Hi friends,
For those of my friends living in the states, isn’t it nice to see little glimpses of spring? We had a beautiful, sunny day last week, warm enough to go out in t-shirts.
Neighbors emerged from homes like prisoners freed from jail. 😀 It was so fun to enjoy the beautiful outdoors after months of cold, huddling inside.
Of course, we immediately had a spat of dreary, cold and rainy days afterward, but we’re hoping for more sun soon.
Last week, I got a great email from a reader, Patricia, in response to my email about making medicine kits. She mentioned how she makes a lot of her own herbal health remedies and uses those preferentially. Her favorite is elderberry syrup, which I also love! So, I thought I’d share some of the little I know about it.
Elderberry – A natural anti-viral!
This berry is small, purple and rather tasteless or bitter, if you try to eat it raw – exactly the kind of berries kids are warned not to eat in the wild.
And with good reason. Elderberry leaves and twigs, in particular, can actually be deadly and the raw berries can also be dangerous.
However, if you cook the juice extracted from the berries and don’t get any twigs and leaves into your concoction, you’ll have a pretty potent antiviral.
Here are the steps we go through to make elderberry juice from the bushes growing on either side of our house:
- Pick the clusters of berries when they are purple and ripe in later summer/early fall. (You have to beat the birds)
- Enlist friends or kids to help strip the berries from the twigs. We’ve found using a fork works well, or just fingers if you don’t mind purple-stained skin.
- Buy or borrow a boiling water steamer that extracts the hot juice from the berries, making it now safe to ingest. Without this piece of equipment, you can also cook the berries, smash them with a potato masher and put the hot slush in a few layers of cheesecloth to squeeze once it cools. Hot and messy, but no special equipment required.
- Bottle the juice as is (requires a pressure canner), freeze it as ice cubes to add to drinks when someone is sick or cook up with sugar to make a syrup that you can then also bottle or keep in the fridge for quick use.
Of course, the beneficial properties of elderberries have become well known recently, and you can usually pick up a bottle of syrup or extract at the local drug store or online. Pricier, but much easier! 🙂
Have any of you used elderberry with good success? Made your own juice and/or syrup? I’d love to hear how it’s worked for you.
Good luck and stay healthy out there!
____________________
Misty’s Writing Update:
I’m at the point in this HUGE book that I feel as if I’m constantly 5 – 10 chapters from the end.
I did wrap up the big battle, but now there are a bunch of plot threads that need tied off before the end. It seems that I keep remembering another one.
I’m currently deciding how much trouble I want the bully and other antagonists to cause for our main guy and his friends here at the end. I figure the good guys need a nice influx of loot and success, but nothing in a good story comes easily without opposition.
It is kind of fun though to play with the balance between rewards/achievements and tension/conflict as I finish this book.
If things go as planned, I’m hoping to finish up the first draft in another week, but tune in next time to see.
I just hit 160k words and with a regular paperback having 250 – 300 words per page, that makes this book between 540 and 640 pages long. I’m wondering exactly how much it’ll cost to print this in paperback. Eeek!
Enjoy reading this week!
— Misty 🙂
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