A friend recently asked, “what do you do with your time? Is it all work?”

And the answer is yes. And no.

It depends on how work is defined. Yes, there’s physical labor involved in homesteading. But I don’t have to work for someone else. My boss is the season. Right now it’s maple syrup season and the trees are the boss. When they produce sap, I make syrup.

I have to empty the buckets, which is all done by foot and hand. No plastic tubing. It’s the time of year when the freeze thaw happens and so some days I’m sitting in a t-shirt in the sun, others I’m sticking close to the stove.

Someone once told me that people who like to make lists and checking each item off might be horribly frustrated with homesteading. The list always grows faster than the check marks.

I am not a list maker… at least not in any consistent way. In fact, inconsistent is the nature of homesteading. The work is never done, but the work is never the same.

My piece of the work is especially changeable. As an herbalist, I am grounded in the seasons, the rhythms of each day. I rarely have to do the same things over and over again on a daily basis. And year to year varies depending on what’s already in the apothecary.

The variations are intertwined in the daily experience of looking for culinary and medicinal treasures in the fabric of each day. I might look for plants or mushrooms that I know (or suspect) are there by season. But even winter brings the unexpected.

This year wind gusts into the 60 mph realm toppled old rotten trees. I had the unexpected gift of actually seeing one of these giants fall from the safety of the living room. I only had time for my jaw to drop, no time to snap a photo or take a video, when an old sugar maple suddenly fell.

As the maple fell, it took a branch of a young tulip poplar clean off.

Tulip poplar bark is an aromatic bitter and nutritive. Preparations of the bark induce the parasympathetic nervous system by gently stimulating digestion and the liver, lowering heart rate and respiratory rate, so that the body-mind-spirit relaxes and heals.

Relaxation is vital to the healing process. Tension prevents body fluids from flowing freely. Whether the tension is from injury, illness, or anxiety, healing processes are inhibited.

Tulip poplar is a diaphoretic, which means that when it is given as a hot tea, it stimulates circulation and encourages the pores to open. Inducing diaphoresis is an important method for relieving fevers around the world.

The Cherokee turned to tulip poplar for many ailments: syrups for sore throats, poultices for wounds and inflammation, infections, and periodic fevers (malaria). Appalachian settlers quickly adapted the use of tulip poplar into their ancestral remedies.

During the Civil War, tulip poplar was commonly used to treat malaria in the absence of quinine and in wound care. In the face of antibiotic resistance, researchers are now trying to figure out exactly how tulip poplar works.

United Plant Savers sent a specialist in native plant restoration who mentioned that tulip poplar is an indicator species for planting American ginseng. Native traditions consider tulip poplar to be a protector of this adaptogenic plant that is at-risk of becoming endangered.

All of this is to say that when this branch was knocked down, a small whiny part of me thought, “just what I need more work,” but that voice was quickly outvoted by the part of me that chooses to see the windfall as a gift.

https://news.emory.edu/features/2019/05/civil-war-medicines/index.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44242-y#Sec1
http://medicinalherbinfo.org/000Herbs2016/1herbs/tulip-poplar/
https://www.trilliumcenter.org/trees-in-folk-lore-folk-medicine