Episode #17 Unlocking the Magic of Essential Oils

Have you ever wondered how a small bottle of essential oil could revolutionize your daily routine? Discover the transformative power of essential oils and their fascinating history on Keeping it Real at the Gorham Homestead. I'll share personal stories from my own journey towards a more natural lifestyle, including how peppermint essential oil has become my go-to for headaches and sinus relief, and the many versatile uses of lavender, from skincare to natural deodorant.

You'll learn why quality is paramount when it comes to choosing essential oils and how brands like Young Living stand out for their commitment to purity. We'll explore the benefits of essential oils in daily maintenance, emotional well-being, and cleaning, with specific mentions of lavender and lemon for their calming and detoxifying properties. Plus, discover the incredible skin care and wound healing benefits of frankincense, lavender, and myrrh.

On the homestead, essential oils take on even more roles. Learn how lemongrass can help with bee swarms and inflammation, while Melissa oil, despite its cost, is a powerhouse against cold sores and shingles. Thieves oil proves essential for cleaning and maintaining milking machines, and tea tree oil stands out for its broad-spectrum usefulness. We'll wrap up with a heartfelt discussion on the importance of quality, encouraging you to research and find what works best for you. For more insights and to stay connected, visit TheGorhamHomestead.com and follow us on social media as The Gorham Homestead.

References:
Young Living - check out my favorite essential oil company here. (Full disclosure, I do earn a commission)  https://www.youngliving.com/us/en/referral/4604050

Sponsors:
 A Bee's Closet - Bon Aqua, Tennessee for all your beekeeping needs

Rogina, LLC - your mold testing specialist, water damage assessments, lead sampling, sewege contamination sampling located in Florida  www.RoginaConsulting.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:15

Hey y'all, welcome to Keeping it Real, the Gorham Homestead podcast, where we talk about real food, real natural living, the real art of natural healing and real life out here in our Tennessee homestead. I'm your host, Dawn Gorham, and today is Thursday, june the 27th 2024. So, as you can see, we're moving to Thursdays. It works out better for my schedule to do this. You're listening to episode number 17, and our topic today is essential oils, and it's literally just going to be for today why we use essential oils and what our uses are, what we use them for and just you know the top ones that are our favorites. So, just to get started, I'm just going to kind of go over what is an essential oil, because I know there's some feedback out there on the web. You know some people say oh, you believe in your essential oils, you believe in the Easter, bunny and Santa and whatever else. But essential oils are just as useful as herbs, and herbs have been used for thousands of years and so have essential oils. They go back to not only biblical times, but like even before that. So what is an essential oil? Well, essential oil is the most powerful part of the plant, it's the lifeblood of the plant. It's what pumps through it and gives it immunity and gives it strength and gives it its vitality. And they are distilled from shrubs, flowers, trees, branches. Let's see, you can get them from roots, bushes, tree resin, fruit, fruit peels and just your basic herbs that you grow, fruit peels and just your basic herbs that you grow and those oils. They consist of over 100 different natural organic compounds and you can use them to kill, like mold, candida. They can be antiviral, they can be antibacterial, antiseptic, anti-inflammatory, anti-inflammatory, anti-neuralgic, which means you know they can help your nerves. They can be antispasmodic, which means they help with muzzle spasms. Antivenomous. They could be antitoxic, antidepressant, sedative, analgesic, digestive. You can use them as a deodorant, you can use them as a diuretic because they contain ses-squirtopines that pass through the blood-brain barrier and there's just not a lot out there in actual pharmaceuticals that can cross over the blood-brain barrier and do things actually in the brain. So they leave the body medicinally and cosmetically, and they enter and leave the same way, medicinally and cosmetically, and they enter and leave the same way, medicinally and cosmetically, and leave zero trace, like there are no side effects. There is no anything left behind after you have used an essential oil, and so I'm just going to kind of go through our favorites.

