Transcription
Hello, my name is Matthew Hunter with Legacy Wilderness Academy, and I'm on a mission to document every edible and medicinal plant in the southeastern US so southerners can have greater access to nutritious food and free medicine.
In today's video, we're going to be looking at one of the top herbs for clearing out mucus and congestion from the lungs and sinuses. It's called mullen. And in this video, I'll show you how to identify mullen. We'll talk about its medicinal uses. Then I'll harvest some in the field. We'll take it home and I'll show you how to prepare it into a medicine. Stay tuned.
Before we get started, I'll quickly mention that if you want to learn more about medicinal plants of the southeastern US, make sure that after this video, you download my free guide to medicinal plants, which you can find in the link in the description below this video.
All right, so here we have a mullen plant. Mullen is known scientifically as verbasum thapsis, and it's primarily identified by its large fuzzy leaves. It generally has a two-year life cycle. In its first year, it's going to send up what we call a basil rosette, which is what you see here. It's just a cluster of leaves coming directly out of the ground. And then in its second year of growth, it's going to send up a flowering stock that can be anywhere from 1 foot tall all the way up to about 6 feet tall. And that flowering stock is going to make it really stand out as far as identification goes. It's going to have yellow flowers. And then as those flowers die, it'll leave behind this brown sort of seed spike that kind of reminds you of a cattail in the sense that it kind of looks like a hot dog on a stick in a way. And so a lot of times, you know, beginners will have a hard time confirming that they have a mullen if they're looking at a first-year plant. Uh, so with a lot of plants, we want to wait until it flowers. Once it sends up that flowering stock, it becomes very distinct and it can help us, uh, if you're a beginner, to confirm your identification.
Next, let's talk about the medicinal uses of mullen. So, mullen is probably the very first medicinal plant I ever started experimenting with. Long before I was studying herbal medicine formally or teaching about plants, I was drinking mullen tea for its benefits for the respiratory tract. It's such a wonderful herb to know because it's common. It's easy to identify. It's very safe for beginners to start working with. It's even safe for young children. And it's just so effective. So, mullen has a number of other uses I won't mention in this video, but first and foremost, I think of it as a respiratory tract herb.
So, mullen has a few different benefits for the respiratory tract. It's an anti-inflammatory. It is a decongestant and it's an expectorant. So, as an anti-inflammatory and decongestant, uh, as soon as you drink a cup of mullen tea, in about 15 or 20 minutes, you're going to start noticing that you can breathe better out of your nose. It just, um, you know, reduces irritation and inflammation in the respiratory tract. It's wonderful for that purpose. As an expectorant, it helps to break up phlegm in the lungs and it helps your body to expel it. And so, uh, the leaves are the main part that I use. The flowers are also used. And a lesser-known part that is used is the root. And I call the root nature's cough drop because, um, one time I dug up a bunch of the roots and broke them into little like inch-long pieces. And you'll find that if you work with mullen for any length of time, you tend to run out of the leaves pretty quick because it's one that you're just constantly running to. To help people with either allergies or, um, you know, even people with asthma to help with the symptoms or people who have a cold and have that congestion, I always put it in my, uh, cold formula. So, you run out of leaves really fast, but the roots tend to last a lot longer. When you dry them and break them into little inch sections, um, whenever you have any type of congestion, if you chew on just that little piece of the root, now it tastes horrible, but usually you can hardly taste anything whenever you're, you know, all congested like that anyway. But it just almost immediately as soon as it starts to rehydrate in your mouth, uh, it has a soothing anti-inflammatory effect on the sinuses. Anytime your nose just feels horrible, it is one that provides almost instant relief. It is almost a miracle drug for that very specific purpose of treating the symptoms of respiratory tract inflammation, especially upper respiratory tract, uh, inflammation.
Now, if you drink a tea, you're going to get all of the benefits of mullen. Some people even take, um, pills, you know, grind it up and put it into capsules. But there's a couple other ways we can administer mullen to make it even more effective. And one of those is a nasal rinse. So, in this video, I'm going to show you how to do a nasal rinse to apply that tea directly to the sinuses and help break up that congestion and reduce that inflammation even more. And we're also going to look at how to use it in a nebulizer. Um, applying it directly to the lung tissue to really help break up that congestion, reduce that inflammation, and, uh, just make breathing a little bit easier. So, I'm going to go ahead and harvest some of the leaves. I'll harvest at least one or maybe two of the roots. We'll take it home and I'll show you how to prepare it into a medicine.
All right, so here we've got a nice little haul of leaves. We've also got a couple roots. So, let's take them back to the kitchen.
