The Grateful Healing Project

Hello, and welcome to The Grateful Healing Project. My first product is going to be a devil’s club salve. In this post I’ll explain my methods of choosing, harvesting, and processing the devil’s club in preparation for making medicine. If you’re not familiar with devil’s club, feel free to go check out my page all about devil’s club.

Finding Devil’s Club

First, you have to find a good spot to harvest. My favorite spots have an abundance of devil’s club growing in a huge area. There are a few places you might see a single devil’s club plant, or just a couple of plants without any others nearby. I’ll avoid those plants for the most part because I want to encourage more of it to grow in those areas in the future. I like to keep a lookout for any plants that may be damaged. Sometimes, kids will whack the top of the plants with sticks, or trail vehicles will run into them damaging them. I’ll try to harvest those plants first. They always seem eager to come home with me. I’ll avoid stems that have grown horizontally across the ground or bent over and touched the ground. They can eventually reproduce that way. I’ll try to avoid any plants with an inflorescence or fruit on the top. Not every stem has one and I want the ones that do to continue their reproduction cycle. Later in the year I won’t worry about this too much, but you really want to harvest earlier than later anyway. I got a pretty late start on it this year in July, but it was kind of a strange winter that seemed to last a lot longer than normal, truncating what would have been springtime.

Cutting Devil’s Club

You have to make sure the stem you want to harvest is accessible and won’t fall backwards on you when you cut it. You can use a pair of tongs, or a pair of channel lock plier with tape on the jaws to gently handle the stem near it’s center of gravity when cutting. I try to ensure I’m not stomping too much on surrounding plants and I try to respect the area as much as possible.

I use a simple plastic pipe cutter (std. shear type) to cut the stems. You can use any type of shears capable of cutting 1 to 2 inch diameter branches. I do not find it difficult to cut through when the stems are healthy or young, but they can be tougher when they have begun to dry out.

Scraping Devil’s Club

Once you cut the stem you want, you can use a sharp edged tool to gently scrape away the spines and outer bark. The outer bark is extremely thin, like a peanut skin. You want to be careful when scraping that you don’t damage the inner bark. You can use your tape-jawed channel locks to gently hold it while you scrape off the spines near the end, then you can just hold onto the handle area you’ve scraped off to do the rest of the stem. Try to avoid scraping towards yourself or you will find yourself covered in the spines. Wear glasses as the spines can and will shoot off sometimes.

I made a special tool for scraping the spines and outer bark. It’s just a couple of curves cut into the back of a butterknife blade. I used a Dremel style multitool but it took over an hour and I used 5 tiny discs. I imagine that if you have access you a bench grinder or a vice and an angle grinder, you’ll be able to create one of these in just a few minutes. This tool works brilliantly to quickly scrape off the spines and outer skin without damaging the inner bark at all. Imade a handle from a pice of dried devil’s club cane. I split it with a pocket knife, and dug out the inside with a thumb knife to fit the butterknife handle. I used a little hot glue, then did a couple of wraps with waxed that to hold it together. The scraper works great, and i highly recommend making one.

Peeling the Devil’s Club

Once you’ve scraped all the spines and outer skin-like bark from the stems, you’ll be left with green, very fragrant, slightly damp sticks. You’ll then want to take a sharp knife and slit the inner bark from one end of the stick to the other. From that cut, you should be able to peel the inner bark off the wood inside. Your custom carved scrapinator 9000, or just any regular butterknife, will help peel it from the wooden bones.

Trimming the Devil’s Club

Once you’ve got all of your inner bark collected, you can cut it into smaller pieces. I find it’s easier to do this while it’s fresh. If you’re drying it first it will allow you more consistency and speed up the drying process. If you’re using it fresh, it will allow for easier measurement and smoother container transfer.

That’s pretty much it. At this stage you’re ready to make the medicine of your choice. You can put it in olive oil to make salves and lotions. You can put it in ethanol to make tinctures and tonics, you can steep it in hot water to make a bath or a pot of tea, and you can use it fresh or dry it out for use in the future.

Gunalcheesh, Haw’aa, and Thank you for reading!