Today I'm talking with Leah at Mabel's Herb Blog. You can follow on Facebook as well. If you'd like to support me in growing this podcast, like, share, subscribe or leave a comment. Or just buy me a coffee - https://buymeacoffee.com/lewismaryes 00:00 This is Mary Lewis at A Tiny Homestead, the podcast comprised entirely of conversations with homesteaders, cottage food producers, and crafters. If you're enjoying this podcast, please like, subscribe, share it with a friend, or leave a comment. Thank you. Today I'm talking with Leah at Mabel's Herb Blog. Good morning, Leah, how are you? Good morning, I'm good. Good. So tell me about yourself and this herb blog because I'm very curious about it. 00:29 Um, well, my name is Leah and I grew up in Southeast Texas, but I had my grandmother was from Nebraska and, um, about, I know that sounds random, but about six years ago, um, I took over the care of my mom who had Alzheimer's. And um, she had always been very. 00:58 pro-holistic care as her mother was. It was just kind of the thing her mom had taught her that, you know, in their belief, you know, pharmaceuticals, we had too big a dependence on pharmaceuticals and my mom didn't like chemicals in her body. So I mean, it kind of started as that when I was growing up. My grandma was a one-room school teacher. 01:25 this and I mentioned my grandma because that's who this is named after her name was Mabel. She was a one room school teacher so she taught a lot about you know botany and paleontology and all of this other she was a really good school teacher and that transition to us grandkids as we were growing up when we would go to visit grandma she was always teaching she was a teacher till the day she died. 01:55 in 1998, always teaching us, always showing us things as kids, which of course when you're a kid and grandma's teaching you paleontology, you're eager to go dig in the dirt and try to find dinosaur bones, you know? But the other side of that was also botany and herbalism and she taught a lot about plants and the importance of them. 02:24 Well, as a kid, you know, that's kind of the boring stuff. And I didn't really pay attention, of course. I knew then what I know now, I would have been hung on her every word. But about five, six years ago, when I started taking care of my mom, it really kind of hit home to me because they were wanting to pump my mom full of so many pills. 02:52 It was a pill for this, a pill for that, you know, and I knew that my mom would hate it. Because she'd have been in her right mind. She'd have been like, absolutely not. Let's find a natural way. And so I started studying herbs because I was like, there's got to be some kind of solution to help, you know, with her, all of her stuff, you know, not just her Alzheimer's, but everything. And um... 03:22 So I started studying plants and I realized that. 03:28 Herbalism and Western medicine, as I call it, pharmaceutical medicine, has a place to balance each other out. Herbalism doesn't have all the answers and neither does Western medicine. So that was my goal when I first started Mabel's Apothecary. And then in so doing, because in my studies, I was like, you know, 03:56 There's a lot of people out here that probably feel the same way about just shoving ourselves full of pills all the time. And so I started sharing on my website on Mabel's Apothecary.com and some friends of mine were like, Leah, you need to be putting this in a blog. You need to put this on a blog so that, you know, everybody, you know, even people who haven't been to your website can 04:24 can get this information and learn about their health. And so it kind of went from there. I started blogging about it. At first I was very gung-ho and I was doing it once a week. And then I realized that that was a huge job. So I've kind of slowed down to once a month so that I can do more in depth and get more research into my blog posts. And so that's where we are. 04:53 I got here. Wow. Yeah. Blogging once a week is a lot. Blogging once a day is a huge task. I did that for a little over a year many years ago about books and writing stuff. And after a year, I was like, I can't keep doing this. It's too much. So I understand why you would cut back to one a month. And yeah, if you have the time to put into one a month, then it can be a much more. 05:23 informative educational posts. So that's awesome. Yes. Okay. So did your, did your grandma grow herbs or did she just know about them? Oh, no, she had a yard full of herbs and plants and trees and everything you could imagine. She had, she was on a family farm. It was a century farm in Nebraska. So the family had had this farm for, I think, 05:53 when she died, it had been almost 250 years. So it was a family ancestral farm. And so there were plants from her great grandmother that were, or her grandmother, I'm sorry, her grandmother that she had planted. And then there were plants that her mother had planted and she had planted. And ...
