Welcome to the FARMacy! Healing Earth and Humanity through Herbal Medicine

When many of us think of the pharmacy, we think of a place with bottles, tubes and needles full of medicines that we have no connection to. Who don’t know who made the stuff, where it came from or even how to pronounce the ingredients!

I visited a FARMacy that has a whole different take on health and wellness.
Here they grow and forage the medicine that they provide to their patients. They make it right at home in the form of tinctures, teas and salves. They know every single ingredient in their medicines and they are happy to teach their customers how they can harvest and make the medicine themselves! Try to get that service from the pharmaceutical industry…

At this FARMacy they are not just healing their patients. They are healing Earth, humanity and our plant and animal relatives through regenerative and permaculture practices. They take holistic healing to another level.

I’m here to help you break free from the corrupt industries like Big Pharma and to take your health and wellness into your own hands. I’m happy to share Walden FARMacy with you via a video tour of their at home Farmacy.

Transcript: The following is a transcription of Welcome to the FARMacy! Healing Earth and Humanity through Herbal Medicine.

When many of us think of the pharmacy, this is what we think of. But the truth is, the medicine here can actually make the Earth, our plants and animals relatives and us a lot sicker in the long run. Today, I am going to take you to a pharmacy that has a whole different take on health and wellness.

Welcome to Walden FARMacy, where they have a whole different take on health and wellness.
It’s located in a surprising place, just outside of Birmingham, Alabama. Here, they believe that healing ourselves comes as we heal the Earth.

[Robin:] Thanks for having me at the FARMacy.
[Joanna Mann:] Thanks so much for being here, Rob. That’s really what belief we were founded on, is that you can’t heal the people if you’re neglecting the land. That we really exist as one organism. So we grow food for our family on our farm as well as medicine for our community in a way that is regenerating the land that we are farming on.

[Robin:] Alright! Let’s meet the plants! Come on!
So, we have elderberry here, which is not quite ripe yet. I feel like we just have to start with elderberry, because elderberry syrup is some of my favorite medicine.
[Joanna:] Yeah, we grow and wildcraft at least fifty medicinal herbs here on the property, including goldenrod, elecampane, pleurisy root, passionflower, turmeric, ginger, nettle, violet, Solomon’s seal, hibiscus, elderberry, poke, wild lettuce, skullcap, blue vervain, yellow root, echinacea, plantain, peach, lemon balm, and reishi.
[Robin:] Wow. Nature’s pharmacy is truly alive here. So. Back to the elderberry. This is something that I love, and that is elderberry syrup. So. I’m going to have a try of this medicine. Ooh! That’s good. So, tell us a little bit about the medicine behind elderberry.
[Joanna:] It’s definitely one as you can see with good patient compliance because it tastes pretty great. Even our kids love it. So, that is why it is our go-to immune booster when they head back to school. It helps prepare the body to deal with any coughs, colds and flus, and can lessen the duration of them.
[Robin:] And it sounds like the ducks are just about as excited as I am about it. So let’s move on to the next medicine.
Alright. What plant friend do we have here?
[Joanna:] This is Solomon’s seal. It’s definitely my go-to for any ligament, tendon or joint complaints. You can use it internally as well as topically. So we have it here topically as one of the ingredients in our muscle and joint salve. A salve is an oil extract of the herb that we have then added beeswax to and melted it down and let it solidify into a container, so you can carry it around with you easily.
Violet here is one of my personal favorites, and it’s one of the ingredients in our sore throat spray. It’s a gentle lymphatic. Safe enough for children. It can really help increase the drainage when you have stuffy ears or congestion around the throat. So, it’s in there along with echinacea, which is growing right beside it.
[Robin:] So, I’ve been here for the last couple days and I arrived with a bit of a sore throat and I have been working with the sore throat spray. And I have to say, it has really worked wonders. So thank you for sharing your medicine with me.
[Joanna:] Happily.
We’re here with our turmeric in our greenhouse and it is one of the medicines that, I think, has gained a lot of mainstream attention just because of its ability to reduce inflammation, which is the root cause of so many diseases. So we use it for that in our joint relief bitters. We also use it for stimulating digestion. It is great liver and gall bladder support as well.
[Robin:] So this is the joint relief bitters, right?
[Joanna:] Yes.
[Robin:] Okay, so I am going to have a dropper of that. Bitter.
[Joanna:] Yeah.
[Robin:] So, I just have to say that turmeric is one of the most important medicines to me. During my year of growing and foraging all of my food, this was such an important daily medicine. It’s so great to be here connecting with this plant.

