InFocus Magazine

Vancouver Island’s newest micro goat dairy is located on Holiday Road in Fanny Bay.  Unless you knew that fact, prescription you could easily drive by the Snap Dragon Goat Dairy and be unaware that it was there.

Karen Fouracre and Jaki Ayton have been developing their compact 1.6 acre farm for the last 14 years.  A mixed farming operation, they raise hogs for meat, goats for milk, and chickens for eggs.  There are gardens and a 40-foot greenhouse in the front yard.  Peach, pear, cherry, apple and plum trees are sprinkled around the property.  Behind the house you’ll find various small buildings, the new milking parlor, several paddocks and pastures.

Over the years they have tried raising ducks, turkeys, sheep, rabbits, peacocks and cows to see what works best for them and their property.  Goats have been part of the herd from the start.  In addition to providing milk, the goats have contributed to Ayton and Fouracre’s recreation opportunities and extended their network of friends.

Ayton shows some of the purebred Toggenberg goats at the summer fairs.  One of them, La Mountain Dutchess, is very close to achieving permanent grand champion status.  Both women are active in local 4-H Club activities giving goat care workshops and assisting as judges.  “They can’t have the parents sitting in on their kid’s presentation; they need spare adults to come,” says Fouracre.  “They do some amazing presentations, it is the most fun, and it is really entertaining.  They put a lot of work into it.  So it has really enriched our lives.”

The idea to establish a micro dairy came when David Wood, the owner of the Salt Spring Island Cheese Company, approached the Vancouver Island Goat Association (VIGA) last fall looking for milk from Island producers.  He was buying milk in the Fraser Valley and wanted to find sources closer to home.  As members of the VIGA, Fouracre and Ayton heard of the enquiry and they immediately began to investigate whether or not they could start a dairy.  Selling their milk to the cheese company would provide them with a way to offset the costs of keeping their ever-growing goat herd.

“I have quite a few goats now and quite a few purebreds and they’re not cheap,” says Ayton.  “We did some stats for the Vancouver Island Goat Association a couple of years ago and it is about $750 per year to keep an adult female goat.”

Logistically it worked because Salt Spring Island Cheese was already purchasing sheep’s milk from a farm in Black Creek, thus making a Fanny Bay stop convenient.  High start up costs had always been a stumbling block to the idea of setting up a dairy.  Cow dairies have setup costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Also, the milk marketing board establishes quotas that can be both difficult and expensive to purchase.  They discovered that the small number of goat dairies in BC makes quotas unnecessary thus leaving the question of the start up costs.  “We got a tour of the sheep dairy,” says Fouracre.  “The fellow was very nice and let us come and take a look.  He has a very simple operation and we went and looked at it and said we can do this.”

They have decided to milk 14 of their 33 goat herd.  Most of the commercial goat dairies in BC have herds of 200-500 animals.  The approximately 300 litres of milk per week that Snap Dragon will produce would be the equivalent of a large dairy’s single day output.  However, that amount of output spread over the eight months of the year that they will sell to Salt Spring Island Cheese should achieve the objective of “getting the girls to pay for themselves.”

In order to get licensed as a Grade A dairy, Fouracre and Ayton had to absorb the very detailed regulations of the BC Dairy code and build to its strict specifications.   “It was a matter of finding people who could help us out,” explains Ayton of how they approached the task.  “Island Dairy Products is the guy who services all the big dairies.  So we phoned Lawrence, we talked to him.  He’s been a really good resource.  We talked to Gerald Smith who has a sheep dairy and asked him tons of questions.  I talked to some of the big goat dairy people on the mainland, and just asking questions, reading it, checking, emailing the BC licensing place back and forth, etc.”  In the Fanny Bay community they found many people to help them, including retired dairyman and neighbor Glenn Plewis, who assisted with contacts to source the various components needed.

“One of the hardest things is to do was find a dairy tank that was small enough,” says Fouracre.  Adds Ayton: “Getting the equipment small enough has been expensive.  Everything is very big.  There is commercial stuff that is big or there is specialty stuff that is completely out of line expensive.”

