Collecting Wild Hawthorn for Food & Medicine
In the last few years, I’ve become more and more interested in identifying native plants and foraging. In the last year, I’ve also grown to fall in love with wildcrafting. In case you’re unfamiliar, wildcrafting is collecting plants or herbs from the wild and using them for food and/or medicinal purposes. While there are many online resources and books that can teach you about this, in my opinion, it’s wise to learn from a knowledgeable instructor who can help you safely identify native plants in your area – particularly if you are planning on consuming them!
This is Suzanne Jordan, founder and owner of Cedar Mountain Herb School in Mount Vernon. She is one such knowledgeable instructor you can feel good about learning from! Suzanne has over 25 years of experience as an herbalist and instructor. She is a member of the American Herbalists Guild, the American Herb Association, and practicum supervisor and adjunct faculty at Bastyr University. If it’s any indication, this is the 3rd class I’ve taken from Suzanne (if you’re curious, go back and check out my posts about the dandelion intensive and medicinal plant walkabout at Discovery Park). The 2 hour drive from my house is well worth it!
Today’s class was all about the hawthorn. This beautiful plant is a member of the rose family (as is the apple!). In fact, in fall the berries actually resemble tiny apples – check it out:
In spring, the plant is loaded with gorgeous blossoms. Here’s a picture of one I took in the spring up at Discovery Park in Seattle:
I think it would make a lovely landscaping plant! And, in fact, many people use the hawthorn for just that. But this beautiful plant is packed full of medicine, too.
The hawthorn, it turns out, is particularly good for heart health. As someone that’s struggled with heart issues off and on, this is a huge reason for my interest in this plant. It’s good for a range of things from strengthening the heartbeat, helping to clear the arteries, lowering blood pressure, and more. It’s also used to help alleviate depression and anxiety. Suzanne calls it, “the everything’s going to be OK” herb and she loves using it during times of grieving or transition (such as a new job, loss of a loved one, moving, etc.).
One of the best things about Suzanne’s classes? After harvesting our herbs in the wild, we get to take our goodies back to her home to process in her kitchen! And she is so open and patient with all our questions.
Here are some of the goodies I made, and I’ll try to break them down for you too, in case you’re not familiar.
Hawthorn Honey: for this, I mashed open the berries, filled the 1/2 pint jar 1/2 way, and filled the rest with honey. This will sit for a month and then I’ll apply heat to the jar and strain out the hawthorn. This method preserves both the nutritional and medicinal value of the hawthorn. (Hawthorn is extremely high in Vitamin C!) The honey can be used ANY way you’d normally use honey – on toast, in tea, on oatmeal.
Hawthorn Tincture: for this, I mashed open the berries, filled the 1/2 pint jar 1/2 way, and filled the rest with 100 proof vodka. This will also sit for a month and then I’ll strain out the berries. This method doesn’t retain the nutrition, but extracts the medicine from the herb. This remedy I’ll use for heart health, taking about 4-5 drops per day.
Hawthorn Oxymel: very similar to the above preparations, I mashed the berries, filled the 1/2 pint jar 1/2 way, and then did an equal mixture apple cider vinegar and honey. This retains both the nutritional and medicinal properties. Suzanne suggested putting maybe 1/4 – 1/2 teaspoon into plain or sparkling water and using it to hydrate – perhaps after one of my long runs!
Beyond this, she gave us instructions for making a hawthorn elixir, hawthorn vinegar, and hawthorn syrup. As you can see, there are many, many ways of getting the good stuff this herb has to offer into your diet. You can pick and choose the ones that most appeal to you (or your loved ones!).
The best thing we made with the hawthorn? HAWTHORN CHUTNEY. This stuff was outrageously good. It had the hawthorn berries (which have a delicate apple flavor), fresh ginger, vinegar, brown sugar, fresh nutmeg, allspice, salt and pepper.
In the end, we all got a pint’s worth of hawthorn chutney to take home! I think it would be amazing basted on chicken or steak. One of the gals in the class deliciously envisioned it atop a cracker with some goat cheese!
Here’s our class with all our goodies on Suzanne’s deck. She asked us to do “jazz hands,” but you can tell some of us were more enthusiastic about this than others. (Yeah, my effort gets an “F”, I’ll admit it!)
I also love that her classes tend to be smaller and more intimate. There are always super interesting people that come to these classes. One of the participants designs solar panels. Another is hoping to find work on an organic farm. It’s always a good time. If you’re interested, Suzanne has three more classes in 2014:
Hot Process Soapmaking & Soap Felting (Nov. 9)
Harvesting Intensive: Oregon Grape (Nov. 17)
Herbal Christmas Gifts (Dec. 7) – this one sounds SO fun!
You can check these out HERE and learn more about Cedar Mountain Herb School.
So here’s a bonus… after all my medicine making yesterday? I still had enough berries left to make another pint-sized tincture AND fill up four trays in my Nesco Dehydrator! The dried berries will be used to make syrups and decoctions.
Final Thoughts
You might wonder what on earth a post like this is doing on my blog? Truth is, we have FREE food and FREE medicine growing all around us. While gardening *can* be a frugal activity, I think learning to wildcraft and forage may be even more so. I see them as a compliment to living a sustainable, frugal lifestyle. I would also argue that learning about native plants and forests has also made me a better gardener.
If this post has peaked your interest, I have a few books I’d like to recommend:
Pacific Northwest Foraging: $16.32 on Amazon. This book was released this year and I picked mine up at Costco (for $14.99) over the summer. What I love about this book – the clear, colorful photos – helpful for identifying species. Clear instructions on where to gather, what parts of the plant to gather, and how to identify. It’s not an exhaustive book of everything edible/medicinal in our region, but I appreciate the careful focus on the plants that are covered. It also includes lots of berries.
Medicinal Plants of the Pacific West: $16.96 on Amazon. This book contains a lot of detailed information about the medicinal properties of the various native plants in our region. It also contains instructions on medicinal herb preparations. While this thick book is chock-full of information, it’s not my favorite for actually identifying plants as it contains black and white drawings, not color photographs. For that reason, I think it’s best used with books that will help you properly identify plants (or for those that already have the ability/confidence to identify plants).
Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast: $15.63 on Amazon. This is my absolute favorite “go to” book for identifying plants in the wild. It’s extremely comprehensive and contains great back information, such as how the native peoples used the plants for medicine, food, shelter, and other purposes. I also love how the book breaks the plants out into their scientific genus and species so you can begin to recognize and understand plant families. It’s a brick of a book, nearly 800 pages and 1100 color photographs. It’s also highly rated – an average 5 star rating after 100 customer reviews. My son and I love taking this book with us into the woods to see how many plants we can identify. Given the user-friendliness of the book, we can often identify plants extremely quickly.
While this book is extremely helpful in assisting you with identifying plants (and often, their edibility/toxicity), it doesn’t get into how to use the plants medicinally. For that reason, it’s best paired with another book that covers that, such as one of the two above.
Want to read more about this topic right now?
You might also wish to read these related posts:
Urban Weed Foraging
Using Dandelions for Food & Medicine
How to make Dandelion Root Tea (I’m about to make some more this week!)
What is Wildcrafting (and my medicinal plant walkabout)
My Visit to Seattle’s Beacon Food Forest
7 Lessons the Forest can teach you about Gardening
I’d love to hear if this topic piques your interest, if you enjoy these kinds of posts, and if you’ve done any foraging or wildcrafting yourself!