Speaker 1: 3:25

One of my favorites is peppermint. I suffer from headaches and several, several years ago, before I even really got into essential oils, peppermint was my introduction to what essential oils can actually do for you. I like a combination of peppermint and eucalyptus when I have a really bad sinus headache. And just by rubbing that on your temple, rubbing it on the back of your head, kind of putting it under your nose, I'm a glutton for punishment, so I will actually even put it up my nose and let it burn, especially if I have a really bad sinus headache, because peppermint oil really helps with that. And it's transportable. It's something you can put that little bottle in your purse, stick it in your car, keep them in your desk. It's not like herbs where you have to make a tea or keep a large amount on hand. Essential oils are just really easy to carry around and a lot of times essential oils will work much faster than herbs, especially if you're doing teas or things of that nature, depending on the application and depending on what the problem is. But I will say peppermint essential oil is my number one thing that I must have in just about every room, in just about every car, in the camper, in the cannery, in the house, at the office, I keep peppermint oil, so that's one that you might want to check out. Another one that I really really love and I've learned to love in the last year is lavender. Lavender essential oil is really really interesting because it is super versatile. It has so so many uses, but one of the ones that I really like it for is deodorant.

Speaker 1: 5:16

I haven't been able to find a natural deodorant and so I've. You know I'm aluminum free and I haven't used aluminum deodorant in probably 10 years, ever since I had a breast cancer scare. I just, I just that's one of the things that made me turn the corner and start looking more natural for myself. I had been very aware of it with my son and with my husband. You know I worry more about what they eat and what they do than I do myself. But when that happened, you know I started sort of turning away from the aluminum deodorants, away from any chemicals, any sort of thing like that in our household cleaners. For a little while I was involved with a Melaleuca company because I really liked their stuff it was, you know, sustainable and which I kind of hate that word, but it was natural, chemical free, just really really good stuff. And I was, you know, involved with them for a while. But it kind of gets old having to order so much per month you know you get end up with. I think I ended up at one point with like 25 dishwashing liquids under my sink because I had to had to order and it was on one of those automatic orders. So that's what I got.

Speaker 1: 6:38

But at any rate, lavender is really really good for deodorizing. Lavender is really really good for deodorizing. You can take just a few drops of it, put it under the armpit and then I like to follow it with a little bit of coconut oil or some sort of other oil to just rub it around and get more skin space with it. So that's what I've been using in bergamot. So I will kind of alternate back and forth for deodorant, because you can build up like a tolerance even with deodorizing if you use the same herb over and over. It's not going to hurt you, but it's just over time it can be a little less effective unless you alternate. So for deodorizing, for deodorant, I alternate back and forth between lavender and bergamot, because those are two that I really really like Next on my list.

Speaker 1: 7:30

So we get a lot of tick bites out here. I actually right now I am covered in tick bites on my ankles and poison ivy on my ankles. Actually tick bites up my hip as well. So ankle hip side, under my bra line, I had about five tick bites and you know they it for with me they itch like forever. Um, they, it's one of those things. They just don't seem to go away. So I've got tick bites, I have got poison ivy around my ankles and sugar bites on the butt because I sat in the grass working on putting together that turkey coop and I don't know. And I've never been allergic to poison ivy in my life, never had to look for it, never learned to look for it, because it's never affected me. Well, all of a sudden, two weeks ago we were doing some yard work and T pointed out to me poison ivy and I was like I don't care, I'm not allergic to it, boy. Next day I woke up it was all over my legs. So for that I'll back up Tick bites.

Speaker 1: 8:38

My favorite, favorite, favorite combination that I have found for tick bites is thyme, oregano and basil, and so I will take like a drop or two of each one of those and put them into just like a little cup and then add some oil to it and mix it together and then rub those all over my tick bites. And while it doesn't really stop the itching because I feel like nothing really stops the itching If you need to get it on there quick enough it does help keep down infection and keep that from spreading, and there is some belief out there in the community that that combination also helps to keep down the potential for Lyme disease. Now I've also been told that if you get that tick off within 24 hours of it attaching, that the chances of actually injecting any Lyme or Rocky Mountain spotted fever or any of that stuff into your system is much, much less. So for the tick bites, do a tick check, get your husband to check your back, get your wife to check your back, your wife to check your back, your body, whatever, it's fine. Do a tick check and then, beyond that, if you find the tick, get it off.

Speaker 1: 9:50

Make sure you get the head out and then use thyme, oregano and basil mixed together and really, really keep coating that tick bite. So that's what we use that, for it's also really good, for basil is really good for ear infections. We use that our dog, our doodle you know doodles tend to get ear infections a lot, so that's one of the things that I will use on our doodle if she gets an ear infection is some basil and it's just a basil essential oil mixed in with some carrier oil, whatever you want that to be olive oil, jojoba oil, whatever you have on hand and then rub that around the outside. You don't want it to go down into the eardrum, but just getting that on the inside of the dog's ears and even doing it when you give them their bath, or once a week or whatever. If you have a dog that's prone to ear infections, that really, really helps to keep that down. It works really good for kids as well. Basil is just one of those things that's good for that, and I'm all over the place today Backing up to lavender.

