally but this has got the stem with the leaves on it and a dead flower as well so for identification purposes this may help you if you find something like this and you can readily identify and look at it you can see something like this you've got I want to show you this because if this is important stuff to understand I think when we're learning about these curves I'm going to back off here a little bit and what I want you to understand is I saw this driving by and the only reason I saw it driving by was because I recognized this flower you're not going to see those that basal rosette of leaves that we found out there in the open field in an area of high weeds like this but what you might see is the flower top sticking up and that gives you the indicator of hey there's yarrow right there and now I can go harvest it all right folks one Dave Canterbury self reliance off theirs in the Pathfinder school I appreciate you joining me here today for this quick video on yarrow in our series materia medica I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I thank you for everything you do for school for family for business for our sponsors instructors affiliates and Friends and I'll be back with another video as soon as I can thanks guys