Green Tribe of Belonging

 I'm off to Maine to visit my daughter and her husband early tomorrow, so I'm getting off another post about beneficial weeds before I leave. We are in quite a drought here in eastern Iowa. I went out this morning to take pictures of Plantain and Burdock, and you can tell by the results that these plants would love some rain! However, even in their slightly wilted state they'll be recognizable to many of you. The first one below, Plantain, is one of my favorite plants. This is not the banana-like plantain that you may be familiar with, but a low-growing small plant that loves compacted soil. If you want to find some, just go to a path or trail where lots of animals or people walk. That's where they are happiest. Long ago I was taught that their leaves are a miracle skin-healer, and I've used them as the main ingredient in the healing salves I've made since then. I had thought they were just good for external use, but now I find that actually they are taken inter

 I remember when I bought my current i-phone a couple months ago, I was ready and excited to take clear and beautiful pictures of weeds and post them on this blog. But this phone has proven to be a total challenge. I feel like flinging it against the wall multiple times a day. I've always had an android, and the transition to the completely different i-phone has been so much more difficult than I could have imagined. I am very, very slowly adapting to this new-age phone, and I finally have learned to take relatively good pictures with it. At last I can get back into the flow of blog posts and catch up by presenting two more weeds we have in plentiful quantities at Prairie Hill. They are both plants that we pull up from our native lawns. But as usual, they are also admirable in many ways if you look at them by themselves. And I even have pictures of both of them. First, there's Black Medic. Here's a picture of it growing out of the crack on one of our sidewalks: I had never