No, Wait: That’s Plantain, Not a Weed That’s Growing in Your Yard.

You may have a powerful and proven medicine growing in your yard or around your property. And you might have thought all along it was just a worrisome weed…

Plantain is a powerful natural treatment for all sorts of ailments, including bronchitis, indigestion, insect bites and stings, poison ivy, scrapes and burns, acne and even the dreaded MRSA (methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus). And believe it or not, it will even draw out splinters.

It can be used on the skin or taken internally.

It can be delivered in tinctures, salves, as a poultice or a vinegar infusion.

You can even administer immediate, on-the-spot first aid for insect stings, bites and other skin trauma– simply by chewing a few leaves and applying the resulting poultice to the affected area!

Plantain is also edible, although you couldn’t prove it by me…

Now, we’re talking about the green leafy plantain that’s often seen in our yards, not that green banana-looking thing you find at the supermarket.

So rather than think you have a bothersome weed to get rid of, think of plantain as a drug store that’s there just for the picking.

Today I woke up with a bit of bronchitis. Probably from a little smoke I snorted yesterday when I put a log in the wood stove. Time to sweep the chimney! So I fell back on our favorite herbal cure for bronchitis: tincture of plantain. Placing a dropperful under my tongue for 30 or 40 seconds, I could feel results after about 15 minutes.

We made the tincture a few years ago using vodka, the preferred source of the alcohol base that’s needed for the tincture. It’s not complicated.

• Just put the plant leaves in a mason jar, add the vodka to cover the leaves, and shake well every couple of days.
• The recipe I used even said to include some roots in the mix.
• Make sure the vodka always completely covers the leaves after they’ve settled.
• n 4-6 weeks strain out the leaves and you have a powerful herbal medicine.
• We poured our tincture into several dark dropper bottles to protect from sunlight and stored it in a fairly cool place to increase shelf life.

I won’t re-invent the wheel here by researching and enumerating the medicinal properties of plantain. It’s been done. Instead, read Heather Dessinger’s excellent article, Plantain Herb Benefits, Recipes & How to Identify that’s on her Website, Mommypotamus. It’s complete with good illustrations to help identify the two types of plantain.

While we find plantain to have a bitter taste in salads, we’re true believers about its medicinal uses!