I love wild blueberries. They hold a special place in my heart and are such a gift. Foraging wild blueberries doesn't just come with the gift of a tasty treat to put up in the freezer or make special jams, teas and goodies with. It's an experience too. The high summer sun beaming down on your sun kissed skin. The refreshing breeze rolling through the pines and the aromatics that follow. When they come along, kids playing and picking, most going straight into their tummys rather than the basket 😆 the stillness of life, the cicadas singing in the pines. 
Wild blueberries are far superior to their cultivated counterparts. They're loaded with vitamin C and incredibly nutrient rich. With a lot of similar compounds as Elderberry, they're incredible immune support. The wild blueberries add an impressive range of micronutrients and are wonderful for moving contaminants out of the body.
But blueberries don't stop their gifts with their berries. Blueberry leaves especially when harvested in late summer and autumn, when they turn or even start turning red, contain the highest levels of antioxidant polyphenol and anthocyanins. About 30x more than actual blueberries! Wild blueberries leaf tea was one of the most pleasant teas I've ever had!
When harvesting blueberries, we stumbled upon so much sweet fern. This is the part I love most about wildcrafting and herbalism, you never stop learning which gives life a whole new beautiful design. I've not worked with sweet fern before. After crushing some of the leaves between my fingers and smelling the incredible aromatics, I knew this plant was going to be my new obsession and had a familiarity that I couldn't place. While the medicinal qualities were unknown to me in that moment, I had some ideas. The aromatics were strong, like a mixture between sage and conifers. I felt perhaps it was a great plant for the respiratory tract. The leaves were so so very astringent, perhaps suitable for inflammatory conditions, and again, the respiratory tract. Maybe a good ally for the skin? Also, noticing their surroundings, they seem to be companion plants to the blueberries, so maybe they shared similar qualities. Cleansing, detoxification maybe. 
Once I got home, I dove right in and am still overwhelmed with excitment. Sweet ferns are in fact incredibly medicinal, and a food herb!
Their plant properties include: tonic, astringent, digestive tonic, immune tonic, lymphatic tonic, nutritive, anti-inflammatory, emollient, antibacterial, antiviral, anti fungal, anti-tumor, anaphylactic, antimutagenic, choleric, bronchodilator, free radical scavenger, inhibits insulin degradation and has slight muscle relaxing properties. 
Such an incredible plant right under our feet! Sweet fern seems to hold traditional uses for everything from immune and respiratory support to topically as a treatment for itchy irritated rashes, poison ivy, insect bites (black flies, mosquitoes ect). Its cleansing to the body, and similarly to blueberries it aids with toxin removal from the body, stimulates the lymph and sooo much more. I cannot wait to work with it further. 
The first thing I did was brew a nice tea with sweet fern, wild blueberry leaves and wild blueberries. Which is what I'm sipping on currently as I type this 😜
Lots of sweet fern medicine coming soon. I hope you join me on this obsession 😆😍