Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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 Unshakable Faith in Plant Medicine
by Arty Mangan

Richo Cech, a true herbal elder who has worked with herbs for 20 years, has
a practical reverence for medicinal plants and has developed a symbiotic
relationship stewarding their genetic treasure and making them available to
the public through the Horizon Herbs Strictly Medicinal Growing Guide and
Catalog. Richo collects seed from at least 700 plant species on his
five-acre farm in Williams in Southern Oregon. The interview was conducted
by Arty Mangan of Bioneers.

Arty Mangan: Richo, I haven't seen you in a few years, what have you been
up to?

Richo Cech: The same that I've been doing for the last decade, finding
cutting edge medicinal plants and bringing them into organic cultivation
for production of organic seed that goes out to growers throughout the
United States and worldwide.

Arty Mangan: Why is it important for people to grow these seeds out?

Richo Cech: Diversity is stable. It brings stability to our land. The human
body is the same way. Having a diverse food source allows for robustness of
the inner ecosystem, and having a diverse plant ecology allows for
stability of the outside system, and also brings in whole other layers of
life that would not otherwise be there. Not only are we creating points of
diversity with different species on the land, but also there's layering of
diversity, the increase of bacterial and fungal activity in the soils, an
increase of all insect life: butterflies, bees, and other pollinators.
There's birdsong and blossoms in the morning. There are bats flying around
at night. This all just really spirals up from the plant diversity. So I
call it a garden for all beings. We create a garden for all beings by
planting trees and herbaceous plants and cover crops.

Arty Mangan: In your book, " Making Plant Medicine" you say the best
medicine is the medicine you grow, or that's grown locally and that you
make yourself.

Richo Cech: Well, there are practical reasons for that. The more that we
separate ourselves from the source of our medicine, speaking of herbs
specifically, the more processing occurs, the more potential for
deterioration of the actual herbal material occurs. So the efficacy is
less. This is probably one of the main reasons why popular clinical studies
on the efficacy of Echinacea are turning up negative results, because
they're using medicines that are taken off of the shelves at stores. Who
knows how many years old the dried root may be? Or they're using the
western pharmaceutical model and they're pulling the plant apart into its
constituent forms and using these as magic bullets to try to treat
patients. So that is very removed from the roots that we dig from dormant
Echinacea plants in the winter and chew on them, direct consumption to
treat beginning phase influenza.

We need to bring the food from the garden and combine it with garden wisdom
for treating self, family, local folks, and others. We need to do that
everywhere. It's a grassroots revolution, buying back our power by knowing
the garden.

Arty Mangan: Does cultural context play a role in the efficacy of plant
medicine?

Richo Cech: Well, we talked about the freshness of the material, and how
that's really important. But there are certainly other levels that are
recognized by various rootsy cultures; and this has to do with a spiritual
realm. It has to do with tying together the process of planting, growing,
harvesting, and using food and herbs by maintaining some level of
consciousness and prayer throughout the entire cycle. What this does is
instills the food with intention. It instills the medicine with intention.

So when I'm planting calendula, I could be thinking about the lyrics to a
Bob Dylan song, or I could be bringing my full human capacity into the act
of planting a calendula seed, distilling that awareness into a prayer that
the calendula seed I'm planting grow, and that it will prosper and flower
and bring beauty to the earth. Then when it's picked, I actually visualize
the activity of the herb. I visualize the anti-inflammatory and healing
nature of calendula, in my mind, as an herbalist who's used these things
many times and made the medicine for scores of years. Then that calendula
becomes a little bit more special, just a little bit more special.

So we respect the plant and the use of its body. I mean, what a gift, it's
giving its body to us. And each step we think about the motivation for
doing this work. In a general sense, we want to help people, and in a
specific sense, what this particular plant is intended to do. Then we trust
the medicine, because we know how it was grown. We know what it should do,
and we have expectations around how it will act. The person who is
receiving the medicine is reassured. They see our faith, and they know that
it heals.

Arty Mangan: What are some of the new herbs you're working with?

Richo Cech: Well, I don't think the herbs are ever new. It's more like new
to me or perhaps new to us in this hemisphere. But one that I always like
to start with is the Holy Basil, or Krishna Tulsi. It is a powerful herb
that has been used historically, and is also employed in modern herbalism
and has a really definitive spiritual aspect to it. The old Latin used to
be Ocimum sanctum, which I like a lot—Holy Basil. Now they call it Ocimum
tenuifolia, or small-leaved basil, differentiating it from the
large-leaved, pesto, culinary basils. We feel that the herb just brings a
lot of blessings to the land and reminds us of why we really do what we do,
and that what we produce here is an offering to people, and trying to keep
the energy really refined. Holy Basil is sort of a good reminder of all
those things. In Ayurvedic medicine, they grow it near the doorway of the
house, in order to keep reminding you as you come home, why you're here, or
keep you focused on your spiritual aspirations.

