Astragalus membranaceus

All right, the plant we're talking about today is astragalus. This is astragalus membranaceus, a Chinese medicinal herb, a Chinese tonic herb. It's a qi tonic or an energy tonic and it tonifies and supports the digestive system and the lungs, the two main places where we get our qi from food and air. This is a very important herb in Chinese medicine and you've probably even heard of it by now. It's one of the earlier Chinese tonics to have come to America. The Chinese say that this fortifies the wei qi, which is the defense energy. It's a kind of qi that circulates on the surface of the body, controls the opening and closing of the pores, and it's our primary line of defense. In western medicine, we would call it an immune system stimulant. You'd also call it an adaptogen. Classic adaptogen helps the body adapt to stress. So it's in the legume family. Pinnate leaves. That doesn't prove it's a legume, but it's suggestive. Typical legume flowers with the banner wings and keel. And then later on we'll see the little pods, which are technically called legumes. Typical of the legume family. We have a native astragalus. Let's plant right here. This is astragalus canadensis, Canada milk vetch. Certain American Indian tribes use this as a food and other tribes used it as a medicine. This is found pretty widespread in the northeast, down here into the southern Appalachians, across into North Dakota, and so on. Whether it equates to this, probably not likely. Astragalus is a huge family, one of the biggest, or a huge genus, one of the biggest of all. And some of them are actually quite toxic. They're called locoweeds out west because they accumulate something or other, selenium, and it has a negative impact on the cattle that graze on them. So not any astragalus is going to equate to this one. This is an easily grown plant if you have the right conditions. So it wants a very well-drained soil. This comes from northern China on out into Mongolia. Dry kind of situation, very hardy. So very well-drained soil, and actually there's some indications that poor soil, it's going to be more medicinal in poor soil than in good soil. My soil here is probably too good. I've put it on this hillside. You can't quite see, but it's perched on a little hillside, trying to get good drainage. Rocky, sandy soil would be fine for this. And a little bit on the alkaline side, which my soil is not, so I add some lime to this. It's quite easy to grow from seed, and it's fairly fast growing. You can even direct sow it. If you have fresh seed, it's going to germinate quite well. If your seed is a year or two old, it's going to go into a deeper kind of dormancy. And in order to enhance the germination, you might want to nick the seed coat, or soak the seeds overnight in warm water, and if they swell up, that means they're going to germinate. What I do is pour a tiny bit of boiling water on the seeds. Water just off the boil, and you want to use roughly twice as much water as the volume of the seeds, so just a tiny bit. For a teaspoon of seeds, you might use a tablespoon of boiling water. Then you can add a little more water, let it sit overnight. The seeds that swell up are the ones that are going to germinate. The ones that don't swell up, you could try it again. You don't want to harvest it until it's four or five years old. And then you can do a lot of things with it. You can make medicine out of it. You can also cook with it. So a lot of these Chinese tonic herbs, especially the ones that go to the spleen, the associated, that is to say the digestive system, the associated flavor is sweet. That's very nice. The associated color is yellow. This is called Huang Qi. Huang means yellow. However, you can't exactly eat this. So this is what it looks like when you buy it as an herb. Right, these tongue depressors, very distinctive. This might, looking at this, you might think that it's a big taproot, and these are slices. That's not exactly true. The roots actually kind of go out in all directions. And in fact, these have probably been pressed as they were rolled and sliced to make them look like this, because this is what the market wants it to look like. The astragalus you grow might not look exactly like this. It should have the same very nice, sweet, sort of nutty aroma. And this makes a terrific component of a stock, like a soup stock. You can't eat it because it's just very fibrous. So what you can do is cook it in your soup or your stew or something, but then when you come to eat it, sort of push it off to the side of the plate. Or take it out ahead of time, make a stock with it, and use that stock to cook rice or cook a soup or something like that.