WHY YOU SHOULD LEARN TO GROW AND HARVEST YOUR OWN HERBS
[Nyerges has been teaching ethnobotany since 1974. He is the author of “Guide to Wild Foods,” “Foraging Edible Wild Plants of North America,” and 20 other books. More information at www.SchoolofSelf-Reliance.com].
Recently I participated in a nation-wide on-line Wild Foods Seminar, where each speaker talked about some aspect of foraging, such as medicine, nutrition, saving the earth, etc. I spoke about my early years when I got interested in wild plants, going back to the 1960s, and I recalled (among other things) my involvement as a “wildcrafter.”
In the 1980s, I learned about a few “middleman” companies which would buy wild medicinal herbs in bulk, which they then processed, packaged, and sold to the well-known herb companies to sell to you as “herbal tea.”
I managed to get the contact information for five or six such middleman companies, and contacted them. They each wanted my lists of the herbs that I could supply in bulk. In time, I was regularly supplying one of these companies.
In the beginning, I had the somewhat romantic vision of wandering around in the wilderness, casually collecting bits of herbs as I was communing with the natural world. The reality was a little bit different.
I had to consider the fact that I would be earning a per pound price of the dried herb, and all that it would take to get the herbs collected, cleaned, dried, packed in boxes, and taken to the post office. I learned the value of my time in this venture as the hours ticked away and the poundage of herbs ready to be sent could be divided by the hours I spent. The middleman paid the postage.
This meant that the quicker I could work, the more I would earn per hour.
Since passionflower leaf was on the desired list, I found areas in the spring that were covered over with the non-native passionflower vine that grew in my area, Passiflora caerulea. I was able to pull it down from the willow trees and other trees over which it sprawled, and pack it into large plastic bags to take home to dry. It’s worth noting that no one cared that I pulled the passionvine off the trees, since it was non-native and regarded as semi-harmful to the trees. Concerned hikers would often pull the vines off the trees, and just leave the vines on the ground. So I could at least tell myself that I was working for the public good by removing passionvine from the tree, and removing it from the area.
In the beginning, I would wash the leaves so they were clean, and I’d pick out any bit of stray twigs or leaves that I could find. Then I would haul the leaves into the attic of our family home, into a large space that I covered with sheets of plywood, and then I covered the plywood with newspaper sheets. In the dry dark heat of that attic, I had an area about 16 by 16 square feet where I dried herbs. Herbs dried quickly up there, and after a week or so, I would pack the dried passionvines, stems and leaves, into the boxes for shipping. I was glad that I was able to include the stems with the shipping, since the dried passionflower leaves reduce to very little in bulk and weight. After a week or more after I shipped each box, I would receive a check for the agreed amount. It was really not a lot per pound, and I always knew I was making any money I made because of the bulk. I knew that the person I was selling the herbs to was then going to further refine the herbs by grinding into a homogenous mix, and then sell it in bulk to the retailers. Everyone had to earn a little along the way. I enjoyed earning this little bit of money because it got me outdoors, and it wasn’t my only source of income. It clearly would not have been a sufficient source of income if that’s all I did for income.
Over the course of maybe two years, I was able to gather many other herbs in bulk, dry them, ship them, and receive a check. I did this with yerba santa, mugwort, epazote, and others. I never uprooted plants when I harvested, and I never denuded an area. I didn’t want to be the guy who everyone says is ruining an area, like so many of the white sage collectors for the New Age market. I turned down some requests because I knew that I could not get enough in an efficient manner to make it anywhere worth my while. I turned down some requests because I did not want to collect poisonous plants, such as tree tobacco and Datura, and I wondered what the middleman was actually going to do with those.
My worst experience was with epazote, which experienced a period of great demand when Americans were learning about this Mexican herb which they began to refer to as “nature’s Bean-O.” Of course, Mexicans have known about epazote for centuries, which they use in beans and traditional cuisine. Though epazote seems to have originated in the Puebla area, it can now be found widely throughout North America, especially in riparian areas. Because that year was very wet, I could collect large volumes of the fresh herb for drying. And because I never uprooted these annual plants, they often continued to grow and get bushier before they died for the season. However, I found that I was very allergic to epazote. Something about its chemistry caused me to sneeze and get severely congested while collected the many pounds that I collected. After I dried the herb, and collected it into the shipping boxes, the allergy was even worse because all they dry dust was in the air I was breathing. Even wearing a painter’s face mask did not seem to help much.
