The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Herbal Medicine for Preppers: Medicinal Trees, Pawpaw and Bush Groundsel

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey y'all, welcome to this week's show. We're going to get into a really interesting tree today. We have another one of these medicinal trees. And this one also has some really good food properties. It's the pawpaw. Pawpaw was once a very popular fruit in America. It's native to America, to North America. Also called custard apple.

Starting point is 00:00:27 They grew up wild. You know, where I live in the mountains, you may want to look into them as a plant you could grow, you know, in your yard as part of your landscaping. Not a very large tree. And there are some sellers. I believe Stark Brothers Nursery has them. One Green World. There's some nurseries that do carry pawpaws, and I believe some of them have been bred to tolerate some warmer climates, you know, than we have up here in the mountains. So definitely look into that. But before I start talking about this very interesting tree, I want to give you a little announcement. I'm recording this on Wednesday, actually Ash Wednesday, and that marks the beginning of Lent. Lent is traditionally, for the past 2,000 years or so, been a time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. But the main thing I want to tell you about is I wanted to do something to help folks.

Starting point is 00:01:27 And, you know, I know the economy is really bad right now. I mean, you know, Biden's economy is a train wreck. And so for my almsgiving, at least part of it for this Lent, I want to give y'all some free books. Just absolutely free e-books. One per person. Just email me, judson at judsoncarroll.com what book of mine you're interested in you know i've written 13 books um go to um well probably the easiest place to look on well obviously everything of mine's on amazon so if you want to

Starting point is 00:02:02 go through the descriptions and everything there, then just email me. I'll send it to you as a PDF, judson at judsoncarroll.com. Or you can go to my blog. It's pretty well organized along the right-hand side of the page. It's southernappalachianherbs.blogspot.com. You see all my books, and if you click click the cover it goes to a description of the book and normally i sell these pds for 9.99 uh so i can i'm giving them away now so one per person just email me and ask uh just tell me which book you want and as soon as i can get to your email

Starting point is 00:02:41 um i've gotten already i announced this this morning through my newsletter, Justin Carroll Master Herbalist, and I got a good response. So I'm very pleased to say I've already been able to give away a lot of books, so much that I'm having trouble keeping up. So if you don't receive your book right away after you email me, just know I'll get to you as quickly as possible. At least within a few hours, you'll have the book. And so I'm enjoying doing this.

Starting point is 00:03:12 And, you know, I hope this will really be, you know, a blessing for folks. So anyway, I hope you'll take advantage of that and enjoy that. Now let's get into the tree, which comes from my book, The Medicinal Trees of the American Southeastern Herbalist Guide. That's one of the books you can get if you want. I actually had several people request this book today. The proper name of the pawpaw is Asimina triloba. There's actually a little I in there that's kind of hard to pronounce. I usually say Asmina. It's Asimina. So A-S-I-M-I-N-A, Trilova. More commonly known as the Pawpaw. Very easy to

Starting point is 00:03:55 identify this tree because there's only one. The Pawpaw has a very unique looking flower. You can pull up a picture of that online real quick. Very easy to spot this tree once you come to recognize it. It's a really unique native plant and you know I'd love to tell you it has all kinds of really impressive medicinal properties. It does have some but really the main value is the fruit and you know planting fruit trees is a really good thing for preppers to do fruit and nut trees and we're identifying them in the wild pawpaw is sort of our native tropical fruit but it grows in temperate regions it's it was long considered a variety of papaya but it's actually not it's a unique tree and like I said sometimes it's called the custard apple. The fruit is somewhere between a papaya and a banana.

Starting point is 00:04:48 So it really does have a fairly unique flavor. And it is very good. You'll very rarely see pawpaws for sale in a store, though, because they just do not ship. They bruise easily. They spoil quickly. It's one you're going to have to grow yourself or find it in the woods. And like I said, it does like the mountains where I live. I think it probably grows best naturally in the mountains and hills. But I think there has been some breeding to allow it to be grown in other climates. So look into that. It's a smallish tree as I mentioned it's one

Starting point is 00:05:25 that inhabits the understory and it would really be far more common if it wasn't for real estate and forestry practices take the understory I mean people like to go in and clear the understory and just leave the big trees they actually just not a very good practice at all really a clear cut is much better for the forest than going in selectively taking trees because everything kind of grows back and finds its own natural place again when everything's cut down you know it would happen after a major forest fire now I know there may be some forestry guys out there that disagree with me or some

Starting point is 00:06:01 logging folks but really a clear cut is much better than clearing the understory. The plants, the trees, everything's growing in relationship to each other. And, you know, so the game of the deer and the rabbits and all that, they need that understory. There need to be bushes and shrubs and all that clearing everything out like a park which is unfortunately what a lot of people do is just actually quite destructive to a natural uh woodland you know if you gotta if you gotta build a house obviously you gotta clear a lot but um like you know i have a neighbor up in the mountains the man is just obsessive he's retired every few days he goes into the woods and cuts down everything that isn't a very large tree.

