Getting Rid Of Wild Lettuce In The Garden Landscape Or Field
In The Gardener’s Weed Book, Barbara Pleasant notes that the best control methods are those that catch wild prickly lettuce when it’s young.
Like dandelions, it spreads many seeds, so catch it before it flowers out. It has a taproot, again, like a dandelion, so cut young plants just below the surface with a scuffle hoe. Older plants, like dandelions, will resprout from root stumps. Heavy mulch smothers the plants.
Weeds Control Without Poisons states:
low aerobic activity, hardpans, crusted soil, low pH, etc. Calcium is always too low when prickly lettuce arrives. Magnesium is high, as is potassium. High manganese and iron releases also figure.
So work to aerate your soil and improve the amount of organic matter, and considering liming the soil to improve calcium levels.
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How To Make Wild Lettuce Tea
You can use wild lettuce like any other herbal tea infusion. Simply start with a tablespoon and let it steep in hot water for 5 minutes. Never use boiling water as it can damage the medicinal qualities. You can make your infusion as strong or mild as you prefer.;
Ingredients: Contains 100% tea grade lactuca virosa
Traditional directions of use: Steep one tablespoon per cup of hot water and strain after a few minutes. Can also be prepared in an infuser. Be sure to strain!
Relax With Wild Lettuce
A sedative, hypnotic, and nervine plant, wild lettuce benefits also include relaxing the nervous system and allowing for the body to sleep. This herb is commonly recommended for treating insomnia, but it is also beneficial for restlessness and general anxiety. Wild lettuce blends well with valerian and pasque flower for treating sleeplessness. A cup of tea is great at the end of the day before going to sleep, but do not drink an infusion before driving a car or operating heavy machinery.
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Wild Lettuce In A Survival Situation
As Wild lettuce is so wildly available and offers a range of benefits, most noticeably its pain relief, it can be used in a variety of survival situations.If the worst came to the worst and the society devolved into a largely lawless world, having a stockpile of wild lettuce might give you an edge over everyone else. Being able to trade an effective pain reliever without having to rely on complicated manufacturing procedures is a massive bonus, you might just find your stockpile of Wild Lettuce is very much sought after putting you into a strong position for trading other essential items such as food and shelter.
Where To Find Seeds
If you find lactuca virosa in the wild, you can harvest the seeds and plant them in your yard .
The plant grows like a weed, so you should be able to easily grow it regardless of where you live. The flowering period is usually from June to August, and it turns to seed shortly after.
An easier solution is just to buy seeds. Ive found this brand to be a reliable source although they can be surprisingly difficult to germinate.
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Is Prickly Lettuce The Same As Wild Lettuce
Prickly lettuce; is very similar to;it. Their medicinal qualities have a lot in common, thus are aimed at dealing with similar health problems and having the same health effects. However, the prickly lettuce leaf shape is slightly different: The prickly sort has less rounded leaves with more jagged edges.
Using Wild Lettuce For Pain Relief
The main benefit is that it is a powerful herbal pain reliever, hence why the plant is often called opium lettuce.
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The components which provide pain relief are known as lactones. They act on the central nervous system to calm the nerves, which cause pain sensations.
Wild lettuce has been extensively studied and repeatedly shown to reduce pain. The name opium lettuce is a misnomer, though. While the plant will relieve pain, dont expect the hardcore sedative effects of opium. It is more comparable to a high dosage of ibuprofen.
The good news though is that it will relieve pain without causing the negative effects of opium. You wont get addicted nor will you develop a tolerance to it.
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What Can Wild Lettuce Be Used For
The uses for Wild Lettuce go far beyond just being a painkiller, it has a variety of uses which make it an incredibly valuable natural occurring asset. Additionally, as there are no documented adverse reactions or addiction issues surrounding it, its safe to self-administer with little fear of anything untoward happening.
Resin/water Extracts Vs Tinctures
Lactucarium the sap from wild lettuce is soluble in alcohol. Thus, tinctures and alcoholic extracts are more likely to have a pain-relieving effect.
Some sources recommend simply blending the whole plant and heating it to make a water or resin extract. Proponents claim this is fine if youre seeking the herbs gut-soothing effects or youre interested in making ointments to reduce skin inflammation and sunburns. The boiled herb is also used as an enema. But if youre looking for pain relief, this method simply wont work .
The scientific literature clearly tells us that the painkilling compounds are low in wild lettuce leaves. Whats more, they dont dissolve well in water. Thats why tinctures for pain relief are traditionally prepared from the sap and dissolved in alcohol .
