Heal Local: 20 Essential Herbs for Do-It-Yourself Home Healthcare

Grow your own first aid

Most of us understand the value of eating and buying local. Taking back our food, goods, and services from multinational corporations and sourcing them from small growers, producers, artisans, and entrepreneurs benefits our families, our environment, and our communities. Heal Local argues that "100-mile healthcare" can be equally valuable in terms of how we treat illness and injury and maintain wellness.

This innovative guide demonstrates that by harnessing multifaceted whole plants, we can rely on homegrown or regionally produced herbs rather than importing exotics and non-natives. Based on the small apothecary model, author Dawn Combs explains how to:

• Maximize the benefits of homegrown first aid, from increased freshness, potency, and effectiveness to community resilience and local economic growth
• Make home herbal healthcare less intimidating and more attainable, by focusing on twenty herbs to effectively treat most common injuries and ailments
• Implement a local medicine culture safely and sustainably, while protecting and respecting wild plant populations

Many herbals overwhelm their readers, presenting a list of hundreds of herbs, each with a different purpose. Heal Local empowers readers by showing that you don't need to know everything about every herb on the planet to create a complete home apothecary. Anyone can be self-sufficient with their wellness, regardless of their previous knowledge, experience, or available space.

Dawn Combs is a homestead herbalist with over twenty years' experience and author of Conceiving Healthy Babies . As well as training others in herbal home healthcare, she treats her family's common illnesses and minor injuries with natural therapies, herbal remedies, and appropriate foods.

Dawn Combs is a homestead herbalist and ethnobotanist with over 20 years experience in women's health issues. She began her career with a B.A. in Botany and Humanities/Classics, and later apprenticed with Rosemary Gladstar. As well as training others in herbal home healthcare, she treats her family's common illnesses and minor injuries with natural therapies, herbal remedies and appropriate foods. Dawn is a beekeeper, educator and co-owner of the medicinal herb and honey farm Mockingbird Meadows, which is nationally recognized for her signature line of therapeutic herbal honey spreads. Her family was recently recognized by Mother Earth News as one of their 2013 Homesteaders of the Year. Dawn is the author of Conceiving Healthy Babies .