by request the ETHNO BOTANICAL thread

I've never heard of using nightshade as an antifungal.

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no luckly its not something thats practiced much if at all theese days. but then again they used to make a wallpaper dye from arsenic!!! and people would get sick from arsenic poinsoning from it. i guess some things are best left to the history books of stupid things we once did

a slightly different herbal for you today!........

i have no idea if this is "origanal" or not, you might already know this one but i didnt untill the other day while i was cooking.

so let me tell you about a small i have been having first. being a farm with many birds we have a constant large rat population, we keep a couple of jack russels that roam the barns looking for rats and we use a large number of rat poison stations, infact we spend arounf £1500 a year on poison and rat control. the main irratation i have with them is the gnawing of the chicken arks where the rats try and get in, and some the other areas, they cause untold damage and it costs to keep repairing the woodwork they destroy.
so there i was cooking the other night (chilli con carne) and while preparing the chilli's (harabarno)sp? i got some in my eye man that hurts like hell, but it gave me an idea !!!!!!!!!!

how about realy realy hot chilli oil painted on the bottom of the outside of the arks! surely rats would take a quick chew and be well and truly put off? then i got to thinking.......... fairly quickly it would wash off etc with the weather and be of no use and i dont have the time to keep applying it.. so this is what i am trying

i have taken a load of hot chilli seeds crushed them and used a solvent to exstract the oil, the reason for this is the hotest part of the chilli is in the seeds and is oil based plus oil soaks in the wood better (more of this in a min). i used hexane because we have it but parafin would work just as well, soak the seed pulp in your solvent for 20 mins then filter it, i used coffee filter paper. then in a small heat proof container gently heat it untill it lightly boils. be very very careful you dont get the solvent so hot it reaches flash point. once the solvent has gone you will be left with pure chilli oil thats very very hot.

now how to get it to stay on the wood??? well what i came up with was WAX!!! i melted some wax and mixed in the chilli oil, so all i do now is melt the wax and brush it onto the bottom of the arks. i then use a blow lamp (plumbers type) to heat the wax and make sure it sinks into the wood a little!

i havnt been using this long so i dont know how good it will be but i will keep you posted

my MIL put chili powder in wood putty and fixed the the wood work where the dog chewed. next time the dog chewed it he yipped and never hit that spot again.
sounds about the same idea?

Hot pepper oil in a wax is popular in the states, as a deterrent for everything but birds..

It should work well...Great thinking..!! Sounds like another useful application for hot pepper oil/wax..

I do enjoy "reinventing" the wheel..Discovery is a blast..
ON

LOL looks like the only person that didnt know about this was ME!!!! see you never stop learning there i was thinking i was being clever .............

This is a super fantastic thread and thank you so much for starting it. My particular interest is essential oils and the waters left after the distillation of the oils. I am currently using cedarwood hydrosol (the water left after distillation) as a spray for my chickens to keep off the mites, etc. I am using essential oils in the hen-house to keep pesky bugs away. I have a little terra cotta amphora into which I place drops of various bug-repellant EOs and hang it up in the hen-house. In fact, I am using a concoction of anti-fungal EOs to spray on my tomato plants to prevent infection with Late Blight, which was ubiquitous in gardens last summer, and has already reared it's ugly head in the US this summer. (The weather is much less conducive to Late Blight this summer, thank goodness, but better safe than sorry.) That concoction includes Tea Tree oil, and a couple cinnamon EOs, all being powerful anti-fungals. I strongly believe that if Pharma could patent, and otherwise make money from, plant compounds, they would do it, and we would all be aware of how little we need propriatory medicines. Now, I'm a nurse, so I'm not talking about up and stopping your insulin or blood pressure medicine, but you get my drift. We now give a pill containing the probiotics found in yogurt to hospitalized patients receiving IV antibiotics--Pharma found a way of formulating it in pill form that we have to pay for. In addition, pts are starting to receive Omega 3s while in the hospital in some cases.

The article about aloe was interesting. I'm trying to figure out if there is any readily available form of aloe in the aromatherapy community which would have the desired effects as a de-wormer for chickens. I'm going to look into it.

I have been really enlightened to learn about the compounds in plants that give them the various medicinal effects which so many of them have. This is not hocus-pocus, or some kind of worthless 'folk medicine'. This is real science, and being researched around the world. I even found research articles online referring to use of tea tree oil and cinnamon oil to kill the Late Blight fungus. My neighbor laughed at me till I found the research article and printed it out for him. I figured it out on my own and only later found that others have had the same idea.

Again, THANK YOU for this thread and keep it up.

Fabulous thread - so glad I found it! I'm always looking for alternatives when caring for/treating my birds. With just a small flock of 7, having just finished my first full year of enjoying them, I consider myself, when compared to many other posters, a newbie and glean lots of useful information from this site. Luckily, I haven't has too much to deal with in terms of predators and illness - but if and when I do I know where to find the info I need. So thanks to all of you who know so much and share your knowledge on this site.

This is the most useful thread I have found yet!
I have a variety of medicinal plants I keep for human use, but I have found very little on herbs for animals.
I found a recipe for an herbal flea powder once (ETA recipe below) and because of that I have a wormwood plant. I had no idea it would help with intestinal parasites, though. I have been told by several others interested in herbs that they didn't think you could get it here (in the US), as they had looked and couldn't find any. They gave up, assuming it was illegal I don't think it is because I ordered mine thu 'seed savers exchange'. I am fairly sure its US based and it cost me about $2.75 for at least 25 seeds which I had a VERY high germination rate on. SSE is a great resource for hard to find plants, I highly recommend it.
Anyway, thanks everyone for posting, I look forward to learning more!

Herbal Flea Powder
eucalyptus
rosemary
fennel
yellow dock
wormwood
rue

Dry and powder herbs, mix equal parts of each together and apply to pet's coat (outside!) by brushing fur backward. Fleas will jump off, it claims, but I doubt it will effect eggs. I haven't tried it yet, but as soon as my ingredients get big enough to harvest (and I can find some eucalyptus) I will report back on what I found. Fortunately we have not had many fleas this year.

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Thanks for the tip on SSE.. I saw them there, but wondered if they would germinate..
Next spring I will be planting some tooo..

ON