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Home makeover, caveman style.

Coracle

I’m working on a long video/reality-tv style thing where i am using traditional skills (like bark tanning, spinning and weaving fibers, gathering clay and pit firing pottery, and such like) to renovate a millenia-old cliff dwelling in Appalachia.

youtu.be/eXdsHnuaOFI?...

Major flooding in Eastern Kentucky. The riparian part of the Sangtuary has been completely submerged. Homes, farms, and roads have been flooded as well. This is the third major flood in four years, in an area that has been intentionally economically marginalized for generations.

Frozen waterfall at the Sangtuary

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Enrolling now for May

www.youtube.com/live/tCj25n6...

Here’s a recorded livestream of yesterday’s class on smoke inhalation

Free class on helping the respiratory system after smoke inhalation. This class will go beyond the basics and share strategies and formulations for using herbs to help people whose respiratory system has been damaged or stressed by smoke. Live on my youtube channel, this friday (Jan 17).

Here are some robins* eating Holly berries from a tree in a snowstorm. These berries are not particularly good tasting, but winter-staying birds will eat them when nothing else is available.

Springs just around the corner.

Here is a pipe bowl i found out at the Sangtuary. It’s stoneware and was made using a mold. I’d guess it was made some time between the 1850s and 1950s. Some old folks still used these when i was young; a step up from a corncob pipe. I made it a new stem out of an elder twig.

Two views of a mature Hemlock tree (Tsuga canadensis). The trunk is a good bit wider than my shoulders. Hemlocks can live for centuries and can get much bigger than this, but between logging and health problems like the hemlock wooly adelgid, they usually don’t.

This is two trunks of a single american beech tree that have rejoined and fused together, leaving this opening.

Caffeine, one of the world‘s favorite phytochemicals, with its two rings mirroring the two seeds found inside the fruit of a coffee plant (Coffea arabica).

Rosinweed (silphium perfoliatum, et species) contains pitchy, terpenoid-rich sap that can help break up congestion, seal woulds, reduce skin inflammation, and do many other fine things. It has square stems and leaves that join to form a cup around the stem, and sunny yellow flowers.

The road through my recently-acquired medicinal plant farm, affectionately known as The Sangtuary. There is a large river just out of frame to the left.

This is a strange Appalachian plant called “little brown jug” (Hexastylis arifolia). It doesn’t have an above ground stem, but instead puts up leaves and flowers directly from its rhizome.