new camera

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crabby

moving

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glass

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juniper berries

arugula

horsetail four

Native Americans and early settlers used tea made from Field Horsetail as a diuretic.

Used as a cough medicine for horses.

Source of dyes for clothing, lodges, and porcupine quills.

It was used for scouring and polishing objects.

The young shoots were eaten either cooked or raw.

Extracted silica is used in manufacture of remineralizing and diuretic medicinal products. Other potential uses of biogenic silica include industrial applications (abrasives, toothpaste, protective cloth, optical fibers, thickeners for paint, etc.), detergents, and cleaners. Leaf-odor constituents were used widely in the 1970's in perfumes but are little used now. These constituents can be used as food flavors and flavor enhancers, and as animal repellants.

Can accumulate gold in its tissues, up to 4.5 ounces of gold per ton of fresh plant material. Its value in this regard is primarily as an indicator plant rather than as a commercial source of gold.

Caution: It contains a substance which destroys vitamin B in animals. It is especially poisonous to young horses. Hay containing this weed may be more poisonous than fresh plants in the field.

horsetail three

Habitat: Field horsetail occurs in depressional areas with poorly drained soils, as well as in sandy or gravelly soils with good drainage such as railroad embankments and roadsides. An intense competitor, it can severely suppress crops and other plants.

horsetail two

Stems & Roots: The rhizomes are dark brown or blackish, spread out for long distances and are often 1 m (3 1/3 ft) below the ground surface. They send up numerous aboveground shoots but of two different types at different times of the year. In early spring, the shoots are ashy-gray to light brown, unbranched, hollow, jointed stems; each node (joint) surrounded by a toothed sheath; and the tip of stem ending in a brownish, spore-producing cone. After the cones have shed their spores (early May) these whitish to light brown stems wither and die down. At the same time, the second type of shoot emerges from the ground. These are green, slender, erect, hollow stems, leafless but with whorls of 6 to 8 branches at nearly every node; each branch may branch again with whorls of smaller branches; stems and branches surrounded by a small, toothed sheath at each node but never end in a spore-producing cone. Both kinds of stems are easily pulled apart at the nodes and can be fitted back together like sections of a stove pipe.

horsetail one

Equisetum arvense L., [EQUAR]

General Description: Perennial. Never has flowers or seeds but reproduces by spores and by horizontal underground stems (rhizomes). Distinguished by its ashy-gray, unbranched, leafless shoots tipped with brownish, spore-producing cones in early spring, and later, from late spring or early summer onwards, by its whorls of 6 to 8 green, leafless branches and complete absence of flowers.

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