every spring provides us with just the sweetest opportunity to embark upon a cleanse
so whether you're deciding to actually embark upon a fast of sorts or whether you're just
cleansing your spirit spring invites us to invoke that kind of clearing and that kind of healing
and you know after a long winter it can feel particularly amazing to kind of shed those layers
to reignite sort of your passionate involvement with your health but also with the natural world
and the amazing thing about spring and what makes it the traditional time of cleansing is that all
of the spring greens come back and what's so incredible about these spring greens now one of
the many incredible things is that so many of them are natural cleansers and healers for our body
and uh almost all of them are weeds so a lot of these herbs that are traditionally used as spring
cleansing plants are just growing wild around your house and probably around your neighborhood
and there's a lot of these different plants so that includes dandelion violet chickweed and the
one i wanted to talk about today is chickweed so chickweed is one of my favorite spring cleansing
herbs and particularly because it's so proliferate and i'm actually here this is the cow pasture
right behind my house and um this is a prime place to get some chickweed because chickweed loves to
grow out of manure so if you have a garden and you've tilled in some manure you might find
chickweed just springing up everywhere chickweed is pretty easy to ID once you get the hang of it
it's got a smooth stem and leaves and it's got opposite leaves here on the stem
and also has a little flower at the top and his scientific name is stellaria media
stellaria meaning star and the flower itself actually looks like a star
and if you look at it it seems as though it has ten petals but it's actually five petals deeply
divided and it gets these really great little wing buds coming off the side that's not a botanical
term but that's what they look like to me and so lastly one of the easiest ways to know that
you've got chickweed and not something else that might fit that profile is even though the stem
is very smooth if you look at it closely there's actually a line of little hairs that travels up
just one side of the stem and then it switches to the other side right at the top and that's like a
key clue that what you've got is chickweed so chickweed is a diuretic it's particularly helpful
for cleansing our kidneys in a very very gentle way it's also traditionally used to curb appetite
which is very interesting that it has that sort of uh history to it and it's a spring cleansing herb
it's also a vulnerary so it is really healing for our tissues that's what vulnerary means so
topically it's a really important skin healing herb and one of my favorite ways
to do that is just to take it to chew it up if i've got a a rash or hives or um a small bray gym
chew it up make a chew and spit poultice and i just stick it right on there and it's so
cooling and so soothing so just like it'll do this for our external tissues it'll do that for
internal tissues as well so really great for just healing our digestive tracts especially if you
have anything like ulcers it's very cooling very regenerative in that way
chickweed is also considered a blood cleanser in appalachian folk terms and basically what that
means is it's helping our body in its natural process of elimination and the term in the
western herbal world is a alterative so you might hear those two words interchangeably alterative
and blood cleanser but chickweed is a is a premier blood cleanser and my favorite way to really get
it into my spring diet is just to eat it i mean I eat tons of it i have whole salads that are
just chickweed i throw it on my sandwiches i make pestos chickpea pesto is so so good
and it's really super high in a lot of vitamins and minerals so much so that is
actually a traditional convalescent food so this is some of the first food that we would have fed
people who had been bedridden for a long time who were recovering from a long illness and
one of the grandfathers of Appalachian herbalism is an Alabama herbalist named Tommy Bass and one
of the things that he said that I just loved is he's basically said that chickweed can help you
with anything that ails you but not because it's a cure but because it provides so much relief
and I kind of loved that cows are moving uh i love that because there's something about chickweed
that has that feeling of relief i think one of the reasons why i'm so in love with this plant
is because of its energetics it's so sweet it's so nourishing but it also has that sort of that soft
supportive feeling that feeling of like ah relief like the relief of yes my body can do this natural
work to cleanse itself yes i'm nourished once more um yes spring has returned like ah the relief you
know the relief of finding myself here and finding the green world growing and finding that there is
abundance wild abundance everywhere i look so this is chickweed and i hope that this beautiful plant
finds its way into your world into your medicine making and maybe into your spring salads as well