Having this in mind, effective wild lettuce tinctures are not easy to prepare. Buying alcoholic extracts or tinctures from reputable sources is probably the best way to go for the majority of people. To prepare a tincture for pain relief yourself, you would need to first go through the delicate process of extracting the sap .
If you are experienced in wild herb harvesting, you may have managed to collect the sap from the plant. Some people recommend dissolving the sap straight into alcohol , while others recommend drying it first. Its unclear which method is more effective .
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The Wild Lettuce High
Some people claim to experience a wild lettuce high after taking wild lettuce. This is due to the perceived pain relief properties of wild lettuce.
Many people may experience a high using a number of pain relievers. As with any pain reliever, using wild lettuce to get high is certainly unwise.
That said, this is why you hear about people smoking wild lettuce.
Preparing Wild Lettuce For Medicinal Use
So assuming youve gone through the painstaking and time-consuming traditional method of harvesting wild lettuce.; Even if youve done as traditional sources suggest, and harvested from 20 or more plants, youre still looking at a pitifully small amount of wild lettuce sap.; Wild lettuce is thus far completely legal in the United States, to the best of my knowledge, so feel free to experiment responsibly with different preparations to see if they work for you.
How do you prepare wild lettuce sap for use as medicine?
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How Much To Take
Correct dosing is not set in stone, there are no official recommendations and the strength of the product can vary greatly. If youre a large and frequent user, youll need to take larger doses in order to receive the same benefits as someone whos smaller and infrequent user.
Its advisable to start at lower doses and see what works for you, roughly 100mg should be a good starting point for most people. You can, of course, take more if you need to, but its not so easy to remove a dose. Remember, it is a drug after all.
Dosage And Side Effects
As far as making any of the above DIY wild lettuce recipes, the information on the particular dosages are somewhat lacking or ambiguous when it comes to the tinctures and extracts. This is something that the user will have to experiment with and if it were me, Id start with very small dosages and slowly work up to achieve the optimum results.
These 2 links give some insight into some different dosages for different applications:
It is suggested that between 30 and 60 drops of tincture can be used per day.
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Wild Lettuce: A Great Herb To Know
Wild lettuce is an easy to identify herb that is abundantly common in the areas where it occurs. If you are a forager or homesteader, this is a great herb to get to know, and it is easy to grow in an herb garden as well.
So, take some time to get to know more about wild lettuce, and put this herb to work on your homestead today.
How Can You Find Wild Lettuce In Nature
Besides being a native plant to regions of India, wild lettuce also grows in the northwestern United States, Washington in particular. It has a history of being used by the Native Americans, which could explain its growth in parts of the U.S. Native American communities would use wild lettuce as a pain remedy but also for lucid dreaming as it works as a relaxant to help insomnia and restlessness.
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The Applications Of Wild Lettuce
Once you start to understand what wild lettuce can do, is when you start realizing just how important it is.
Wild opium lettuce can be used to treat a very vast array of different ailments and health issues.
Its a super everything natural drug. And since it has no adverse or addictive side effects, you can administer it without fear.
Wild Lettuce Pain Reliever Sedative Potential
Many people claim to experience pain relief and mild sedative benefits from wild lettuce. You can use wild lettuce for pain by drying the leaves and grinding them up and putting them in capsules.; You will need to dry the wild lettuce leaves out in order to make capsules.
You can also make a salve for your skin and mix with coconut or olive oil. There is a milky substance which is the sap known as lactones that is used for pain and is found at the stem and is the most potent part. It acts on the central nervous system to calm nerves which emit the pain sensations. This is more OTC strength as opposed to heavy pain killing properties.
Use the seed oil for hardening arteries; some people have used the sap or the late tax directly to the skin for germ killing purposes. Some people report a high from smoking the dry leaves. Of those people, many claim to experience hallucinogenic effects.
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Pain From Pms To Rheumatism
One of the traditional uses of wild lettuce is for pain relief. This herb has anodyne and anti-spasmodic properties that can benefit minor pain-related issues. It can be used for muscle spasms, muscular pain due to rheumatism, and painful periods. It can be blended with passion flower for a calming, soothing, pain-relieving herbal tea.
Other Uses For Wild Lettuce
Wild lettuce has been used by some veterinarians to help old, perhaps cognitively impaired dogs to soothe their nerves and relax at night; it might also help with arthritis and joint pain. For horses, it is considered to be a natural way to calm them down when they are acting out or are in pain.