After time, I got tired of the inability to breath, and stopped dealing with epazote after probably a few hundred pounds were shipped.
The end of the road came for me when my middleman called and asked me if I could get Ginkgo biloba leaves.
“Sure,” I told him. “The trees grow all over town, but it would take me forever to get a reasonable amount. I’d have to go from tree to tree.” I explained how they are sometimes grown in the space between the sidewalk and streets, and often in center meridians.
“Just rake it up and put it in a box and ship it,” he said.
“What?” I exclaimed. “Rake it up? It would take me double the time to get all the other crud out of the box.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he assured me. “Didn’t you know that you can have up to 15% adulterant?”
I was nonplussed, and couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What do you mean?” I asked. Up to that point, everything I ever sent was about as close to 100% pure herb as you could get.
“Yeah, up to 15% adulterant. Just rake it up and put it in a box.”
However, I declined, and that was the end of my commercial wildcrafting career, assuming you could call that a “career.” I realized that I had been working hard for a pure product, and delivering a pure product in an industry that was willing to cut corners.
My middleman explained that I could have always had up to 15% adulterant in all the herbs I mailed. That means odd twigs and different leaves and maybe just dirt. He explained that he blends up all the herbs when he received them, and basically homogenizes them all so there is a consistent size of the leaves and stems. Those are shipped to the retailers who then pack them into bags or sell in bulk. No one would ever notice or care, he told me, about that 15% adulterant that would make my life easier as a wildcrafter.
But I declined, and in the future, I made a point of always personally collecting any medicinal herbs I needed. There are many fine companies today selling packaged herbs, and some grow all their own. But many still obtain their herbs from wildcrafters.
Every now and then, though rarely, you read in the newspapers about someone who drank some herb tea that they purchased in a box at the health food store, and got sick, or died. When the tea in question was studied, they found that it contained an “adulterant,” the word for something that should not have been there, usually a poisonous plant. Which means that somewhere, somehow, a wildcrafter (not me), raked all the stuff into a box and accidently got a little bit of poison hemlock or some other poison herb mixed in, and some poor unfortunate soul ended up drinking that “adulterant” in their beverage.
In the overall scheme of issues that we should be concerned about in our daily modern lives, adulterants in herbal teas rarely even makes the list. But learning to grow your own herbs, and learning to identify wild herbs that you can collect and use, can provide a feeling of safety and well-being.
GROW AND HARVEST WHAT YOU NEED
These days, I’m a big advocate of collecting the herbs you need, and even growing them in your own yard if that’s possible. This way there is no doubt as to the identity of the herb, and the purity is assured.
For personal use, I still grow and/or collect from the wild, nettles, mullein, passionflower, mint, everlasting, black sage, yerba santa, mugwort, and other. The first four are not native, and the last four are native to me.
I dry herbs for out of season use so that I can use it year-round. In some cases, depending on the herb, I don’t dry as much because it will grow in my yard year-round, like mint.
These days, I mostly use an air dryer, which consists of a fabric mesh, which is hung. I hang the dryer where it gets no sun. I also have an electric food dryer which I sometimes use for herbs, but mostly for persimmons, fruits, and even acorns on occasion.
If you’re a regular user of teas – whether as a beverage or medicine – you’ll find that it’s an easy matter to set up your own drying operation, where you’re regularly adding herbs to the dryer, and removing the dry ones for storage. I store the herbs in glass or plastic containers into which I’ve added dessicant packages. I keep them in the shade, or in a cupboard. And always label your containers with the name of the herb and the date it was stored.
SELLING TO WHOLESALERS
Someone who wants to ethically collect wild herbs and sell them to a middleman can still do so. These days, everything is on-line, so you can do a search for wholesale buyers of wild herbs in your area. Then you begin the process of telling them what you can supply in bulk, and the negotiation process of how much they will pay you. If you have no idea what you might get paid, then look at the retail catalog and see what the company charges for a pound or ounce of any herb. If they sell, for example, dried boneset for $40 a pound then you can be assured that you, as a wholesale supplier, will earn below 50% of that retail price. (I have no idea how much boneset sells for – I’m just making an example). The store makes their money by packaging your bulk herbs in smaller containers and charging the higher price to their retail customers
