Cleavers How To

TRANSCRIPT

Hey! I want to talk with you about cleavers.

I’m out on a walk, kind of a sweaty walk, and just noticed a whole patch here. I’m going to just show you how it looks growing in the wild. It just sort of grabs onto stuff and hangs on as much as possible. And I just wanted to show you that you just take the tops. You can break off the tops so that you keep the root in there. This isn’t the best time to grab cleavers. In the spring before it flowers is best and now it has its fruiting body on there, but it still works the same.

So this is really helped with venus return, reducing leg swelling, leg pressure, leg pain, ankle swelling, foot swelling, heat intolerance, sausage fingers when you go for a walk, also blood pressure instability and moving those mycotoxins around out of the extra cellular matrix which is our pre-lymph system into the lymph system and gets it moving.

I don’t recommend them fresh. They are kind of yuck, like fish hooky in the throat. So what I do is when I make my green tea I can take fresh or about half the amount of fresh dried and add it to my green tea, my little teapot, and steep it about the same time as my green tea; actually, I leave the cleavers in there forever (until the tea is gone) and then just sip it throughout the day. And it is so important, it’s a great combination with green tea because green tea is doing all of the arterial side, all of the astringing and the detoxification once the cleavers deliver all the gunky lymph up to the liver, to the blood system technically.

So I just wanted to show you this little guy. They’re very sticky. There’s a reason they’re called cleavers. They will just literally stick onto you. So now I don’t know if I can get them off (laughing). So that’s cleavers guys. I hope that you have some where you live and if you don’t you can order them dried. My favorite place is Frontier Herbs in Iowa. It’s a very economical way to do it and you can just take a couple tablespoons of cleavers and add them to your green tea steep.

Okay, so you might be wondering how on earth do I use the cleavers once I find them in the wild?

So here are dried cleavers. These are harvested a little late. Just like I talked about before, they have their little fruiting body on them. If you are sensitive to caffeine, these do have caffeine in them. So you want to remove the fruiting body if you’re sensitive to caffeine. That’s the only difference for why you want to harvest cleaver earlier or later in the year.

You may also have found a plant that looks a heck of a lot like cleavers. That’s this guy. But it didn’t stick to you. That’s the difference. This one sticks. That’s why we call it cleavers. This one doesn’t stick. Oh, it did. Stuck to the already done one. That’s funny. This one is in the cleavers family.

Ooh, now I’m covered in fruiting bodies. This one’s called galium odoratum or sweet woodruff and if you smell it, it’s one of my favorite spring smells. This one is edible. I add this to lemonade or some kind of, it’s really fun to put it in like a strawberry lemonade. And it adds a wonderful flavor. So you can do a cold infusion with this one. You can also eat it.

But for the purpose of lymphagogue, this one, the one that sticks, is going to have the stronger powers.

So how on earth do we make it? You can eat it. I don’t recommend it because it is very sticky in the throat. So typically because this is dried it’s going to probably fall all over the place. I just put it in my teapot. I put one or two stalks of cleavers that I harvested, I’m going to go for some caffeine so I’m going to leave the fruiting bodies on there. And I like this tea is my favorite little reishi tea. It’s jasmine tea. So I have my teapot, I’m putting in my green tea. You don’t have to add the green tea. You can have cleavers all by itself or you could add herbal tea. You could add any kind of tea that you like. Or you could just make the tea straight with two stalks of cleavers.

So all I do here is add my hot water and I’m making cleaver flavored jasmine green tea. I also like to add this to wild sweet orange tea or hibiscus tea. It all depends on what I’m in the mood for. And then this usually I will leave my green tea to steep for about 4-5 minutes depending on how bitter you like your tea. And then I will remove the tea bag but I leave the cleavers in the teapot.

And that will help you with your lymphagogue action so you can conquer mold and talk back your health!


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