It took three months to find a dairy tank that would work.  They finally found one in the Fraser Valley—at 1,000 litres it is bigger than they need but the smallest they could find.  Karen had to significantly modify the plans for the milking parlor/processing building in order to make it fit.  In order to meet the goal of shipping milk in May, many of their friends and Holiday Road neighbors have been called upon to assist with their expertise and a helping hand.  They are most appreciative of all the assistance they have received and they look forward to paying it back with their own labor.  “We’ve had friends, three or four times now, we’ve had anywhere from two to seven of them show up for a day and help us build,” says Fouracre.

On May 10 their dairy dream became a reality when Salt Spring Island Cheese owner David Wood came to help pick up the first shipment of milk.  Wood, originally from Scotland, moved to Toronto in 1973 to work as executive director of Pollution Probe.  His entrepreneurial endeavors prior to establishing Salt Spring Island Cheese in 1994 included Solartech, a renewable energy company, and, the David Wood Food Shop, which by 1989 included three Toronto stores and a catering division.  Salt Spring Island Cheese specializes in handmade goat and sheep cheeses.

Fouracre and Ayton are pleased to share their knowledge of raising goats and how to approach setting up a micro dairy.  “If you are going to start with animals, join all the animal clubs first,” says Fouracre.  “Then get your animals.”

Ayton agrees.  “It’s like getting a dog.  You want to know the community, know the breeders, get the history and background and then start spending large quantities of money.”

Mastering the art of animal husbandry is their number one recommendation for anyone thinking of setting up a dairy.  Get to know your animals and how to care for them.  This will keep them healthy, which will ensure a good product and will keep the vet bills down. They are very proud of the fact that their goats have nice personalities and, on average, they live to be about 24 years of age.  The average life span for a goat is about 15 years.

Another tip from Fouracre:  “Keep the farm clean and tidy because if you don’t, you’ll have a vet bill.  If there is something lying around that shouldn’t be there, you should move it.  Either that or it is going to be tripped over, stepped on or swallowed.

“One thing we learned early is there is no such thing as tomorrow,” she adds.  “There’s no such thing as later either—we’ll do it later.  It’s like, okay, that fence is looking wobbly.  No, you fix it now!  Whatever you were doing you fix the fence now.  Or you’re searching for the goats later, or you’re getting up because they’re in the garage and they’re in the feed.  Or, the buck is breeding the does you didn’t want bred, you know!  When all you had to do was stop for 20 minutes, get the nails and the hammer and fix the fence.  But you didn’t do that so now you’ve got this!”

Ayton outlines some of the essential elements for setting up a dairy:  “Estimate high on all your expenses—we had a business plan and a business plan budget.  There are a couple of really good ones online and we went through and figured it out,” she says.  “I know our price point of how much each goat has to produce per day.  Each one has to produce a good amount of milk, we can’t have loafers.  And you have to be willing to be a farmer, which means cull.  And cull to us means kill.  It means different things to different people.  You have to be willing to look at your herd and say. ‘Okay that one’s no good; they have to go to the butcher.’  I mean you love them to death, like the babies, you get lots of babies every year, you can’t keep them all.  And that’s just part of the animal part of it.  Seeing these are the good ones, these aren’t good ones.  Taking the time to figure it out and then getting rid of the ones that aren’t productive.”

Fouracre agrees, adding, “That took a long time to learn.  That is a whole mind set that took two or three or four years to start thinking that way; to actually be able to do it.”

Adds Ayton:  “Most people only have goats for four years, because they’re not farmers and they don’t get rid of them.  If you start with two goats you can have 15 in four years if you don’t get rid of them.”

The women have obviously worked hard to learn all the necessary parts of farming.  Listening to them describe their dairy and how they take care of their animals it is easy to assume that farming is in their background.  In fact, says Ayton, it took some years to learn how to view their goats like farmers.  “I wasn’t raised on a farm; I grew up in a townhouse.  We’re not farmers by birth.”

But they are now dedicated farmers by choice.  Ayton still works off the farm in public health but with the launch of the dairy, Fouracre is now working at home full time.  In addition to her dairy chores, she will also be selling produce, flowers, eggs, fruit and hand-drawn art cards from a farm stall.   They love what they do and where they live.  They also love sharing the experience with others.  This past April they held their second “Open Farm Day” where anyone interested was invited to visit the farm and see the animals up close.  Donations are collected to go to YANA and it also serves as a form of self-preservation.

“It’s just for fun,” says Ayton.  “Everyone wants to come and see the babies.  They want to see the farm and see the goats, so we open the farm.  We have so many people who want to come and see the babies we figured we better designate a day, otherwise you don’t get anything done.”

