From the desk of Dr. Dandy

For the past year, my daughter, Lucy, who has just turned five, often tells me that she wants to grow up to be a doctor (or a vampire). You can imagine what I have my fingers crossed for). More than that, she is very interested in herbs, oils and potions; if someone gets hurt, she is the first to offer ice or lavender oil; if someone has a stomach ache, she is the first to offer a glass of warm milk or tea.

I thought to myself, what better way to encourage her than to start teaching her about medicine while her interest is there. So we took a walk down by the Boise River so that I could teach her how to identify local herbs and medicines. We gathered yarrow, purple dead nettles, cleavers, wild lettuce, dandelion leaves, sage, goldenrod and many more. She learned about Oregon grape and each tree that was outside. We filled up so many bags of these medicines, that we did not have enough hands to carry them.

Then we came home, pulled out all the purple dead nettle, yarrow and wild lettuce, and we put them in our dehydrator for 12 hours. The next step, was to take the dry herbs and to make them into an oil herbal infusion. You can do this with multiple oils, but we chose avocado and olive. Basically you take the dry herbs, crush them down in a mason jar and fill the jar with oil. This is where we had to have some patience, because it takes two weeks for an herbal infusion to get the best solution.

PURPLE DEAD NETTLE GROWING BY THE BOISE RIVER

Click below to read more about this local herb:

After the two weeks was over, we strained all of the herbs out of the herbal infusion, put the oil in a double boiler, added 2 TBSP of shea butter pellets, 10 drops sandalwood, 10 drops cedar wood and 10 drops lavender. Then Lucy stirred until everything was dissolved, then we placed the concoction in containers and put them by the windowsill to harden.

Now not only do we have a "boo boo" cream, it also works as a bug repellent, sun screen, scar salve and so many more things. As a matter of fact, Lucy has already used three of the above tubes on her scrapes and bruises and it works quite well. I have used it on the nasty mosquito bites that seem to always love me. Next time I go out, I will be putting it on before the bugs can bite me.