Radical Herbalism is a new workshop offered by Leah Wolfe. The first is sponsored by United Plant Savers!
To learn more click here: https://trilliumcenter.org/2017/07/24/radical-herbalism/
Contact us if you’d like to have this workshop happen in your area.
If you don’t get our newsletter, you might be missing out on some of the classes offered by the Trillium Center. Sign up for our newsletter in the left-hand column. Here are the upcoming classes. Visit the Calendar for details!
Autumn is Coming Plant Walk, Sep 2
Herbs for Emotional & Spiritual Healing, Sep 15
Radical Herbalism = Roots + Restoration + Resilience + Resistance, Sep 23
Calming Herbs for Stress and Frazzled Nerves, Sep 24
Weekend in the Woods: Mushroom & Wild Medicine Intensive, Sep 29-Oct 1
Foraged Finds: Wild Mushrooms of our Forests, Farms & Urban Lots, Oct 6
Community Herbal Intensive 2018, starts in March
Join us for a mushrooming experience with Olga Tzogas & Willoughby Arevalo
Learn what fungi exist commonly within communities. Gathering mushrooms and other wild things increases our awareness of the ecology of our environment and helps us reconnect to our ancestral selves. It doesn’t take much to walk out the door and find edibles, medicinals, and even poisonous life forms. Journey into the field of knowledge we all once knew. Tap into the diverse and vast world of fungi that live within the region. Exploring the ethics of gathering and what sensitive life exists in our forests. Learn basic skills for proper identification and how fungi live within our forests.
Sliding-scale fee: $45-75 per person
A sliding-scale fee is offered as a way to allow people with less money to pay less, and people with more money to pay more. If you can pay a little more, consider it a way of paying it forward.
This workshop intends to teach the core principles and skills of mushroom identification and ease the learning curve by clarifying broad concepts and offering tools to the beginner to intermediate mushroomer. The workshop will begin with a collection foray and continue indoors with lecture and demonstration.
Topics include:
Learn more about Willoughby at The Fungorium https://willoughbyarevalo.com/biography/
Learn more about Olga at Smugtown Mushrooms
http://www.smugtownmushrooms.com/Default.asp
One of the most beautiful places to visit in the autumn is the Allegheny National Forest. We spent a weekend in the woods there last summer and saw some amazing plants, mushrooms, and wildlife. The pictures above are from the area we will revisit.
But now, we want to go in the fall to see the mushrooms and the autumn roots.
Hands-on skill building activities include:
— plant walks to learn how to locate plants and mushrooms
— field identification of plants and mushrooms
— spore identification of mushrooms
— incorporating wild foods into meals and beverages
— learning to use field guides (and identifying which field guides work for you)
— building community around foraging and the love of plants and mushrooms
— breathing deeply in the depths of the woods
— developing a system for learning materia medica (the study of the medicinal properties of plants and mushrooms)
— an emphasis on several native plants
Cost: $125-175 sliding scale
This means pay what you can afford in that range. If you can afford a little more it makes it easier on the people who have to pay less. If you can pay more, consider it an opportunity to pay it forward.
The work/study positions for this event have been filled.
Register here: https://www.artful.ly/store/events/13308
.
Light Footsteps Farm, Chardon, OH
Increase your self-reliance skills by integrating wild plants and kitchen ingredients into basic first aid remedies. Learn how to provide minor first aid and wellness care at home or outdoors and quickly identify emergencies. We will focus on common and easy-to-grow plants for herbal first aid. This is a hands-on class. No first aid experience required.
This preventive approach to natural first aid has three core values: the human mind and body is a self-healing organism, early detection of illnesses, and careful treatment of minor wounds to prevent infections. Find out why you only need to know five plants to enhance your first aid skills. Learn a quick assessment to determine when to call for help. Practice using plant remedies and learn how to make a few versatile herbal products to have in your medicine cabinet.
Join Leah Wolfe for this hands-on workshop. Since 2013, Wolfe has practiced and taught first aid and natural wellness in the streets, in free clinics, at conferences, camps, and in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Class fee for Herbal First Aid is $65; includes materials, supplies, refreshments, and instructor’s fees.