Watch for their ads next year so you don’t miss the chance to visit these two interesting women and see this most unique micro dairy operation.
Vancouver Island’s newest micro goat dairy is located on Holiday Road in Fanny Bay.  Unless you knew that fact, site
you could easily drive by the Snap Dragon Goat Dairy and be unaware that it was there.

Karen Fouracre and Jaki Ayton have been developing their compact 1.6 acre farm for the last 14 years.  A mixed farming operation, they raise hogs for meat, goats for milk, and chickens for eggs.  There are gardens and a 40-foot greenhouse in the front yard.  Peach, pear, cherry, apple and plum trees are sprinkled around the property.  Behind the house you’ll find various small buildings, the new milking parlor, several paddocks and pastures.

Over the years they have tried raising ducks, turkeys, sheep, rabbits, peacocks and cows to see what works best for them and their property.  Goats have been part of the herd from the start.  In addition to providing milk, the goats have contributed to Ayton and Fouracre’s recreation opportunities and extended their network of friends.

Ayton shows some of the purebred Toggenberg goats at the summer fairs.  One of them, La Mountain Dutchess, is very close to achieving permanent grand champion status.  Both women are active in local 4-H Club activities giving goat care workshops and assisting as judges.  “They can’t have the parents sitting in on their kid’s presentation; they need spare adults to come,” says Fouracre.  “They do some amazing presentations, it is the most fun, and it is really entertaining.  They put a lot of work into it.  So it has really enriched our lives.”

The idea to establish a micro dairy came when David Wood, the owner of the Salt Spring Island Cheese Company, approached the Vancouver Island Goat Association (VIGA) last fall looking for milk from Island producers.  He was buying milk in the Fraser Valley and wanted to find sources closer to home.  As members of the VIGA, Fouracre and Ayton heard of the enquiry and they immediately began to investigate whether or not they could start a dairy.  Selling their milk to the cheese company would provide them with a way to offset the costs of keeping their ever-growing goat herd.

“I have quite a few goats now and quite a few purebreds and they’re not cheap,” says Ayton.  “We did some stats for the Vancouver Island Goat Association a couple of years ago and it is about $750 per year to keep an adult female goat.”

Logistically it worked because Salt Spring Island Cheese was already purchasing sheep’s milk from a farm in Black Creek, thus making a Fanny Bay stop convenient.  High start up costs had always been a stumbling block to the idea of setting up a dairy.  Cow dairies have setup costs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Also, the milk marketing board establishes quotas that can be both difficult and expensive to purchase.  They discovered that the small number of goat dairies in BC makes quotas unnecessary thus leaving the question of the start up costs.  “We got a tour of the sheep dairy,” says Fouracre.  “The fellow was very nice and let us come and take a look.  He has a very simple operation and we went and looked at it and said we can do this.”

They have decided to milk 14 of their 33 goat herd.  Most of the commercial goat dairies in BC have herds of 200-500 animals.  The approximately 300 litres of milk per week that Snap Dragon will produce would be the equivalent of a large dairy’s single day output.  However, that amount of output spread over the eight months of the year that they will sell to Salt Spring Island Cheese should achieve the objective of “getting the girls to pay for themselves.”

In order to get licensed as a Grade A dairy, Fouracre and Ayton had to absorb the very detailed regulations of the BC Dairy code and build to its strict specifications.   “It was a matter of finding people who could help us out,” explains Ayton of how they approached the task.  “Island Dairy Products is the guy who services all the big dairies.  So we phoned Lawrence, we talked to him.  He’s been a really good resource.  We talked to Gerald Smith who has a sheep dairy and asked him tons of questions.  I talked to some of the big goat dairy people on the mainland, and just asking questions, reading it, checking, emailing the BC licensing place back and forth, etc.”  In the Fanny Bay community they found many people to help them, including retired dairyman and neighbor Glenn Plewis, who assisted with contacts to source the various components needed.

“One of the hardest things is to do was find a dairy tank that was small enough,” says Fouracre.  Adds Ayton: “Getting the equipment small enough has been expensive.  Everything is very big.  There is commercial stuff that is big or there is specialty stuff that is completely out of line expensive.”