Starting point is 00:06:47 And he just likes to walk around out there and drive his golf cart around in the woods. And it's like, dude, you're ruining the habitat. But you know, he doesn't care. I mean, it's, and it really annoys me because he's ruined some of my best mushroom hunting grounds because he takes out all the dead wood. Mushrooms need to have dead wood to eat. They decompose the dead wood, but he thinks it looks messy. So I know there was a wonderful stand of chanterelle mushrooms. It's not there anymore thanks to his endless and tireless efforts. The property is close enough to my house that he really gets on my nerves with the chainsaw and the leaf blowers he's constantly using and the tractor. I mean, he makes more noise for no valid reason.

Starting point is 00:07:32 I mean, when you've got to use equipment, power equipment, you use power equipment. I mean, I use a chainsaw to cut down a tree. No big deal, right? But this guy is like, I don't know. He just has way too much time on his hands, and he just kind of drives me crazy. But hey, you know, another thing I need to work on during Lent is forgiving people. So I'm not going to talk bad about him.

Starting point is 00:07:53 I'll just say, you know, God bless him, whatever. That's actually, when someone says that in the South, like, bless your heart, it's not actually intended to be a very nice statement. It's like, oh, you're so pathetic and pitiful. Just, you know, God bless you. But anyway, we'll get back to the subject at hand. Like I said, Pawpaw is like a mixed forest, not a park-like setting.

Starting point is 00:08:15 The two factors that have led really, though, to Pawpaw falling out of favor is that the fruit just doesn't shift well. And really, you know, a lot of it, and this is something I've written about extensively. I've probably talked about it on this show before. The reason so much of our knowledge of foraging, of hunting and fishing, of herbal medicine, et cetera, has been lost, home preserving, canning foods, et cetera, et cetera, is because of the breakdown of the nuclear family, and especially the extended family. I know so much of what I know because I got to grow up around my grandparents

Starting point is 00:08:52 and great-grandparents and great-aunts and uncles. Kids today, you know, don't. I mean, most marriages are ending in divorce, and then actually most people aren't even bothering to get married. The kids that are actually raised in a two-parent family are now the minority. I think it's like less than 30% of the population. And a lot of people marry two, three, four times, like another neighbor of mine. They've been married, I think, three or four times each and have just gotten divorced from each other. You know, that doesn't exactly lead to intact families.

Starting point is 00:09:35 That doesn't lead to traditions being passed on from generation to generation. And, you know, people move all around the country and they don't grow up and stay in their hometowns anymore. So, you know, I mean, it reminds me of an episode of Duck Dynasty where, you know, Phil and Miss Kay realized it was very important to take the grandkids out and show them how to harvest black hall berries. And then they took them home and they made a hall jam and I mean that's not something most kids these days grow up doing so you know obviously that's a big reason why people don't even really know what a hall a pawpaw is anymore much less a black hall or another member of the you know Hawthorne family.

Starting point is 00:10:27 When just a few generations they were so popular, there was a kid's song, Picking Up Pawpaws, Put Them in Your Pocket. That was a song that kids played. It was like a nursery rhyme. It was like a nursery rhyme. And now nobody seems to really know what they are. So I think on one hand, that's a great tragedy. On the other hand, as a prepper, it means you can have these trees in plain sight,

Starting point is 00:10:53 and it's probably one of the few fruits kids aren't going to be sneaking onto your property stealing. When I lived in Fosco, North Carolina, I had a beautiful, huge cherry tree right at the edge of the yard and two apple trees um oh you know blackberry bushes everywhere you know it was great it was really great and uh but that cherry tree every kid in the neighborhood knew that cherry tree and knew it had just great delicious cherries and it was a real challenge to get out there or to get a ladder high enough to go where the kids hadn't gotten and get some cherries before they were all gone so but you're not going to have that problem with a haw haw a paw paw and really not with a lot of your heirloom more you know sour apples the ugly apples that make the best ciders and pies and apple butter.

Starting point is 00:11:47 You can't go wrong with heirloom apples. They're just fantastic. They're not pretty enough to sell in stores. And, you know, most kids probably wouldn't even recognize them as an apple. But anyway, so as far as the medicinal use, the fruit is a laxative when eaten in large amounts. The leaves are diuretic and make for a good poultice on wounds and boils, infections, and inflammation. Now, that's probably the way you're going to use it most. It's really good.

