Ray McCune's Website
Hi there, Chris said I was remiss in my explanation of the magic of the "Jewelweed" or "Touch Me Not" plant . It takes a bit to create the info for this comment, so I thought it would be a good Malfunction Jucktion Page.
This is the result of my pulling a vine of some sort from the bank at the road, trying to uncover Chris's "Creeping Phlox". Which I helped her plant there last year in the spring. They are doing okay, but they do better if I can keep the other weeds and grasses around them from getting too high. Unfortunately, that is a low priority, and tough to do on a good day, so it only gets done a couple times a season. This time I was trying to get it done as a last thing in the day, near dusk. Last year I bought a 4 cycle string trimmer, it screwed up after about two weeks and I had to return it for a month to get it fixed.
But the repairman (Tom) at the local hardware did a good job of it, and it has run ever since (though now I'm sure I've jinxed it!). One of the reasons I wanted this model, is it has a bevy of attachments. One of which I just got and hoped it would make caring for Chris's garden operations a little easier.
This attachment is a miniature rototiller. I was trying it for the first time and going to show her what a boon to our operations it was going to be. But I found it gets pretty wound up with the vines. So I was going to remove as many as I could, by hand, before wrapping them up in the tiller tines. In so doing, I ended up with a clearly discernable line of blisters up my left arm around my wrist and between two fingers which is exactly how I had the vine wrapped as I pulled it out of the ground. I actually remember thinking I should be wearing gloves, I guess I was right again!
Anyway, back to the "Touch Me Not", I was considering making this a movie clip and letting you watch it, but as you will see, there is nothing to see it happens so fast! So I made it a series of frames of the movie, actually 6, at 30 frames per second it was really quick and so...
The following are frames of a movie, each 1/30th of a second, which is the rate most of your little hand held movie cameras store their movies. So without a special high speed camera set up, this is what you can generally record to tape, or memory chip in this case. Each 1/30th of a second below shows why this plant is called a "touch me not".
So there, in 6/30th's of a second, and actually in the first 2/30ths of a second, the seeds are in flight. The other four frames are just to show that they are bouncing around in Chris's hand.
Now, regarding it's being the natural antidote to Poison IVY, you pull a couple plants and chop them up, put them in a two quart pan with some water and boil them for a while. Eventually you will get a golden colored liquid. After straining it, It is recommended that you make ice cubes out of it. To preserve it, not to mention that it feels good when you rub it on itchy spots. You can buy soap made from it, and other things that are reputed to prevent poison ivy , I don't know about all that yet. But I can say, that it almost immediately stopped the itching and it healed in about three days after I started to use it. And it was getting steadily worse, before I found out about using the Jewelweed.
I can't vouch for this particular line of products, but I can tell you, it is where I found out about using the Jewelweed. And what I boiled up, following their instructions, sure seemed to help, so it seems plausible.
http://naturalpoisonivycure.com/
Just be careful, not everything you find on the internet is true and there are "snake oil salesmen" everywhere. But I'm tempted to give this a try, as the need arises. You are on your own from here out, be careful, have fun.
Good luck with the itchys.
Man, are we happy out here!
The happy Nada Farmer, finding new ways to make the same mistakes for 56 years. And occasionally finding that I have just removed the cure for the problem that I created, while destroying the cure. Just doesn't seem right does it? That's why it's Malfunction Junktion material.
Keep coming back , I'm sure I'll screw up something else soon. Maybe I'll live to tell about it!