It took three months to find a dairy tank that would work.  They finally found one in the Fraser Valley—at 1,000 litres it is bigger than they need but the smallest they could find.  Karen had to significantly modify the plans for the milking parlor/processing building in order to make it fit.  In order to meet the goal of shipping milk in May, many of their friends and Holiday Road neighbors have been called upon to assist with their expertise and a helping hand.  They are most appreciative of all the assistance they have received and they look forward to paying it back with their own labor.  “We’ve had friends, three or four times now, we’ve had anywhere from two to seven of them show up for a day and help us build,” says Fouracre.

On May 10 their dairy dream became a reality when Salt Spring Island Cheese owner David Wood came to help pick up the first shipment of milk.  Wood, originally from Scotland, moved to Toronto in 1973 to work as executive director of Pollution Probe.  His entrepreneurial endeavors prior to establishing Salt Spring Island Cheese in 1994 included Solartech, a renewable energy company, and, the David Wood Food Shop, which by 1989 included three Toronto stores and a catering division.  Salt Spring Island Cheese specializes in handmade goat and sheep cheeses.

Fouracre and Ayton are pleased to share their knowledge of raising goats and how to approach setting up a micro dairy.  “If you are going to start with animals, join all the animal clubs first,” says Fouracre.  “Then get your animals.”

Ayton agrees.  “It’s like getting a dog.  You want to know the community, know the breeders, get the history and background and then start spending large quantities of money.”

Mastering the art of animal husbandry is their number one recommendation for anyone thinking of setting up a dairy.  Get to know your animals and how to care for them.  This will keep them healthy, which will ensure a good product and will keep the vet bills down. They are very proud of the fact that their goats have nice personalities and, on average, they live to be about 24 years of age.  The average life span for a goat is about 15 years.

Another tip from Fouracre:  “Keep the farm clean and tidy because if you don’t, you’ll have a vet bill.  If there is something lying around that shouldn’t be there, you should move it.  Either that or it is going to be tripped over, stepped on or swallowed.

“One thing we learned early is there is no such thing as tomorrow,” she adds.  “There’s no such thing as later either—we’ll do it later.  It’s like, okay, that fence is looking wobbly.  No, you fix it now!  Whatever you were doing you fix the fence now.  Or you’re searching for the goats later, or you’re getting up because they’re in the garage and they’re in the feed.  Or, the buck is breeding the does you didn’t want bred, you know!  When all you had to do was stop for 20 minutes, get the nails and the hammer and fix the fence.  But you didn’t do that so now you’ve got this!”

Ayton outlines some of the essential elements for setting up a dairy:  “Estimate high on all your expenses—we had a business plan and a business plan budget.  There are a couple of really good ones online and we went through and figured it out,” she says.  “I know our price point of how much each goat has to produce per day.  Each one has to produce a good amount of milk, we can’t have loafers.  And you have to be willing to be a farmer, which means cull.  And cull to us means kill.  It means different things to different people.  You have to be willing to look at your herd and say. ‘Okay that one’s no good; they have to go to the butcher.’  I mean you love them to death, like the babies, you get lots of babies every year, you can’t keep them all.  And that’s just part of the animal part of it.  Seeing these are the good ones, these aren’t good ones.  Taking the time to figure it out and then getting rid of the ones that aren’t productive.”

Fouracre agrees, adding, “That took a long time to learn.  That is a whole mind set that took two or three or four years to start thinking that way; to actually be able to do it.”

Adds Ayton:  “Most people only have goats for four years, because they’re not farmers and they don’t get rid of them.  If you start with two goats you can have 15 in four years if you don’t get rid of them.”

The women have obviously worked hard to learn all the necessary parts of farming.  Listening to them describe their dairy and how they take care of their animals it is easy to assume that farming is in their background.  In fact, says Ayton, it took some years to learn how to view their goats like farmers.  “I wasn’t raised on a farm; I grew up in a townhouse.  We’re not farmers by birth.”

But they are now dedicated farmers by choice.  Ayton still works off the farm in public health but with the launch of the dairy, Fouracre is now working at home full time.  In addition to her dairy chores, she will also be selling produce, flowers, eggs, fruit and hand-drawn art cards from a farm stall.   They love what they do and where they live.  They also love sharing the experience with others.  This past April they held their second “Open Farm Day” where anyone interested was invited to visit the farm and see the animals up close.  Donations are collected to go to YANA and it also serves as a form of self-preservation.