So, there you have it, wild lettuce might be the natural pain reliever you were praying for. Our 100% natural wild lettuce is harvested at its peak of potency by growers who have decades of experience with wild lettuce and know exactly when to harvest this natural pain supplement.
Youll find in Burma Spice, the strongest dried wild lettuce in the market. It is 100% natural, kosher certified by ORB, and it comes with a 100% satisfaction guarantee; If it doesnt work for you, simply contact us for a full refund.
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How To Process It
Heres a summary of;the steps in the video:
The Legality Of Opium Lettuce
For those of you worrying about its legality since it is fully natural opium, we are gladly announcing that it is;100% legal in the US. In compliance with the FDA , it is an uncontrolled substance, implying its free cultivation, selling, and distribution in unlimited volumes.
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What Is Wild Lettuce Anyway
Wild lettuce is a plant where the leaves, sap, and seed are used to make medicine.
This medicinal lettuce has been widely used since ancient Greece.
In 430 BC Hippocrates, known as the Father of Modern Medicine, wrote about the pain-relieving effects of the plants milky sap.
By the 1800s, it had reached America. I was widely put to use throughout the Civil War when liquid opium became scarce.
Around the same time, the polish noted that, while wild lettuce has opioid-like effects. Yet, discovered it has none of the addictive properties of true opioids.
From the 19th century Polish journals:
The action of the substance was weaker than that of opium, but free of the side-effects and medical practice showed that in some cases lactucarium produced better curative effects than opium.
Later, in the 1970s, wild lettuce again resurged to the forefront of drug use. This time, however, it was not for easing the pain of dying Union soldiers.
The hippie community adopted it and started using it as a legal psychotropic, to get high.
Since then its become popular among holistic medicine users as well as survivalists because it grows so readily all around the world.
If you want to learn more about this plant, this video by The Lost Ways is an excellent resource.
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How To Make Tea
As mentioned, wild lettuce tea prepared from the dried leaves is unlikely to offer you pain relief. The leaves are low in the active compounds, and these, in turn, dont dissolve well in water .
Still, some people like to drink it just for the taste or to soothe gut inflammation .
If youre among them, you can use 1-2 teaspoons of the dried leaves to make tea. Pour boiling water over the leaves, let steep for 5-10 minutes, and strain into a cup.
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A Few Other Species Of Wild Lettuce
This is the most common Wild lettuce, Lactuca serriola, it is an introduced species. I see it throughout the United States. It is easily identifiable by the spines along the vein on the underside of the leaf.This is Woodland wild lettuce, a native with chickory blue flowers Wall lettuce, Lactuca muralis. It is an introduced species and much smaller than the other species found in the Western US. Another native Wild lettuce, Lactuca canadensis. It is one of the tallest species and has a distinctive neck on the top of the seeds as well as white pappus
Animal And Cell Research
No clinical evidence supports the use of wild lettuce for any of the conditions listed in this section. Below is a summary of the existing animal and cell-based research, which should guide further investigational efforts. However, the studies should not be interpreted as supportive of any health benefit.
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History Of Wild Opium Lettuce
Wild lettuce has a long history of medical use. ;Its use goes back to ancient Egypt, and depictions of it were seen in hieroglyphics. ;During the Roman Empire, Emperor Augustus built an altar to the plant after using it to recover from illness.
It is often called opium lettuce because it was used during the 19th century when opium couldnt be obtained.
Dont let the name lettuce opium put you off, though.
The plant is not addictive and does NOT cause the side effects of opiates, such as an upset stomach.
Identifying And Processing The Wild Lettuce For Natural Pain Relief
When someone first hears about Wild Lettuce, they usually begin asking questions.The first two questions are usually what the heck is wild opium lettuce? and why should I care?But, once you understand all the benefits of wild lettuce,;more questions come to mind.Is it legal, how do you find it in the wild and how is it processed?Thats the goal if this article ;to provide you with detailed answers to each of these questions.Specifically, this article will cover the following topics.
- What Is Wild Lettuce
- The Legality Of Wild Lettuce
- The Applications Of Wild Lettuce
- How To Use Wild Lettuce
- How To Process Wild Lettuce
- Identifying Wild Lettuce In Nature
- How To Grow Wild Lettuce
- Survival Uses For Wild Lettuce
How To Find Natural Medicines In The Wild, And Survival Home Remedies
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