What is radical herbalism? For me, radical herbalism is about getting to the root of health issues. The word radical means “going to the root.” I believe that every person has a right to good health. This goes beyond providing health care. Do you see the difference?
What I see is that health care in the U.S. is largely centered around the treatment of disease. This approach to health means that most people get help after they are already sick. Programs that emphasize prevention and wellness are becoming more common because it’s becoming more clear that many of the most common health issues can be prevented with a good diet, clean water and air, and exercise.
Once upon a time, herbalism was daily part of life. So as I see it, one aspect of radical herbalism is about re-integrating herbalism into daily life. But I can’t stop there. After studying for a masters degree in public health, I learned more about how everything is interconnected and that good health is more complex than just telling people to eat better and exercise more. What if they live in a place where fresh and whole foods aren’t available? What if they can’t afford the health food prices? What if they don’t know the foods they are eating aren’t the best thing? So we’re talking about access to food, knowledge about healthy foods (which changes all the time depending on what’s in the news), cultural ideas about food, the social impact on why we eat what we eat and so on.
Join me for a class on radical herbalism and the different ways that herbalism can become part of daily living at the United Plant Savers Botanical Sanctuary in Rutland, Ohio. If you’d like to learn about how to get to the root of your own health issues, or how to create projects that consider root issues, this might be the class for you. Here is the flier with details.
Viriditas,
Leah Wolfe
P.S. The photo above is me teaching at the RadHerb gathering at Farmacy Herbs!
Workshop Activities
Join Leah Wolfe, MPH, herbalist, health educator & street medic, to follow her journey through radical herbalism; first stop, seventeenth century Ireland & on to coal country, the mountains of the west, post-earthquake Haiti, the fracking-waste front lines, Standing Rock, & the final destination, a rust belt food desert. Wolfe started the Trillium Center in 2013 to bring herbal education & ethics to local & regional communities. Learn more at trilliumcenter.org. Contact us at 440.812.9921 or leah@trilliumcenter.org
This is the 2017 Summer Solstice sunset from Conneaut Harbor’s “Mud Pit” Wildlife Sanctuary.
Life sort of just rolled over my head and got parked there for the last many months. Rolled over me and left a smear of Grease Hog and 2790 splashed up one of my pant legs. I know that the skin on my leg as tuned white and will start to itch/burn as the fluid dissolves it’s way towards neutrality or chemical resolution, which ever comes first. I can never remember. These days I cruise through Erie and clean carpets in empty (and full) apartments and houses. We only run 3 trucks, upwards of 13 hours some days. Usually at least 10. It took me a while to figure out how to do things before I was able to do them without having to think about them. I had to make it a muscle memory and recover physically from bringing my carpet cleaning muscles into shape. (Mostly core) I’m no expert or anything, but chances are I can clean your carpet real good. I cleaned the grout in the kitchen tile with the truck from work and found out that the tile aren’t brown or grey. I have no memory of the grout lines when I moved in here 13 years ago. Turns out that they are BABY BLUE!!! Sometimes there is such a thing as getting stuff TOO CLEAN. I don’t know how I’m ever going to keep them clean now. ugh
Once the muscles stopped hurting and I could move on my “weekend,” I made some progress in the barn. 10 scoops of 1/4″ screened bank sand, 20 1/4″ screened yellow native clay and 3 large forks of hay/straw.
I wanted time to see if it would just fall off the vertical Phrag before I brought anyone else in to help.
The seem along the top of the wall still needs attending to but the walls seem to be staying up. Remarkably, they haven’t really checked the say the 1st layer in the Seedhouse had.
All the windows are secured with “chicken wire” and most of them are open now. it smells good and is bright and airy in there. Chickens being chickens, they mostly get it that they need to go in the door they came out of… most of them get that. 3 or 5 still get stuck in the barn every night instead of going through the coop’s exterior door. The goats have the run of the rest of the barn, except the feed room and the milking parlor.
We took Maly walking the other day and there’s a chance he saw the fishes slowly positioning themselves close enough to catch the potential cat food or Frito that may or may not be inbound. They stayed far enough back that if Maly had seen them, which we kind of doubt, he couldn’t have gotten them anyway.
