SPRING MEDICINES & MY FAVORITE SPRING PESTO RECIPE! 🌱

I am always amazed at how much medicine the Earth can birth on just a few square feet of her body! This morning I went for a walk in my beloved Hudson Valley, close to the river and the hiking trails, and got to see a powerhouse of medicinal plants: chickweed, cleavers, dandelions, burdock, motherwort, purple dead nettle, wild mustard, celandine, yellow dock... all of them growing right next to each other, and bursting with so much color & life force!

These plants are all powerful spring tonics for the digestive and lymphatic systems, and are packed with vitamins, minerals & nutrients to wake up and gently cleanse our digestion, purify our blood and lymph, and remineralize the body! Exactly what we need during this season is just under our feet!!

So why not take a walk and harvest some of these amazing plants?! Before you do so please make sure that there is no round up or other chemical treatments happening in the area. And as always, remember to wild harvest this beautiful medicine in a gentle, kind and sustainable way. We never take the whole patch of plants, only a few here and there, or just harvest parts of the plant, using scissors or clippers and making sure that roots stay intact unless we are harvesting them for medicine making.

Today I would like to share with you a very simple, delicious & very medicinal  spring pesto recipe! 🌱

All you need is some fresh dandelion leaves, cleavers, chickweed and wild mustard (see photos.) If mustard's stems are already hard (which happens later in the season) then only use the leaves. You can collect the plants in equal quantities by volume. Clean them off from dirt and dried leaves, put them into your blender, and add olive oil, salt and fresh lemon juice to taste. If you are not using wild mustard then you could add a few cloves of fresh garlic to your pesto. Give it a good spin and taste this delicious goodness, bursting with flavor, color and medicine!!

You can use this pesto to dress a salad or any cooked dish (veggies, pasta, grains, proteins...) Besides the great flavor this pesto will help you digest the meal, nourish your liver and gallbladder, cleanse your lymphatic system, and remineralize your body! 

"Let the food be thy medicine and the medicine be thy food!" 🌱