Speaker 1: 11:02

Lavender is also good for burns. Now, it has to be true lavender and not the other version of that, and I can't even remember what that's called, but there's another version that's not. It's lavengela. I believe it has to be lavender essential oil and, that being said, I will go ahead and disclose that I am a big, big fan of Young Living essential oils. I may be proved to be wrong at some point, I don't know, but so far they have shown to me that they are a very reputable company and that their stuff is authentic and that it is used.

Speaker 1: 11:44

It is chemical free, pesticide free, because if you think about it, if you're using an essential oil from a lavender field that has been sprayed with some sort of pesticide to keep pests down and then you distill that down, think of what that concentration would be of pesticides in that essential oil. You're getting that as well as the goods. You're getting the bad stuff with the good stuff. And I know for a fact that Young Living does not do that. They actually will not get their essential oils or their products or their herbs, whatever it is. They're growing their cedarwood trees, their lavender, whatever, from a field that has had any sort of spray on it for 50 years, which is much, much more than what the requirement is to be labeled as organic. So I trust them. You know, I don't know about all of the things that they claim essential oils would do. I'm not super big on believing that you're going to cure, you know diabetes or cancer with essential oils, because that's just not going to happen and that's not how herbs work. Anyway.

Speaker 1: 12:55

Herbs and essential oils are more for your day-to-day things maintenance wounds, you know, colds, stuff like that. They're really good for that and they're great for cleaning. And they're great for smelling. Because if you think about it, you know when you smell something that goes directly to your brain and smells can really evoke emotion. They can make you think of a time in your life that was happy, or a time in your life that was sad, or it can evoke a memory, like the smell of rain on hot asphalt immediately takes me back to walking down a road when I was a child, barefooted on a freshly paved road. My feet were super hot. But the smell of that asphalt, I mean it takes me back instantly. And essential oils are sort of that way as well. They can invoke good memories and bad memories, but they also, I mean, they just go straight to the brain. They cross straight across the blood-brain barrier. So things that you know for, like lavender for anxiety, it can really calm you down. It's a naturally calming scent and there's actually constituents in the lavender that helps your brain to calm down.

Speaker 1: 14:16

Lemon essential oil is like one of my favorites. I love all things lemon, just like I love strawberry. I love lemon water. I love lemon smell. I love lemon cleaning stuff. I love all things to do with it because to me it just smells clean, it smells fresh, and so lemon essential oil is one of the things that you can mix if you like that smell. It's really good for removing grease, it's good for cleaning windows, it's good for adding just to anything that you want to do that cleans in your house. But it's also really really good to help clean toxins out of the body. And lemon essential oil can be added to water because it's safe. It's safe to be ingested, so you can drink it, you can put it in your diffuser, you can put it in your diffuser, you can put it in your cleaning supplies. You can do whatever you want to do with it. And it's also a really good digestive tonic. It helps, you know it helps to break down food. Just the citrus in it helps to break down any fats and whatever that might be in your stomach and in your gut. So it's really really good for that and I love I mean, I keep lemon in my purse the lemon essential oil in my purse because I like, like I said, I like lemon water and a lot of times when I go to a restaurant I can't get my lemon water because they don't have lemons. So I keep that in there.

Speaker 1: 15:55

So frankincense, so for my skin care. I'm almost 50, so kind of have to, startly, before I go to bed, into jojoba oil in my hand and I mix that all together and then I rub that all over my face because I don't have super oily skin, I have super dry skin. So it's not going to cause me to have any sort of you know, breakout or anything like that and I don't believe it does most people anyway because it's really really close to your natural, your natural oils in your skin. So I rub that all over my face and then I just pat it dry. So frank and frankincense is really really good for wounds and so is myrrh. So those are two of my go-tos if I have a cut or if I have. You know, a couple of weeks ago I had a really bad gash on my thumb that needed stitches and what I went back and forth between was frankincense, lavender and myrrh. I was alternating those and it really helped with the pain too, I'll have to say, and it helped it to close over and not get infected. And now it I mean looking at it, I see I have a little scar where it is, but other than that it's closed over and it, you know, it never got infected or anything like that. So frankincense, lavender and myrrh are my go-tos for skin stuff.

