Tomorrow morning I will (eek!) awaken at 5am in order to prepare to leave for the Northern California Women's Herbal Symposium. It will be my first sojourn thusward. Expect a full report, pictures included, upon my return. Here is a blog that my friend Sasha posted about her experience there in May.
Pick up any herb book and read about comfrey (Symphytum spp.) and you'll learn that it is the no-brainer go to herb for healing broken bones and damaged tissue. I had no experience with this herb personally until less than a month ago. I had noticed what I thought was the plant growing wild in a friend's garden earlier in the spring, but wasn't sure until it flowered this summer. Then, at a medicine making party at another friend's house I came upon it again in her garden. I knew that I should make a salve out of it- having a little one in the house, not to mention a very physically active partner, it seemed like good medicine to have around.
I had brought along some fat that our friend Robert, who is the butcher at our local food co-op, had rendered himself from locally raised, grass fed cows. I had recently read this excellent post from Shawna at Weed Dance Farm about the superiority of using animal fats when making herbal salves (as compared to vegetable fats like olive oil) and was very inspired by it. I had been scheming for weeks about how to get my hands on some when Robert showed up at gifted us with a quart jar of it, saying "I don't know what you'll use it for, but..."
The idea of using fat rendered from local animals makes sense to me on many levels. One- It hasn't, like olive or jojoba or many many other fats often used in herbal medicine making, used up lots of fossil fuels being picked, processed, packaged, and shipped from across the country or the world. The rancher drove the cows to the co-op, Robert took it home and rendered it, then drove it over here (along with some amazing home brewed kombucha and pickled eggs!). Two- It's making use of a part of the animal that us modern folk tend to discard. Props to Robert for making the effort to save the fat and then taking it home and doing all the work of rendering. Three- it's how our ancestors made their herbal salves. It was the only thing available, and it made sense to use it in this way. I truly love doing things that I know my ancestors did (if you're not aware of the Primitive Technology movement, check it out! Wish I had more time for stuff like that). Four- I don't have to add a second base, such as beeswax, to make it solid at room temperature. Five- the fat felt absolutely divine on my skin. Slippery, soft, soothing, melting.
As I held the comfrey leaves in my hand that day, I could see and feel why this herb has the effect it does on damaged tissue. The fibers are very firm and there seems to emanate an energy of strength from the herb. In many of the geographically diverse traditional cultures where comfrey was used it was referred to by some version of the same name: knitweed, boneknit, boneset. Today science tells us that this special plant contains allantoin, which seems to promote cell multiplication, thus causing wounds to heal more quickly. It's high mucilage content also soothes the area. Here are Kiva Rose's thoughts on comfrey.
Okay, so I chopped up the leaves very finely and poured the cow fat (which I had heated on the stove top into a liquid state) over it in a jar. When I got home I set it on a spot on the porch where it could get plenty of sunlight during the day. The warmth causes the herb to infuse into the fat. I would usually let the herb steep for a month, about one moon cycle, but about a week after this Graham fell and knocked his pinky knuckle cap down to about the middle of his hand. His hand was incredibly swollen, and at the hospital they popped the cap back into place and gave him a removable fiberglass cast.
When he got home we strained out a bit of the comfrey salve and began applying it to his hand every day. A few days later we picked some fresh leaves and applied them as a poultice which he kept in the cast over night. Well, the next morning we saw the most dramatic improvement in the swelling that we had seen yet, and his range of motion was greatly improved. Graham is a chef and our livelihood depends on his hands' ability to make delicious food for our community, so we are very grateful to comfrey for providing so rapid a recovery.
(And on a related note, here's a post by the same Shawna about how comfrey cured her son's broken toe. All of her blogs are awesome: here's one on fermented herbal ales, and here's one on using herbs in milk.)
My herby BFF Sasha over at the Kitchen Witch just posted a blog documenting the medicine making party she and I had over at our lovely friend Jaime's house last weekend in Nevada City. Check it!
Oh and there at the end Sasha has posted a picture of the medicines I made (we did some group and some individual projects). They are, from top to bottom, St. John's Wort in apple cider vinegar, hops in vodka, St. John's Wort in whiskey, thyme in local raw honey, then to the right calendula, lavender, and roses in witch hazel, and to the left comfrey in local free range cow fat (more on that coming!).
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