Starting point is 00:12:16 The bark may be used as a digestive bitter. Actually, the bark of the pawpaw tree is quite good for the stomach and liver and all that. bark of the pawpaw tree is quite good for the stomach and liver and all that. And there's also some history, some information I found in old books, that it was used as a wash to treat head lice. So you could see it would be a very useful plant if you happen to be able to grow it. Of the seeds, they have an emetic property. They can be used as an epikect. They can be used to make you throw up. Ms. Greve said that emetic for which a saturated tincture of the bruised

Starting point is 00:12:53 seeds is employed, dose being 10 to 60 drops. Okay, so what does that mean it means to take all probably about a pound or so of the seeds and bruise them put them in a quart jar and fill up the jar with some good vodka let it sit for a month and then it could be used to for emergencies to make you vomit okay the bark is a bitter tonic and said to contain a powerful acid and that's probably why it was used for uh uh head lice um and the leaves are used as an application for to boils and ulcers as i said and that reminds me you know another grapefruit tree we'll talk about soon that uh most people don't know about anymore is persimmons wild persimmons i gather tons of them every year and the bark and leaves are fairly similar properties actually you'll be interested in the persimmon uh so good uh you

Starting point is 00:13:52 know when we get to that show i'll give you my recipe for persimmon bread basically you make it just like banana bread and it's like dense and chewy i mean it has like a molasses texture and I mean it's really actually very good and I Think yeah George Washington was very fond of making Persimmon beer he would actually make a bread like that dry it out and then use that To make beer out of which anyway, we'll get into that another time Another one you might want to think about is passion fruit it is a you get passion fruit vines established and they grow rampantly i mean you have trouble keeping them under control and that's absolutely delicious fruit and those are those are things wild persimmons passion

Starting point is 00:14:35 fruits pawpaws hall berries you never see those in stores and they're just really good for you too all right so uh back to the pawpaw. Resources of the Southern Field and Forest says that it preferred rich soils and particularly grew along streams and had been observed in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and along the Savannah River, and let see North Carolina so yeah I mean but I know it also grows in New England so it's not necessarily a southern plant and I think you can probably grow this one in most places it says the uh the rind of the fruit which is a part we haven't talked about yet it possesses a very active acid and is sometimes

Starting point is 00:15:28 used as a topical application in ulcerous wounds. The juice of the unripe fruit is a powerful and effective vermifuge. That means it helps get rid of intestinal parasites, specifically worms. The powder of the seeds answers the same purpose. So they're saying the seeds could be dried and ground to get rid of intestinal worms. And this, oh, this is also very interesting. They say the tree has the property of rendering the toughest animal substance tender by causing a separation of the muscle fiber. It's very vapor even does this. Now, I'm not sure.

Starting point is 00:16:03 I have not tried that. I'm wondering if this is maybe a case where they're confusing it with a pawpaw. Because, see, confusing it with a papaya. Because, see, the papaya, which is actually a tropical fruit, contains, I think, is it amino acid? I think it's called papain, P-A-P-I-N. And it actually does cause the breakdown of protein. It's a very good meat tenderizer. You know, it's something chefs like to use.

Starting point is 00:16:33 I don't know that the pawpaw, even though they actually say this is a triloba that they're referencing, has that same principle. I don't know. I'm going to have to try that next time I have a, you know, some tough meat and I've got some pawpaws in, in season. And, um, because yeah, that's, that would be pretty cool. You know, I mean, sometimes, especially as a hunter, you know, you get some tough meat sometimes and, uh, that would be a, another nice use for the plant and it would add really good flavor too. I mean, like I said, it's somewhere between papaya and banana. So, I mean, I could totally see that going with like, uh like pork or bear meat. Oh yeah, that'd be good.

Starting point is 00:17:10 I mean, that'd be really good. Pineapple can also have some meat tenderizing qualities, by the way, if you happen to live where you can grow pineapple. Oh, they went on to say, you know, on that same subject that newly killed meat suspended over the leaves and even old hogs and poultry, when fed on the leaves and fruit, become tender in a few hours. That would be amazing. Well, it might be worth raising some pigs under your pawpaw trees. I mean, you know, absolutely. Pigs also love honey locust pods, by the way. That's a really good tree that we'll get into. That's a great one to grow. That's actually the, well, they don't know if it was the

Starting point is 00:17:55 locust tree or the carob tree. They're related. That's mentioned in the Bible, you know, in the prodigal son where he said he would eat the pods that were intended for the hog. So, you know, in the prodigal son where he said he would eat the pods that were intended for the hog. So, you know, that's a very old way of raising pork, actually. The sap of the pawpaw tree is extracted for, okay, on this one they actually are talking about the papaya, so I guess I'll skip that. We'll look at King's American Dispensatory from 1898. They listed the actions, usage, and dosage of pawpaw properly, I mean not papaya, as emetic, which we already discussed about, using a saturated tincture of the bruised seeds, 10 to 60 drops, just like Ms. Greaves said in England in the 1930s.