Speaker 1: 17:25

Now, before I go any further, I want to take a moment to give a shout out to our sponsors. Our first sponsor is A Bee's Closet. If you are looking for any beekeeping needs, if you are in the market for bee supplies, bee suits, hive tools, hives frames, honey, supers, any of that kind of stuff, joe at a Bee's Closet is your guy and he is so knowledgeable and so kind and I would highly recommend that you go visit Joe at a Bee's Closet in Bon Aqua. The second sponsor of the day is Regina LLC and they are your mold specialist. If you have any issues with, or suspect that you have, mold issues, highly recommend that you give them a call. They are very knowledgeable, they are veteran, owned and operated. They are a friend of the podcast and a friend of the self-reliance community Just really, really good people and you can trust them. They are not going to tell you something that is not 100% the truth, because they want to help you, they want to keep your health good, they want to keep your home safe and they want to make you know your environment a good environment to live in. So I'll highly recommend that you call Rojina LLC. They are in Florida. Highly recommend that you call Rogina LLC. They are in Florida, but they will travel around the country and they also have contacts for mold remediation if it is determined that you really you know if you have a problem and you need to fix it. So Rogina LLC, our friend, all right up next, on the essential oils, since we just spoke about beekeeping lemongrass.

Speaker 1: 19:03

Lemongrass is a good oil for a homesteader to have, and the reason that we use lemongrass essential oil out on the farm is to catch bee swarms. The cool thing about that is that it is very akin to the pheromone that bees emit when they are mating, and so putting lemongrass in your swarm catcher when you're trying to catch a swarm is very, very effective, and that's what you want to use that for. I personally use it because I had trigger finger on one of my hands and I don't know how it works, I don't know what the specifics of it are, but lemongrass is really good for inflammation. So if you have an inflamed shoulder or inflamed hand or arthritis or anything like that, I like lemongrass for that purpose because it's one of the cheaper essential oils. It's not. There are some that are probably better for inflammation and better for arthritis, but they're also a little higher on the cost scale. So for what it does for me, lemongrass is it's one of my favorites. I don favorites. I don't put it on, I don't use it as deodorant or because you can also use it to keep away certain other bugs not bees, but like mosquitoes and things like that. But if you're a beekeeper, it's probably not something that you want to wear out, something that you probably just want to use at night. I don't know if it would make bees follow you around, because I don't want to find out. So just that's the mating pheromone for bees. So just keep that in mind. It's good to use, but don't go out onto your beehive with lemongrass all over you.

Speaker 1: 20:58

I just have a couple of more that I'm going to talk about today, because when I get Joy on from Dr Hennerkoff's office, I really want her to give a much more in-depth explanation of some of the essential oils and what they can do, because her knowledge is so much more vast than mine. I just wanted to give you, like some things you know, the top 10 that you can start with that are really really basic, like cause. There are some others that are out there that you can use, like Melissa, also known as lemon balm, the essential oil, the young living essential oil. Melissa lemon balm is really really good for things like cold sores. It's a quick fix. It can be used for anything herpetic and that has become my quick fix go-to If anything like that happens.

Speaker 1: 21:56

We have had friends that have shingles. We have my son gets cold sores every once in a while. He picked that up as a little kid, wrestling as a four-year-old. That's the only place that we can figure that the poor kid picked it up Because we have no, no other issues. Nobody else in the family had had cold sores up until that point, so I have no idea, but he picked it up as a four-year-old and as just a little wrestler and so now that's something that we have to deal with. So he has the Melissa essential oil and we keep it, like I said, for anything. That is a very good anti-herpetic, it's also good for nerves, it's good for calming, it's good for lots of things. But because it's so expensive it's like $150 for a little bottle we use it very sparingly. That's not something that we use on, you know, on the regular.

Speaker 1: 22:53

But back to my last two that are my regulars. One is Thieves. Thieves is really really good cleaner and it's really good. Like from Young Living you can get things that they have a Thieves line of all of their cleaners and things. You can also just get it as an essential oil and use it however you want to.

