Magic Under Our Feet

Story of the Day – Roots Weekend Day 2 – November 5th, 2017

Bridgette’s Farm and Property

We started the day all gathering in Bridgette’s basement who so graciously hosted us on her land.  We all huddled around the wood stove together to start our day with an opening circle.  It was foggy and raining outside but we were all ready to get outside and DIG THOSE ROOTS!!

After we spoke about what we were grateful for, we geared up and headed out onto the land.  Bridgette showed us around, walking around horse paddocks and a big beautiful pond.  We walked up and down some small hills and crept under electric fences.  We eventually made it into a wooded area where we walked through some cedars and through to an area covered in Sugar Maples.

We collected clippings from all the different Evergreen trees that we could find and being that this land used to be an old Christmas tree farm, there were some interesting and confusing trees that we found!  Cedar, White Pin

e, Scot’s Pine, Balsam Fir, Hemlock and Fraser’s Fir??

We walked down into the Sugar Maples and decided to get down in the dirt and start checking out some roots.  Folks dug down and ended up finding some very different and amazing roots.  Fibrous roots, corms and bulbs, Trout Lilly corms, Blue Cohosh roots and some

really cool mysteries.  As some of us swept back the fallen leaves, we realized there were some tiny flowers that were already setting up for next spring.  The tiny flowers were attached to a round brown corm, after lots of questions and suggestions, we decided it was possibly a Spring Beauty!  We were amazed at how they do this and how they sit pretty under the fallen leaves and snow in that state until Spring!

On our way back for lunch we split into a few groups, a group to harvest Cattail roots, a group to harvest Burdock and a group to harvest Willow.  Some of Bridgettes’ goats were out and about and followed us around as we worked.  When we were done, we all took relief from the rain inside of Bridgette’s workshop and huddled around the wood stove once more while we enjoyed our lunch together.

After lunch we all took on a few projects, we needed to clean some of the roots we dug from the morning and they day before and we needed to cut some of the willow and Highbush Cranberry that was harvested into smaller pieces so that they could be processed.  When all was done, we brought the roots and branches inside, the roots were displayed on a table and we took some time to admire how beautiful and different each of them were.  It was great to take some time to look at these roots that we never spend enough time looking at!  We looked in books and learned about Primary and Adventitious Roots and identified who was who.  After a little time we broke off and had some great hands on time creating root tinctures and peeling bark of Willow and Highbush Cranberry for amazing painkilling and cramp stopping medicines.

Time flew by and it was the end of our day in no time.  It was hard to put down what we were doing but we managed to divide up the roots and bark for folks to take home and we finished our day with a closing circle.  Huddled around the wood stove, we said our goodbyes and all headed home knowing that we would see each other in just a few weeks.

-Kelly