My ds10 showed me on Shavuos that he has a very bad rash between his fingers, which was super itchy.  (My kids have a way of only telling me about things like this on Shabbos or yom tov, when I can’t do much about it.)  He said he was sure it was poison ivy.  I asked why he thought so, and he told me he pulled out poison ivy with his bare hands when he saw it growing in the yard.  When I asked what made him do that, he said he planned to wash his hands after he pulled it out but forgot.  I mentioned that we have plenty of garden gloves that would be useful for something like this, but he said it was too much work to go into the garage to get them.  When I said we had pairs right on the back porch, too, he said that would have been too much work, too!

So not surprisingly, he now has a very unpleasant case of poison ivy.  I have a recipe in my notebook for a poison ivy remedy that I’ve never made, and decided that it would be instructive for him to prepare it himself.  The recipe called for just three ingredients: burdock root, plantain, and comfrey.  I have comfrey in my small collection of herbs, and burdock and plantain growing wild in the yard.

His best friend came over early in the day, and I sent them both out to harvest the herbs.  Plantain is easy to pick, but the burdock roots are long and skinny so it’s a bit of a job to dig them.  He discovered that using a full sized shovel made the job a lot faster than using a trowel.  Once they came in with enough of the herbs (I had to send them back out a couple more times), I had ds peel the burdock roots and chop them up, then wash the plantain leaves and chop them up. 

He put a cup of burdock and a cup of plantain into a pot with 1/3 cup of dried comfrey.  (The recipe called for equal amounts of each herb in the dried form, so I figured we should use about triple the amount of fresh herbs so it would be the right balance.)  He put enough coconut oil into the pot to cover the herbs, and then let it simmer on low for a couple of hours.  (You can also use Vaseline, or a combination of virgin olive oil and beeswax instead of the coconut oil, but for simplicity, health, and it’s powerful antifungal/antibacterial properties, I prefer coconut oil.)  After it cooked for a while and the herbs were starting to get crispy, dd14 strained it out (he had to leave for his baseball game, or he would have done this, too) and put it in a small glass jar to cool.  We made about 9 oz of salve.   

When he got home from his game, the mixture had solidified, and he put some on his hands.  Very soon he told me that the itching was much less and the irritated red skin was noticeably less inflamed.  After a couple of hours, I suggested he apply some more, and within an hour he told me it was much, much better.   I’ll have him continue to apply it until the rash is entirely gone; I’m hopeful with the help of the salve that it will be pretty quick.

When I placed my last bulk herb order a number of months ago, I ordered a 4 oz can of herbal salve that was good for general antibiotic use, stings, etc, and paid $16.95 for it.  This was a bit of a splurge for me but it seemed like a valuable item to have around.  And it has been very useful for diaper rashes, chapped skin, cuts – it’s been helpful for a number of things, and I also bought a small 1 oz container to keep in my purse.  Four ounces lasts a lot longer than you might expect – we still have almost half of the container left, even after using it frequently. 

We checked the ingredients in the salve that I bought, and saw that it contained both comfrey and plantain, along with three other ingredients.  We realized that the salve we made can easily substitute for the one we purchased in terms of practical usage (reducing skin inflammation, itchiness, healing cuts, diaper rash).  But this cost us a LOT less – the herbs we picked were obviously free, the amount of comfrey we used was probably less than 50 cents, and I bought the expeller pressed coconut oil in a 5 gallon bucket for about $80 a while back (price has gone up since).  Since there are 80 cups in 5 gallons, and I used a cup for this recipe, the cost of the oil was $1.   I’m not going to figure out how much gas we used for two hours on the lowest setting when cooking it, but let’s say that it cost another $1.  That means for less than $2.50 I was able to make a comparable salve to what would have cost me $34 if purchased retail.  We also realized how easy it would be to slightly change the recipe to make a salve that has the same ingredients as the one we purchased; while it would be slightly more expensive, since we’d need to use other herbs that we purchased in bulk instead of harvested ourselves, it would still be only an additional $2 for the entire batch. 

If you want to make a healing wash instead of a salve, use water instead of oil and follow the same directions.  Use the herbal wash to rinse the affected area periodically. 

It was fun and educational for him to make this and see how easy it is to take care of your own health.  And this batch should last us for quite a long time!

Avivah