“It’s just for fun,” says Ayton.  “Everyone wants to come and see the babies.  They want to see the farm and see the goats, so we open the farm.  We have so many people who want to come and see the babies we figured we better designate a day, otherwise you don’t get anything done.”

Watch for their ads next year so you don’t miss the chance to visit these two interesting women and see this most unique micro dairy operation.
You wouldn’t necessarily think that writing botanical reference books is an adventurous vocation—until you talk to Kahlee Keane.

Keane, check who moved to Vancouver Island in January, stuff
has just published Wild Medicine of Coastal British Columbia, a practical guide to BC’s medicinal plants. She estimates that it is her 25th book—or thereabouts.  In fact, she’s lost count.

Keane has spent more than three decades researching and writing these books, as well as teaching workshops, leading educational walks, and writing newspaper and magazine articles.

Along the way she has been renamed, honored, and royally told-off.  She’s made great friends and stood up to worthy enemies.  And she has consistently been awed at the healing powers of the plants that grow in the Earth’s wild places.

Keane’s work has taken her into communities all over North America, where she has played a number of pivotal roles: anthropologist, historian, biologist, educator and activist.  Wherever she goes, she galvanizes people to understand and appreciate the healing properties of native plants, to treasure them, and, if necessary, to campaign for their protection.

Each of Keane’s books is dedicated to the plants of a certain geographical area, as broad as the province of Ontario or a specific as Grand Manan Island, a 135-square-kilometre fishing community of 2,500 people off the coast of New Brunswick.  And each book has a different tone and structure, reflecting not just the local uniqueness of the botany but also the needs and inclinations of the locals.  Although her books are all about plants, her research very much includes people.

“Wherever I go, the first thing I do is look at the lay of the land and talk to the people who live on it.  In Newfoundland, people had lots of information and what they needed was for me to collect and publish it.  They were happy when I published their recipes.  In Ontario, there was a real lack of information, so my job was to offer what I knew,” she explains.

Her new book, she says, reflects her observation that BC is a relatively sophisticated audience for this material.  “The knowledge is already very alive here; there are lots of people teaching, learning about, and using wild medicinal plants.  So I included more detail, such as the chemical constituency of the plants.”

One thing Keane loves about her work is the connection it gives her to other cultures.

“Because this is North America, I get the chance to learn about different approaches.  For instance the Ayurvedic tradition [from India] has a huge body of knowledge.  All our different immigrant groups bring their experience and information with them.”

Keane says she is happy to trade information with different cultural groups, but she also needs to respect their autonomy.  “For instance, in some areas the First Nations people have suffered a great injury in the loss of their medicine.  But it’s not for me to replicate their traditions.  All I can do is offer what I have.”

It was a multi-cultural encounter that gave Keane her nickname, Root Woman, under which she wrote several books.  “I was researching down in Mississippi.  The people of color there have a rich folk healing tradition.  They were quite wonderful, and we all got to know each other pretty well.  One day we were out working in the soil together and they said to me, ‘We name you Root Woman.’  That’s what they call their healers.  I was so moved, I sat down and cried.”

Keane’s mission is to restore balance in the relationship between people and medicinal plants, both for the sake of the plants and for the sake of the humans.

“I’m putting the folk back in folk medicine,” she explains.  “I want people to understand that this knowledge is their birthright.  It behoves them to learn about their allies.”

It also behoves them to make sure these plants continue to grow and thrive in their natural habitat.  This is the other component of Keane’s mission.  “As an eco-herbalist, activist and conservationist, my goal is to protect bio-diversity.  My craft insists on a heightened ecological awareness and a deep respect for the living Earth,” she says.

Not everyone understands that Keane’s work aligns with environmentalist aims, she adds.  In fact, some people think she puts the plants at risk by encouraging humans to harvest them.

“Oh, I’ve been confronted pretty aggressively,” she says with a wry chuckle.  “I remember hearing a loud knock on my door one day, and I opened it to this big tall environmentalist who started in on me—‘How dare you publish this? You have to stop immediately!’ That kind of thing.

“I was actually scared of him.  But when he stopped talking long enough for me to answer, I told him: ‘I teach people to use the plants so that they respect and protect them.’  And it has always worked that way.”

The angry environmentalist did have a valid point, says Keane—medicinal wild plants are being lost due to over-picking.  But Keane says this is a result of commercial harvesting, where big companies harvest in bulk to make products they sell all around the world.  This is a far cry from what she teaches.  In her books and workshops Keane encourages small-scale wildcrafting, where individuals go into the wild to harvest plants for the use of themselves, their friends, and their families.