Speaker 1: 23:17

I use Thieves to clean my milking machine once a week, like I do the regular daily maintenance. What I have to do, where I run it through the clean in place, I run the water through, I run the acid detergent through and then just a tiny, tiny little bit of bleach through the third cycle and then I'll rinse it again. But once a week I will do all of that and then I will also take everything apart and clean it with thieves, because I have seen in person where they measured the bacteria count before cleaning with thieves and after cleaning with thieves and it was chicken that they were using and once they were done cleaning with the thieves, the bacteria count was zero. So I really like using that in my milking machine just as an extra layer of cleanliness, like I said about once a week, and I'll use it anytime that I need to clean something and I need to know that it is super, super clean. And I don't like using Clorox or any sort of caustic cleaner on a regular basis. I don't use them in my house. I don't use them. I can't use them in my septic tank because I don't want to kill the bacteria in my septic tank. So I'm very, very careful about the cleaners that I use.

Speaker 1: 24:39

And Thieves is really great. You can also diffuse it in the air and it cleans. Like if you've got a sick kid and you want to run the diffuser in there and you want to run Thieves in the air. It kind of helps keep the bacteria level in the air down. It's also good to use. It's not the best tasting. I don't care for the smell of it. Personally it's not my favorite smell, but it's good. You can put it in water, you can add it to teas, you can do any of that kind of stuff and it's really an amazing antibacterial. And there's a lot more story behind the thieves and that goes back to like the bubonic plague. But that's a story for another time.

Speaker 1: 25:27

The very last one that I love Well, shoot, I had it written down, thieves. What was my last one? I'm thinking, oh, tea tree oil. Tea tree oil, that's another one that I really like for wounds, things of that nature. It's good for dandruff, it's good to put in shampoos, anything that you know would be itchy, a skin condition. You know I told you that I have the other ones that I like, but tea tree oil they actually used it, I believe, in World War I as an on-battlefield way to cleanse wounds when the military was hurt or the soldiers got hurt.

Speaker 1: 26:20

Tea tree oil was one of the go-tos. So it's really good if you get a cut or something superficial. It's probably not really good for deep wounds, but it's really good for things like that. I believe you can also brush your teeth with it. It gets really good up there in the gums. You can also brush your teeth with it. It gets, you know, really good up there in the gums, helps clear out any bacteria in that area. So tea tree oil is another one that you should check out and see if it's something that you're interested in. It's also known to be good for inflammation, and so you can rub it on sore muscles, put it on the back of your neck, rub it all over your shoulders and it helps if you've got like the flu. Things like that kind of helps those body aches and helps you to get over that just a little bit quicker. All right, so we are going to wrap up.

Speaker 1: 27:11

That is my top ones, and I have many, many more Like I've got a hundred essential oils I think pretty close to that that I use for different things, different blends, different things for different applications. You know, I use herbs, I use teas, I use tinctures and I use essential oils. But I love the essential oils because, like I said, they're transportable. Like you can keep a little bag of your top 10 essential oils and carry it with you everywhere you go and you always have, you know, your little emergency kit. So whatever might come up, whether it's a headache or whether it's indigestion, anything like that, essential oils are really really good for acute things like that and they're good for cleaning, and we are all wanting to live a toxic-free life and for me that is the most important part of having essential oils is that they do so much.

Speaker 1: 28:12

Their applications are so broad and you can make different smells. You can make soaps, you can make salves. You can add them. You know they are great to add in with herbs when you're doing, say, a comfrey salve or a face salve or something like that. You can always add in some frankincense and some myrrh to your facial cream and all of a sudden you've got a powerhouse. So just keep that in mind. It's really cool to learn about essential oils and, again, young Living is my favorite.

Speaker 1: 28:43

I do believe that the quality of essential oils matters, because I was one that tried cheap essential oils and just didn't really get much benefit, but I think it was because of the quality. It wasn't a pure essential oil and I have learned now the difference. You can literally smell and see a difference between an adulterated essential oil that has fillers and other things that they use as solvents, versus a true, pure essential oil. So I encourage you to do some research and find out what you believe and what you like and then start using essential oils in your home in the best way that you know how. So with that.

Speaker 1: 29:30

Thank you so much for tuning in. If you have liked the podcast and like the work that we do, it would be really cool if you would subscribe and leave me a review. It helps other people to find my podcast. You can also find me at thegormhomesteadcom and on all the socials as just the Gorm Homestead. Whatever you've got on the docket, I hope that y'all just keep it real. See y'all and my mama was a waitress where they parked M18 wheeler trucks. We didn't have much money. Times were kind of hard, living in a trailer on the edge of grandpa's farm. Yeah, I may not come from much, but I've got just enough. As long as my baby's in my arms and the good Lord knows what's in my heart, I refuse to be ashamed. It's just a southern thing.