Walk With Us: Memoirs & Meanderings

We were featured in the Ohio Cooperative Living magazine in May 2023:
Woodland Herbal is a family business based in Warsaw, Ohio, who specialize in plant-based medicines, traditional remedies, and natural body care products like teas, salves, tinctures and extracts, beauty care, and more. Their products are handmade and crafted by their family of herbalists, resulting in a quality you can’t buy in stores. They employ great research, time, love, and positive intent in all of their recipes, using only the highest quality of natural ingredients known to man.

In Woodland Herbal we often mention the many generations of healers in our family. Our Wild Lettuce is an extract originally created by Jeff and Barb Keith at their Ohio home, The Twisted Post Ranch. They are the parents of Jenni, grandparents to Leah, and Great Nana and Pap to little Rowan.

In early spring the couple carefully prepared the soil in their herb garden to plant wild lettuce seeds. While many types of lettuce grow wild in the area, they were careful to plant Lactuca Virosa, the strongest medicinal lettuce.

It’s spring, the most wondrous time of the year, where rebirth is upon us and green things are sprouting. Among our favorite pastimes is wandering the wild wood and foraging for medicinal plants, edible herbs and mushrooms. If foraging is something that sounds fascinating to you, but you don’t know where to start, this article might serve as an ignitor for inspiration.

You might be feeling as though the forest is such a mysterious and strange place to wander, but...

Nymph stage ticks of all types are waking up from hibernation and they are hungry. Like most people in this country, I knew very little about Lyme disease. Had I known just a little more, my Lyme journey may have been a little smoother, and a lot less frightening. For the sake of our big Woodland Herbal family, I will share a bit of what I learned the hard way.

Late spring of 2020, I noticed a red mark on my calf...

It seems as if no one can sleep. Well… We live in a modern world that supposedly makes life simpler and more comfortable than traditional ways of life, yet everybody is too damn busy to slow down to enjoy life. The result is a range of imbalances that take hold, problems mount, then anxieties run amok. Still, people wonder why they can’t sleep.

If you go-go-go all the time, you have no time to decompress, and no time to savor the flavors of life...

Once upon a time, a human watched a bear… Legend has it, native peoples learned the green ways from the bear. They’d watch what plants and root and fungi the bears consumed, and that way they knew it was safe to consume for themselves. If the bear suffered a belly ache, and grazed in a mint patch, they knew that was the medicine to use for such an ailment. Our connection to natural things was stronger then than it is now, because we were one with what was around us. We still have connection to this mother earth...

Once upon a time, Jenni swore, “Oh gods, no! Blogging is a dirty word. It sounds like something you wipe off your shoe. You will never get me to BLOG… Yuck!” When Brandon pitched the idea to Jenni…There was a lot of yelling. Over time, along with your help of asking questions, we wore her down. Good work, fam.

The day has come...