Starting point is 00:18:42 The bark is a bitter tonic and has been used in domestic practice. The medicinal properties of this agent have not been fully investigated. But the Peterson Field Guide for Eastern and Central Medicinal Plants, which is, you know, that is my favorite field guide. I always recommend Peterson. The fruit is edible, delicious, and also a laxative. The leaves are insecticidal. Remember we said that the leaves have been used as a wash for head lice. The leaves are also diuretic and can be applied

Starting point is 00:19:15 to abscesses as a poultice, as we've mentioned before. The seeds are emetic. That makes you throw up, as I said, but also, and this, guess it's really the the warning that needs to go with this plant although you know these herbalists have recommended making a tincture of the seeds you don't want to eat pawpaw seeds or have too much that tincture they actually are somewhat narcotic and can cause a stupor and have a some level of toxicity so you could actually get kind of sick if you ate pawpaw seeds the powdered seeds formally applied to the heads of children to or can control lice having insecticidal properties and they also under their warning say the leaves may cause a rash so you may you know it can

Starting point is 00:20:05 cause contact dermatitis if you have an allergy to it yeah and that kind of that really wraps up pawpaw like I said it doesn't have a lot of medicinal uses the the the value of it is more in the fruit but I think it's a really important plant for us to discuss because well one like one, like I said, you can grow it, but two, once you can identify it, you can find it fairly easily in nature. And just remember, I mean, you can use your phone's GPS and such to mark where those useful plants are in the woods when you find them. That's one of the few things I like about cell phones. And, you know, the other thing is most people don't know what they are, so you're not going to have a lot of human competition

Starting point is 00:20:51 for such fruits. And since, you know, we've wrapped that one up, I'm going to give just one more because it's a really short entry. This is Baccharus hamifolia, bush groundsel now um there are four species of baccharis that's b-a-c-c-c-h-a-r-i-s that uh have been used in herbal medicine uh my favorite one goes by the common name mules fat don't you just love that i love the name mules fat for a tree i'd yeah i'd have it just for the name but anyway anyway this is not native to my region. Actually, Hamifolia is the only one that grows around here and that's known as bush groundsel as I mentioned. Bush groundsel is mainly grown as a hedge plant. It's more of a shrub and but medicinally it's really good.

Starting point is 00:21:43 It's very useful for coughs and lung ailments it's a demulcent and calming to the lungs so if you have bronchial issues as I do definitely one to consider planning definitely one to be able to identify and you know do your research on it investigate again that's Bacchus hemifolia bush groundsel. I am so tongue-twisted today. I don't know why that is. All right, y'all. Have a great week. And I will talk to you next time.

Starting point is 00:22:15 Remember, shoot me an email at judson at judsoncarroll.com. And I'll be glad to send you a free PDF of any one of my books. Just let me know what you like. Have a wonderful and blessed Lenten season, and get ready to celebrate Easter in 40 days, and spring a little bit earlier than that, which I'm really looking forward to. I've got a lot of new things I want to grow from seed this year,

Starting point is 00:22:41 and I'm just holding off on starting them just yet. So anyway, have a good one judson at judsoncarroll.com judson at judsoncarroll.com the information this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or condition nothing I say or write has been evaluated or approved by the FDA. I'm not a doctor. The U.S. government does not recognize the practice of herbal medicine, and there is no governing body regulating herbalists. Therefore, I'm really just a guy who studies herbs. I'm not offering any advice. I won't even claim that anything I write or say

Starting point is 00:23:20 is accurate or true. I can tell you what herbs have been traditionally used for. I can tell you my own experience and if I believe an herb has helped me. I cannot nor would I tell you to do the same. If you use an herb anyone recommends, you are treating yourself. You take full responsibility for your health. Humans are individuals and no two are identical. What works for me may not work for you. You may have an allergy, a sensitivity, an underlying condition that no one else even shares and you don't even know about. Be careful with your health.

Starting point is 00:23:51 By continuing to listen to my podcast or read my blog, you agree to be responsible for yourself, do your own research, make your own choices, and not to blame me for anything ever.

The Prepper Broadcasting Network - Herbal Medicine for Preppers: Medicinal Trees, Pawpaw and Bush Groundsel

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