Description

Like the honorable Nicholas Culpeper, I’m going to say ‘this plant is so common, that I need not describe it to you’. He was a bit more ‘floral’ with his speech (pun intended) but you get the idea. All you need to do to know Wild oats is look at the picture above. The species covered here vary in seed size and number on the plant but are generally pretty close and you can’t really go wrong.

There are three varieties of Oat plants around this way, you can see them in the pic above. All three are useful in the same way but you can squeeze more ”milk” from the cultivated variety. It is thought that (on the far right of the pic) the Common Wild Oat (Avena fatua) is the variety originally cultivated to become the cultivated Oat that is on the far left of the pic. The one in the middle is either from an intermediary stage or is a cultivated Oat that has gone wild and is the one that we use around here.. Both cultivated Oats and Wild Oats have the taxonomic name of Avena sativa.

For your interest, here’s a diagram that tells you how to tell Oats from other cereal crops that you may encounter –

Medicinal use

There are many, many references to the health benefits of cultivated Oats that have been allowed to set seed (known to Americans as ‘Oat Berries”. They also call Wheat seeds ‘Wheat Berries but they ain’t berries, folks). Here, though, we’ are’re looking at Wild Oats that are foraged from the wild or maybe harvested fresh from your own little Oat patch.

Consequently, some of the usually listed benefits are omitted here. They may be healing properties of Wild Oats that are allowed to continue to the seed stage, but for now, lets just go ‘wild’.

Wild Oats are an excellent dietary supplement and nerve tonic. As a nutritional supplement, Wild Oats go by either the name of ‘Oat grass’ or ‘Oat straw’. As a nerve tonic, they’re ‘Milky Oats’. Their most famous herbal use is of the unripe seeds but more of that later.

The whole plant is full of minerals, so don’t just use the unripe seeds. Being a grass, it’s bursting with Silica which is great for bones, hair and cleansing. You can feel the little Silicon crystals by running your finger carefully along the sharp edges of the leaves – the sharpness is crystals of Silicon! There’s also calcium, magnesium, phosphorus and a whole range of other goodies in it. Use the stem, the flower heads and the leaves to make a nutritious infusion (see below) that’ll shore up your nervous system and body, especially your bones. Add this infusion to your daily routine, along with a bowl of Oats and before long, you won’t recognise yourself!

Wild Oats of the Avena genus are ready to harvest at the end of Spring and early Summer. What marks this time as being special is that inside the seed case, the seed is forming. At this time the little blob of white goo inside that will become the seed is what gives these plants one of their common names ‘Milky Oats’ and is what we’re after to make our nervine herbal remedies. The ‘milk’ component of Wild Oats is used to restore tired and exhausted nervous systems. It helps to sooth and calm our nerves and to rebuild energy.

Combining the nutritional benefits of the Oat Grass with a daily dose of tincture can have amazing results in cases of fatigue and exhaustion from whatever cause. In this sense, Oat Grass and Milky Oat tincture combine well with Olive from the Bach Flower Remedies which is indicated for exhaustion. This can be expanded into other areas where the Remedies can be useful – Oak for when you are tired from trying to support everyone at the expense of yourself and Elm for when you get exhausted from trying to be everything to everybody. Vervain can help too by helping you to ‘switch off’ chattering thoughts about work that hasn’t been done. I use that a LOT with folks who can’t switch off at the end of the day. Rock Water can help too by letting you know that you’ve done enough and can rest. Interestingly, the Bach Flower Remedy, Wild Oat, doesn’t fit in this category as it’s generally used to help people find their true calling in life.

It can be fun but time consuming to go around squeezing every Oat that you find, so here’s a tip. When the top two Oats on a plant have dried out, it is a good sign that most of the lower Oats on the plant are ready.

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Preparing and using Wild Oats

You can harvest the plant at any stage of its lifecycle if you’re after the mineral content. If you’re looking for the milk, wait until the seed heads have formed. Give one or two Oats on the plant a squeeze from the base and, if they’re ready, you’ll be rewarded with a little blob of ‘milk’.

Don’t dry your unripe seed heads (see below) but you can dry the rest of the above ground plant, even the roots if you want. It’s best to cut the herb before it is dried, especially bigger stems as they can become quite tough and you will be forever having pieces flying around the room if you try to cut them at this stage. I’m looking for a second hand, old fashioned paper guillotine to try cutting bunches at a time.

The milk is best extracted in alcohol and when you are making a tincture of Wild Oats, you must use fresh plant material because drying greatly degrades the constituents in the unripe seed. Because you’re using fresh plant material you should use a higher alcohol concentration (>60%) to compensate for the moisture in the herb. It may not feel like there’s much moisture in the seed head but it is there (see this page for more information). Using fresh herbs to make a tincture means that we should use enough alcohol to make the ratio of herb to alcohol 1:2. That can be interesting!

The Wild Oat seed heads are light and don’t pack together easily, leading to much of the herb remaining above the alcohol. Use a blender to mulch up the herb and alcohol but do so in small amounts because the oats tend to bounce around in the blender and don’t get sliced up.

Tonic infusion –

All of the minerals are water soluble, so Wild Oats lends itself to teas and infusions. A tea or infusion made from it can help frazzled nerves and exhaustion too, so harvest the whole above ground part of the plant, including the seeds, dry it and use it as a tonic tea all year.

You can make an infusion of Wild Oats by itself or combine it with other mineral and nutrient rich herbs for a nourishing brew. I like to combine it with Nettles and Red Raspberry.

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Other herb pages on Ligaya Garden

We cover a lot of ground on many herb related topics here on our website. There are whole pages devoted to different topics as well as frequent posts. Some of the links are –

Garden Herbs

Wild Herbs

Making Remedies

Mushroom medicine

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