Bidens/Spanish Needles/Herbal Antibiotic

Hi y'all, this is Kathy with Barefoot Mountain School of Herbs, and today I wanted to do a video on one of my absolutely very favorite herbs, the Biden species, also known as Spanish Needles or Beggar Ticks. It is a natural antibiotic, antiviral, and immunomodulating, to name a few of the purposes of it, and it is one of those herbs that I absolutely have to have a bunch of every year because everybody that uses it just loves it. Now when you think about Bidens, most people think about Biden's Pelosa because that is the one that was made famous by Stephen Buehner in his book, Herbal Antibiotics, and Biden's Pelosa I'm sure is wonderful, but here in central Appalachia, that is not the species that we have the most of. Here we have a couple of them. The most common is Biden's Frondosa, and we also have Biden's Bipinata. Now since Biden's Bipinata blooms earlier in the summer, I'm going to go ahead and cover it first. As you can see, it has a little yellow flower, a little tiny yellow flower, with five petals, and it will have three to five leaflets. It kind of has a little bit of a shiny look, and the stem will be mostly smooth. You can see a little bit of hair on them, but it's mostly a smooth stem. Now the biggest look-alike is going to be ragweed, but you'll be able to tell the difference by the very hairy stem of a ragweed. It also has a kind of a little bit of a look like poison hemlock, so you'll need to know the difference in that and poison hemlock. To me, the best way, if you have any doubt at all, the best way to tell is to wait for the yellow flower and then try to get some that haven't bloomed yet, because the best time to harvest them is before they bloom, or you can wait until the fall or winter and identify the seeds, the burrs, and then you'll know where the Bidens is growing. Now this next one I want to talk about is very common around here, almost to the point of being invasive, and it is Bidens frondosa. Bidens frondosa doesn't have any poisonous look-alikes. I can't think of any look-alikes at all right offhand, but it has also three to five leaflets. It has toothed edges, and the leaves are about two to three inches long. It has a yellow flower also, but it doesn't have any petals. It just has a yellow middle to it. The stems are mostly smooth, and it can have a few little sparse hairs, but it's mostly smooth, and sometimes later in the summer they'll turn red. Some of them will just stay green, so it could be either way. They're a little bit taller than Bidens bipinata. They're probably about three to four foot tall, and they come up a little bit later in the summer, but they're also very plentiful, so this is the one we end up using the most of. So now I want to talk a little bit about harvesting and preparing Bidens, and I prepare mine according to this herbal antibiotics book by Stephen Herod Buhner, so I highly recommend the book. You harvest them in the summer just before the flowers open. You can actually start harvesting them pretty early, and you can get the tops of them, and they'll come back, and you can get three or four harvests out of them. You do want a whole lot of the leaves because they're very light, and the tincture is very concentrated, so you need quite a few of the leaves. Now once you get your harvest, you want to bring it in immediately and tincture it just as fresh as you possibly can because it starts losing its strength as it starts to dry. So if you're out in the field and you're not going to be going home for a little while, you might actually even want to go ahead and tincture it out there in the field because the fresher the better with this plant. This is also one of those plants that you want to weigh. I don't usually take any chances with this one, so I'll go ahead and put it on the scale, and you want to do it in a one to two ratio. So if you have two ounces of Biden's leaves, then you'll want four ounces of pure ethanol like Everclear or something just as high a percentage of alcohol as you can get, and you don't add any water. You go ahead and tincture them fresh in pure ethanol. And this is easier said than done. To get two ounces of leaves into four ounces of Everclear, you're going to have to get them very, very tiny. I use a hand blender or a blender or a smoothie maker or something like that to get them very small, and even then it's going to look more like a sponge than a tincture. And of course you put it in the jar, in the clean jar, and you add your Everclear and you shake it very well, and then you shake it every day that you remember it for about six weeks. Then you want to press it out really, really tight because the best medicine is right there around that herb, and then you want to strain it, and then you have your tincture. Now one of the reasons that I just love Bidens is that it is a systemic herbal antibiotic. Now most herbal antibiotics, you have to put them where they are needed. They won't get into your bloodstream. You can't just take them like a pill and then go all through your body, but Bidens does. It is absorbed into your bloodstream through your intestines and will go all over your body. And also, it is effective against both gram-positive and gram-negative bacteria. Now gram-negative bacteria are a real problem. They're a real problem for even the drugs, the antibiotics that they have. They're the ones that have the extra protections and are just a problem for antibiotics to take care of. But Bidens is effective against both positive and negative bacteria. Another thing I really love about Bidens is that it's effective against a wide variety of bacteria as well as quite a few viruses and some fungi. So it's very versatile. We can use it. We use it in our family and amongst our friends, even against MRSA. We've had a few battles with MRSA that we've won with just taking Bidens by mouth and using it also on the wound. And I personally won a battle with shingles that I didn't even know I was fighting. Before I knew that I had shingles, I started taking Bidens every two hours and it stopped it in its tracks. And then, of course, when the swelling went down and being a nurse, I recognized that it was shingles and then had it confirmed by a doctor's office. But Bidens just absolutely stopped it in its tracks. Now that's not on the list of viruses that it's effective against, but it really did work for me in that instance. And I also wanted to mention real quick that Bidens is in Steven Buter's protocol for dealing with COVID-19 in order to protect the lung cilia from the virus. So I wanted to mention that. But how to take Bidens, I just, whenever we have anything come up that I think that it will help with, we do a dropper full every two hours, especially that first day. We just really load up on the first day. As soon as the symptoms start declining, then we'll go down to about three times a day we'll take a dropper full. We put it in grape juice so that it tastes okay. And if we really need it to be strong, then we will take a teaspoon, well, probably about a quarter of a teaspoon of black pepper ahead of time, and that increases the strength of it. Okay, and that's all that I can think of to tell you about Bidens. If you have any questions, just please put them in the comments. I appreciate you all for watching and may God bless you and Shalom!