Also, the plant has an adaptagenic or a normalizing effect on human health.
So we eat the leaves during the day. There's this direct consumption that
we were talking about, where the herbs are really most powerful right off
the plant. It contains compounds that are adaptagenic and normalize body
functions towards homeostasis. So if you have high blood sugar, then the
blood sugar is lowered. If you have low blood sugar, then the blood sugar
is raised. The indications for using Holy Basil are many. It proves
prophylactic against cancer and degenerative diseases, and it's used for
treating sexual dysfunctions. It's used for treating malnutrition. The list
really goes on and on.

Arty Mangan: What about your own personal herbal regimen, what's involved?

Richo Cech: I incorporate fresh herbs in with my food. Everything here is
seasonal, so in season we tend to gorge on the plants that are really at
the peak of their readiness. Then, when they're no longer at their peak,
we're usually taking the seeds from them. Dandelions are a good example. We
almost never pull dandelions on this land. They're allowed to grow freely
wherever they set seed. In the spring, we eat a lot of dandelion greens.
It's a spring tonic for us, and we use them in the salads just directly out
of the garden. It has a definite laxative effect, which most spring tonics
should have, because this expels toxins built up from a winter food supply
that's often coming from further away. I'll have dandelions daily for three
or four weeks while they're really in good shape, and then later I go out
and pick the dandelion fluff and rub that out into seed. I've always said
that I must be really fortunate to be able to make my livelihood from
picking the fluff of Dandelions.

I think that any herb or food is going to work best during the peak
ripeness. If you start to rely on something and the use becomes really
habitual, then it becomes less effective over time. So that's one of the
benefits of this kind of diverse diet including medicinal herbs, is that
then we can switch it out to something else.

Arty Mangan: Generally speaking can you describe the different categories
of seed saving?

Richo Cech: Well, we were just out there checking the Physalis peruviana,
the Peruvian Goldenberries. These are seeds in a soft fruit, so one of the
categories of seed collection would be to be harvesting these fresh, fleshy
fruits and then smashing them and floating the debris out from the smashed
fruit by adding water and then decanting. The heaviest seed, for the most
part, is the most viable fraction. So the heavy seed goes to the bottom of
the bucket of water. Then, this is usually either dried on a screen or it
may actually be saved in moist coir medium and refrigerated, especially in
the case of seeds that take on dormancy when they dry.

There are actually a lot of good examples of this. Another one would be the
wild grape, Vitis riparia, which we've recently begun to work with as a
great permaculture plant. It's really excellent for planting in riparian
zones and in shelterbelts. The grapes are small, round, and loaded with the
constituents that are excellent vascular tonics. These we never allow to
dry out, because when you dry them out, the germination percent goes way
down. We call them multi-cycle germinators. They require multiple cycles of
freezing and thawing before they'll germinate, whereas if we keep them
fresh, they'll germinate readily in the spring.

Another obvious category would be dry seeds in capsules. Our method of
working with those is to wait until their seed is really ripe in the
follicle or ripe in the capitula of the plant. Then we just go out with
buckets and we overturn the plants into the bucket and give a shake, and
the seed falls out. So there could be multiple harvests on plants of this
nature. Figwort is an example of this that we just harvested. It's a plant
that carries its seed in dry capsules. If you tip it over, its seed just
pours out. It's part of some of the historical anti-cancer formulas. It has
some strong anti-cancer activity, tumor reducing potential. So we would
harvest these plants numerous times over a period of three or four weeks,
and then combine all of the seed from all these shakes. Then clean them and
make one lot of seed, which we would characterize and number and put in our
records and package up and make ready for sale throughout the winter and
early spring, when we sell most our seeds.

So that leaves us with dry seeds that do not readily come out of the
capsule. These require more processing on our part. We need to physically
break open the seed-heads. Echinacea would be a good example. We don't get
much by shaking the ripe plant. In fact, if you let it go long enough so
that the seeds is shattering, then the goldfinches will have probably come
in and get the best seed anyway. So you harvest it when the seed is ripe,
but not really shattering from the plant. Then we take those seed-heads dry
them and run them through a chipper. What we come up with is a mass of seed
and broken chaff. Then we screen and wind winnow it to get a pure seed. In
most cases, I aspire towards one hundred percent purity. But in a situation
like Echinacea seed that has a huge amount of chaff intermixed, then I
would be satisfied with 98 percent purity.

For more information: www.horizonherbs.com

http://foodandfarming.bioneers.org/node/25