Herbs in Chinese Medicine: Spanish Needle

Video Transcript

This next herb is called Spanish Needle, it's sometimes referred to as Spanish Bayonet. This is one that's very common weed that grows in most yards and roadsides, anywhere in the south actually. And so there's a couple of nice things that this is useful for. It's best when you get it fresh, ideally out of your yard. But do be careful where you harvest it from, you don't want to be getting it from a roadside, or any place where chemicals and pesticides may have been used. The most commonly used part is actually the flower. The flower, besides being yummy and edible, and a wonderful, attractive additive to your salads, it's also very good for minor abrasions or insect bites. So whiles you?re out there pulling weeds in your garden and you get stung by a bee or perhaps bit by a mosquito or a gnat, it's great to take that flower off, mash it up. We call it a spit pulpus if you chew it up first. And you can take that and just massage it into any bug bite and go ahead and leave it on there for a few minutes and it will take some of that sting and some of the swelling out from that. One of the other interesting aspects of it is the seed. And you can see here, a couple of the seeds here. It's easiest collected on your pant legs. Often times when you're doing your laundry you'll find them stuck all over your socks and your pants. There's been some reports that that's actually effective in shrinking the prostate, perhaps even better than salt palmetto. The only thing that's tough sometimes is gathering it up. But you can gather the seeds right off of the plant as the blooms start to die off. And so in general, Spanish Bayonet, besides being yummy, has some wonderful, simple, therapeutic uses for it.

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