[Robin:] You can smell the medicine that we are in right here.
[Joanna:] Yeah, this is our abundant patch of holy basil. We love this medicine personally, because it’s great at helping you cool off on a hot summer day, which we are very familiar with here in Alabama. Basils are also known as heart exhilarants, so they increase feelings of joy.
I would say this is the easiest-to-grow adaptogen. Those are plants that help you cope with feelings of stress and just help your body be a little more resilient.
[Robin:] Well, I can feel the stress just releasing and I can feel the joy. So here we have the medicine in a tea. Mmm. So. As you can see, our medicine can be growing freely and abundantly all around us. It can be accessible. In fact, it looks like there’s more than a hundred different plant medicines here than fifty, wouldn’t you say?
[Joanna:] Yeah, once I’m walking around out here, I’m just amazed at how surrounded I am. Every plant I see almost has a use. Southern folk medicine, which I am trained in, they believed that if you had an illness, the remedy was somewhere in your own yard.
[Robin:] “If you have an illness, the remedy is somewhere in your own yard.” And it can be as simple as a delicious tea.

[Robin:] Alright, ducks, we might need you to quiet down a little bit. And you, too, chickens, just for a little while.
So, often in today’s culture there’s this clear delineation between food and medicine. We have our food and we have our medicine. But here at Walden FARMacy, there really is no separation. Our food IS our medicine and it is intricately, at the same time, part of healing our Earth. So tell us about where we are right now.
[Trevor Mann:] Yeah, this is our chicken composting system where we compost our food scraps and our garden weeds. And we turn it into a beautiful compost with the help of the chickens. So we turn each pile down the hill each week and create this amazing, beautiful compost.
[Robin:] And, of course, with beautiful compost also chicken eggs at the same time. So, we’re talking about …. [rooster crowing] This rooster is quite excited. So, we’re talking about creating healthy compost, turning food waste into compost and, at the same time, getting a wonderful thing – chicken eggs.
So, we’re out of the chicken composting system. We are just below it. Tell us about where we are now, Trevor.
[Trevor:] Yeah. So, we are in a big bio swale. So, a swale is a ditch and a berm on the contour and it catches water that is sheeting downhill. So, we are functionally interconnected with the chicken composting system here because it is just above the swale, so water is rushing through the composting system, catches in the swale, and then fertigates the system past it.
[Robin:] So, rather than the water being distributed and shipped off the property, you are trying to keep as much of that water on the property as possible to water your gardens, to grow food and to soak it in.
[Trevor:] Yeah. The best place to store water is in your soil. So this is an awesome way to do it.
[Robin:] Alright! Today, when a lot of people think of growing food, they think of monocrops: acres and acres of the exact same food being grown, such as corn, or soy, or wheat. And they see this behind us and they just see a wall of green. And they don’t know what it is. But this is food! Tell us a little bit about it.
[Trevor:] Yeah. This is a forest garden, which is an indigenous technique adopted by permaculture that mimics a healthy forest ecosystem. So, we have all the layers of the forest ecosystem here. We’re going to come in with the ducks to create disturbance on the ground level and utilize their fertility and collect their eggs.
[Robin:] So, we’re talking about dozens of foods and medicines coming out of one area all growing together, right?
[Trevor:] Yeah.
[Robin:] So, we haven’t talked about the goats yet. Tell me a little bit about how the goats play into this entire holistic system.
[Trevor:] Yeah. They do some weed management for us. We have some invasive weed trees that we coppice, and they will be a regenerative forage for the goats. I used to battle this weed, but now it’s like a regenerative food, so I’m happy about it.
[Robin:] And, of course, you have delicious goat milk and goat cheese?
[Trevor:] Yeah. Turning poison ivy into goat milk.
[Robin:] Yeah. Actually, one of the most interesting things he was sharing is that he used to have poison ivy all the time. And, once introducing goats, and the goats actually eating the poison ivy, and then drinking that goat milk that has the poison ivy or actually sister ivy, I like to call it, then you actually seem to have adapted to the sister ivy.
[Trevor:] Yeah, I can roll around in it and I do not get it at all.

[Joanna:] So, we’re really of the belief that everything on this planet is here for a reason. So, every weed or plant or animal has a role to play here on the farm. And, as the land stewards, we’re really just the conductor of the symphony of life around us.
[Robin:] It’s a beautiful way to look at the world that we live in. So, this right here, here at Walden FARMacy, is proof that our medicine can be growing freely and abundantly all around us and that we can do this together as community. And that we don’t need the pharmaceutical industry to take care of ourselves and our community.
So, if you found this inspiring, and you want to connect more with herbal medicine and food as medicine, the links to Walden FARMacy are in the description. And, of course, if you want to continue learning more, make sure to subscribe to this channel where there will be many more videos to come. And, if you think this is a message that you would like the world to see, like it, and comment. Share your thoughts to help spread this out into the world.
We love you all very much and we look forward to seeing you again soon.