How I Cured My Poison Ivy Naturally

The weather was gorgeous here in New England for Labor Day weekend.  As I was spending it alone, I decided to take my laptop outside and do some work out there.  My kitchen counter is lovely, but my patio view is even lovelier.

Am I the only one who didn’t realize that you can’t see a laptop computer screen in the sun?  So I took my laptop back in the house so I could see it, messed with the controls, (I mean I very carefully followed the Google instructions), and somehow managed to make the screen nice and bright so that I can now work outside!  I must be a real blogger now.

I learned something else too, which confirms that one is never too old to learn.  While pulling weeds this week, I had managed to contract a serious case of poison ivy.  Oh, the itch!  My lovely neighbor brought me a bouquet of jewelweed to solve my problem.  Apparently jewelweed is a natural remedy for poison ivy and, lo and behold, that weed was one I hadn’t yet pulled up!  It was running rampant in the damp areas of my yard near my little stream.                          

So this is what I did and you can too…

Split the largest part of the stem to find the juice

I smoothed the juice over the rash.  Almost immediately, I felt better.

Make jewelweed tea

I chopped up the whole plant, leaves and stems, and boiled them in water until the “tea” turned bright orange.             

 

Next, I strained out the greenery. The next step is to pour this lovely orange tea into ice cube trays and freeze. 

Then, whenever I need it, I can pop out a cube and run it over an itchy part.  Problem is, who has ice cube trays these days?  So that step has to wait until I buy ice cube trays.

In the meantime…

I have what seems to be an unlimited supply of jewelweed in my backyard.  The juice from the stems seems to work.  Ah, relief.