Wildcrafters respect the plant, and are often willing to work hard to protect it, she says.

“I’ve seen this just about everywhere I’ve worked, but it really came forward for me in Saskatchewan,” she says.  “I stayed there for 15 years, trying to save one plant—Seneca Root—which is a powerful remedy for the respiratory system.  It is also an old snake-bite remedy. The problem is, you need 250 roots to harvest a pound of it, and it takes seven years to grow one plant.”

Seneca Root was being threatened both by over-picking and loss of habitat due to development.  Keane worried it might be headed toward extinction.  She’d seen this before—for instance, with Wild Ginseng in Ontario, which, she says, is now completely gone.

“But the way to save it is to get it listed as endangered or threatened, and it is very, very hard to do that. You need to count it and monitor it, which is a huge undertaking.  Thankfully, the little farming communities of Saskatchewan have a great understanding of their medicinal plants, and they grasped the particular situation of this plant.  They came forward and volunteered to help, counting, recording, monitoring, so I could make an evidence-based case for the plant.”

Keane and her allies formed a non-profit group, Save our Species, which took as its first task the preservation of Seneca Root.  They are still working on it; Keane remains hopeful, although cautiously so.

While the fate of Seneca Root in the Canadian Prairies still hangs in the balance, the ongoing campaign to have it listed as endangered has brought people together in a powerful way, says Keane.

“My years in Saskatchewan were very exciting; there was so much camaraderie, so much willingness to cooperate and pitch in to do the work to save this plant,” she says, sitting back in her chair with a smile of satisfaction.

Another source of satisfaction, for Keane, is seeing people wake up to the realization that they can use plants to heal themselves.

“I’m giving people control over their own health,” she says.  “These days, we are steeped in pharmaceuticals, and people are looking for alternatives.”

Humans have used plants for healing for millennia, all over the world, she points out.  Our modern pharmaceutical system is, in a way, an outgrowth of this.  Nearly 50 per cent of the thousands of medications prescribed today are either derived from plant sources or contain a chemical, synthetic imitation of a plant compound.

“Since we did not evolve with these synthetics, our bodies do not always have pathways for their distribution and elimination,” she explains.  Although synthetic drugs have certainly performed miracles and saved lives, virtually all of these drugs have side effects ranging from the unpleasant to the lethal.

Using wild medicinal plants not only offers an alternative to the use of pharmaceuticals, it also provides a very different experience of healing.  Instead of visiting a doctor’s office or a hospital, people go out into the forests and mountains; they can make the medicine themselves and they know exactly where it comes from.

“When people see that this works, they are thrilled!” Keane says.

Keane doesn’t consider herself a healer; she would rather see people learn to heal themselves.  This is why she became a writer.

Originally, Keane was an accountant, a profession she found “terribly dry,” she says with a merry laugh. Thirty-five years ago she left accounting to study herbal medicine.

“I was drawn to the plants. But I didn’t want to work in a clinical setting. I figured the best thing was to write.  I can educate people this way; a book gives them time to absorb the information by slow osmosis.”

When Keane feels her research is complete and she is ready to write a book, she throws herself into an intensive period of writing, writing, writing till it’s done.

“I chain myself to the computer.  Something happens—an upheaval in my brain, and I start to see the whole book form.  I work 8-12 hours a day.  I just keep going and going.”

The new book has been particularly gratifying because it represents her return to BC, where she lived decades ago.  “I love it here; it’s like heaven to be back.”

Keane says BC has a plethora of wonderful healing plants.  However, she is able to choose a favorite.

“I’m very fond of Devil’s Club.  It only grows here in BC, a little bit in Northern Alberta, and in one very small enclave in Ontario near Lake Superior,” she says.  “It’s strong, it’s a warrior, it’s substantial and resilient.”

Recent research has confirmed the use of Devil’s Club, a member of the famous ginseng family, for respiratory problems, including Tuberculosis.  This is of particular interest to the medical world, since some strains of Tuberculosis have been developing a resistance to commonly used pharmaceutical drugs.

There is more information about Devil’s Club, and 42 other medicinal plants, in Wild Medicine of Coastal British Columbia.

For more information and to order books visit www.gaian.ca.