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If you want to see American Ginseng, Black Cohosh, Wild Ginger, Bloodroot, Goldenseal, Maidenhair fern and other Ozark Woodland Medicinals growing WILD in their native habitats, then you need to take an herb walk here at our farm!

Native Ozark herbs, herb walks, farm tours, birds, butterflies, medicinal plants, and heirloom vegetables and fruits. Visit the wondrous beauty of the Arkansas Ozarks Highlands!

Ancient Earth Wisdom
Roxann Phillips, Herbalist/Naturalist

roxann at AncientEarthWisdom.com

Also visit my blog: A place for friendly discussion of herbalism, homesteading, and life among the hills of the Ozarks in Northwest Arkansas: My blog is located at http://blog.ancientearthwisdom.com

Let's keep in touch!

go to the old website

Ozark Musings

A place for friendly discussion of herbalism, homesteading, and life among the hills of the Ozarks in Northwest Arkansas: My blog is located at http://blog.ancientearthwisdom.com

Let's keep in touch!

5-30-06
This past weekend was Memorial Day weekend, so I had Monday off. I felt like I had a good, productive weekend. The little pumpkin plant given to me by a coworker is doing great on it's little hill all to itself. Good thing I gave it lots of space, as it turns out that this particular plant will grow HUGE pumpkins, like 200 lb pumpkins! Hahaa, I can't wait to put this one out by the mailbox for our Fall decoration. I also reclaimed a few rows of my garden from the weeds that were taking over. The tomatoes are now mulched and happy, and the strawberries had some babies that I separated and planted out. They also are now mulched with some old hay. I planted some gladiolas behind the pear tree guild (a term that I think refers to my tree and his surrounding space-mates, a permaculture word). I'm still learning about permaculture, but it seems to be something I will remain interested in pursuing. Another exciting thing about this weekend is that I found an old rose, unlike all the wild roses living around the place, but a pretty white climbing rose with clusters of double blooms. It was over at the old homestead site, so I know it must be a very old rose - probably dating back to the 1800's. Now if I could only find out it's name...

6-2-06
On my drive to work today, I noticed the milkweed and echinacea in bloom all along Hwy 12. I'm jealous that I don't have any echinacea blooming at my house, but at least I do have milkweed. LOL, one plant, though mine blooms a different color. What I saw a lot of today was the A. tuberosa, the orange variety. The one at my house I think is the common milkweed, A. syriaca, but I also noticed along my county road a lot of milkweed blooms of a darker pink. I can see this summer that I will be collecting milkweed seeds :) My own echinacea should begin blooming next year. The two baby comfrey's that survived the rain and hail from a few weeks ago are finally starting to regain their footing. I'll be putting the other one out tomorrow. I lost a lot of seedlings during those rains, so I haven't been at the farmer's market yet this year! Hopefully I'll have enough to bring a few things next week.

6-12-06
Over the weekend, I got a lot of gardening work done! First, I pulled up and re-planted my bell peppers. They were doing very poorly, and I cultivated the ground in each spot a little better before putting them back and mulched heavily with hay around them. They are looking a little better. Then I planted some basil between the Arkansas Traveler tomatoes. I also planted some bee balm. Then I persuaded Gary to bring me one of those old leftover round bales of hay with the loader bucket. After the hay was in place, I was going to put up some more t-posts and make more fence, but I couldn't find the post driver. Necessity being the mother of invention, I decided to make a jackleg fence with the hopes that it would at least keep the horses and cows out until I can fix it better next weekend. What a hilarious experiment! If anyone were watching, they would have gotten a good laugh from watching me knock that fence down over and over until I finally was able to reach a state of semi-stability with it. If it is still standing and I get home from work before daylight today, I'll take a picture of my pathetic attempt at pioneer fencing, LOL. I couldn't remember what exactly the fence should look like, so I improvised. You'll just have to see it to believe it...

6-26-06
I was able to get out and go hiking on the mountain. Specifically, I was looking for ginseng - I know it's there because I've seen it before - but I couldn't find it this time. However, I did find another herb that was exciting - Black Cohosh! The usual residents were there: goldenseal, wild ginger, false solomon's seal, doll's eyes, maidenhair fern, christmas fern, paw paw trees, bloodroot, and the baby ginsengs that I'd seeded last fall. But I guess I'll have to wait for the berries to find the mature ginseng plants that I found last year. Right now on the homestead we are finally beginning to make some progress. Gary hung our homestead bell over the weekend. When it rings, it echos through the whole valley, so the kids should be able to hear it and come home from anywhere they might be playing. I've been making plans for building my goat and chicken hutch. I'm going to house them together, and I want to experiment with something called ferrocement. If this stuff works out, I have all sorts of things I want to build with it! Gary almost has the house pad finished. He moved the bigger rocks and small boulders to the low end and built up on top of that with the dirt he pulled from the high end. During this process, he broke the buried water line a couple times, lol, but he had the parts to make quick repairs and keep on working. We're thinking of building a round house, but we disagree on the roof. I don't want a dome roof and he does. Until he can show me some pictures of dome roofs that I like, I'm not giving in :) I like the "yurt" style roof. And I like the free-style ferrocement houses a LOT. Since we're not financing this project with a bank's help, we should be able to do just about whatever we like. And of course I love the earth colors that make it look like adobe.

8-1-06 This month marks a new beginning in a couple ways. Last month, my old goat, Bambi, had to be put down. It was a most unpleasant chore, but I felt compelled to do it. She was very old for a goat (14) and suffered enough. And now my great pyr, Cathy, went missing. She ran off chasing something Thursday night and never returned. I have said that I would give her 7 days to come home and then I will assume she has also died. She could have tangled with a mother bear, or a mountain lion, even. I loved that dog a lot, and I'm still holding out that she's trying to come home. I'll have to get a new pup soon because the coyotes will surely figure out that she's not here soon, and they'll be hungry for chicken. Last Saturday I bought a new companion goatie for Floppy. He's part Boer, looks to be part pygmy, but he's cute and holds his own with ol' Meannie Floppy. His name is Frosty, he's a wether, which is a castrated male goat. I'll post some pictures soon.

The other day I went out exploring and found some more ginseng growing. One was a 4-pronger, so I'll bet it's at least 10 years old. That was an exciting find!