All right, so here we have the leaves and the roots. The larger root that I harvested was woody on the inside. So, I just stripped off the outer root bark. And then the smaller roots I just cut into about inch-long sections. These will be set out to dry and I can chew on a piece as needed. The leaves are also going to be set out to dry, but because they have these thick midribs that are full of moisture, they tend to not want to dry all on their own when set out on the counter. So after a few days of drying, I'm going to put them in the oven on the lowest heat setting. I'm going to prop that oven door open, put them on a tray, and I'll leave them in for an hour or two just to drive out all the rest of the moisture. You can also use a dehydrator, uh, if you have one.
So, for mullen, usually I don't even measure it. This is dried mullen leaf here that's been crumbled up. And I've been doing it for so long, I just take a little handful, put it in some water, and I know, you know, how much. But for this video, I'll give you, you know, a rough amount. I kind of estimated how much I would use, you know, so you can kind of get an idea. So here I have one cup, uh, this is not like a packed cup. This is just a loosely, uh, you know, a loose cup here. And this is going to go into 2 and 1/2 cups of water. And that's going to boil for about 15 minutes. So let's go ahead and do that.
All right. So I think the number I gave you was actually a little bit off. I wanted the finished product to be two cups and I added that extra half cup to account for boiling and some of the water absorbing. But I think a little bit too much boiled off. So I added a little bit more. Um, we'll see how I did. The next step is that you want to strain it through, uh, some type of fine, uh, filter because for mullen, it has these little irritating hairs. They're just mildly kind of, you know, itchy on the back of the throat sometimes. And so, you want to try to strain those out. So, I'll go ahead and squeeze all the water out of this. So, like I said, I did add a little bit of water at the end there. And you can see that we almost hit that two cup mark, which is what I was shooting for. So instead of starting with 2 and 1/2 cups of water, you can maybe start with three or three and 1/2 cups to account for that boiling and for the water absorbing into the mullen. So like I said earlier, I don't normally do it like this. Uh, this is sort of the proper decoction. And the way you would dose this is about 1/2 cup of this, but like I said, I'm usually not that exact with mullen. I'll either throw it into a formula with a bunch of other plants or if I'm doing it by itself, I'll just throw a little handful into a pot of water and then I'll usually drink a lot of a bigger cup. That's just my personal preference. But for this strength that I've shown you, about a half cup.
Um, so next, let's talk about how you can actually apply this directly to the sinuses and also directly to the lungs in a nasal rinse and in a nebulizer. So our next step for this is we want to make what's called an isotonic solution. We want the solution in our nasal rinse and nebulizer to have a little bit of salt in it to match the amount of salt that's in our body's cells. That way that water when it hits the inside of our sinuses or in our lungs, it's not going to be, you know, irritating, but it's going to be soothing to the tissue. And so, we're going to start by, um, getting one cup of the mullen tea. This is going to make it convenient to measure. And then for this, we're going to do one-quarter teaspoon of the neti salt. And neti salt is basically just a purified salt. You can also just use your, if you have a neti pot at home, you can use your little packets that it comes with and that's going to work the same for nebulizers or for nasal rinses. So this is 1/4 teaspoon of salt and you usually want to use distilled water or reverse osmosis filtered water is what I'm using here for this because it is going to be going into our lungs. And now we have our isotonic mullen solution.
Okay. Next, I'll go ahead and pour this into my little nasal rinse bottle here. Okay. So, for this next part, my assistant Georgia is going to be helping me. And, um, the first thing I'll show you how to do is do the nasal rinse. Um, so I may kind of cut the section out where it actually starts coming out the other side of my nose, but it goes up one nostril and comes out the other side. All right, so that's how to do the nasal rinse. And we can use that exact same solution and put it into our nebulizer. So we'll just put it into our nebulizer cup here. And George is going to demonstrate how to do that. Put this mask on. Okay, flip it on. So by applying mullen directly to the sinuses in a nasal rinse or directly to the lungs in a nebulizer, it increases its efficacy as, um, a respiratory anti-inflammatory decongestant and expectorant. So that is how to do that.
Well guys, I hope you enjoyed the video. Thank you so much for watching. And if you want to learn more about medicinal plants of the southeast that are used for respiratory tract issues, I'm going to put up a few more videos on the screen. One is my video on wild cherry. We have two species of wild cherry in the southeast and they go in a lot of my cough formulas because they're great at reducing pain in the lungs and also helping to get some more of that phlegm out. They're an expectorant as well. And then I also have one on goldenrod, which is great for upper respiratory tract congestion. It reduces inflammation and dries up runny sinuses. And then I also have one that is two plants mixed with mullen in a nebulizer formula as a knockout respiratory virus formula. And these are all local southern plants that you can find probably in your area if you live in the southeast. So again, my name is Matthew Hunter. Thank you again for watching and I hope to see you guys in the next one.