Down Home Blog

We subscribe to our local daily newspaper and a couple of Sunday papers, devouring all the sections including the funnies, the TV schedules, the want ads, and the police log.

I’ve listed vinegar as one of my baker’s dozen of household essentials; I’ve extolled its virtues as a hair rinse (after a borax “shampoo”) and as a medium for extracting the culinary and healing essences of herbs.

For millennia, our ancestors experimented with the leaves, roots, seeds, fungi, lichens, barks and other natural substances around them for healing.

Light deprivation, snow and ice storms, dangerous driving conditions, power outages, frozen pipes, the frenzy of winter holidays, overindulgence, weight gain: winter delivers a load of extra stress to those of us in the colder, darker regions.

If you live in one of the nation’s cold regions and burn wood for some or all of your winter heat, you’ve got wood ashes.

I’d read about using a slice of raw garlic to remove a splinter when working on a previous post praising the healing powers of garlic. But I didn’t mention it then.

Here in the northern latitudes, the incidence of colds, flu, pneumonia, strep, chicken pox, and norovirus infections (“stomach flu”) — rises dramatically during the winter months.