Back to Eden Natural Health and Wellness

10/25/2026

🍎 From Fresh Apples to Apple C***r Vinegar: Nothing Goes to Waste!

We've got a new project underway at Back to Eden!
A few weeks ago, we purchased several five-gallon buckets of raw, unfiltered apple c***r vinegar to get our big batches of Fire C***r started in time for cold and flu season. After filling all those jars, we had a little vinegar left in the buckets, along with the living "mother."

Rather than let it go to waste, we had an idea. Why not make our own apple c***r vinegar and replenish our supply?

Well, we were shopping for business supplies at the Amish store the other day, and wouldn't you know it, it's apple harvest season! Beautiful Jonathan apples were just 60 cents a pound!

So we brought home our first bushel, purchased a new apple grinder and c***r press, and we're getting ready to put them to work!

We're hoping to press around four gallons of fresh juice from this first bushel, which we'll add to our leftover vinegar and mother to begin the process of making more apple c***r vinegar. If all goes well, we'll head back for another bushel or two while the apples are plentiful and inexpensive!

🍎 Did you know you can make your own apple c***r vinegar right on your kitchen counter?

You don't need a c***r press or bushels of apples, either! The next time you're making an apple pie, save those peels and cores. With a little water, sugar, and patience, you can turn those scraps into homemade apple scrap vinegar!

Raw apple c***r vinegar has been valued for generations for its many uses, from cooking and food preservation to traditional home remedies. Research even suggests that consuming a little diluted apple c***r vinegar with meals may help support healthy blood sugar levels.

At Back to Eden Natural Health and Wellness, we're passionate about making the most of what God has given us. Reducing waste, repurposing what we can, and learning to make things ourselves are all part of the lifestyle we want to encourage.

And there's something else we believe strongly:
Learn these skills and practice them now, while you don't have to, because someday you just might need to!

🌿 It's all part of getting back to the basics, becoming a little more self-sufficient, and appreciating God's provision!

10/19/2026

Time to start the next big batch of fire c***r! This will give us staggered batches to help ensure the supply covers the winter needs of our community. Watch for more photos in the comments.

10/18/2026

Time to start thinking about your Thanksgiving dinner! We are now taking pre-orders for sourdough dinner rolls and air-fried hand pies (pumpkin, apple, cherry, chocolate creme, and strawberry rhubarb)! Payment is expected when ordering, last day to order is Nov 20th! Let us ease the stress of your holiday baking!

Sourdough dinner rolls (12-pack)- $12
Air-fried hand pies - $5 each

10/17/2026

🌿 WHAT IF WE STARTED SUPPORTING OUR HEALTH BEFORE WE GOT SICK? 🍯

At Back to Eden, we believe one of the best approaches to health is prevention. Why wait until our bodies are struggling when God has already provided us with so many wonderful ways to support them?
That's the thinking behind our latest experiment!

What you're looking at are two half-gallon jars packed with fresh garlic, ginger, turmeric, rosemary, and cracked black pepper, all immersed in raw honey. We're allowing this mixture to ferment for several weeks, and we're pretty excited about the possibilities!
But why these particular ingredients?

Jen and I have spent years learning about natural compounds that help our bodies regulate inflammation and activate their own antioxidant defenses.

Most people have heard of antioxidants, but did you know your body actually has the ability to produce its own powerful antioxidant defenses?

God designed an amazing system into our bodies called NRF2. Think of it as a master switch that helps turn on genes responsible for producing and maintaining our body's own antioxidant defenses. Certain compounds found in plants, including some of the ingredients in these jars, have been shown in research to influence that system!

These same ingredients also contain compounds studied for their ability to support a healthy inflammatory response.

And here's where fermentation gets really interesting!
Fermentation isn't just about preserving food. Beneficial microorganisms can help break down plant structures and transform natural compounds into different forms, sometimes making them easier for our bodies to absorb and utilize.

So our thinking was simple: Why not bring these wonderful ingredients together, add the natural goodness of raw honey, and explore what fermentation might contribute?

We don't yet know exactly how fermentation will change this particular combination, but that's part of the adventure!

And here's something we really want you to understand: You can learn to make natural preparations at home, too!

We didn't follow some complicated formula. We selected ingredients based on what we've learned about their properties and combined them in roughly equal proportions, using our judgment and experience. Of course, learning proper fermentation methods is important, but exploring natural health doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. You don't always have to buy something to begin taking better care of yourself and your family!

Our hope is that this becomes another enjoyable addition to a daily wellness routine, especially as we head into cold and flu season. We're not looking for miracles in a jar. We're simply exploring ways to nourish and support the remarkable bodies God gave us.

And if you'd rather leave the preparation to us, we're hoping to have some available at Back to Eden once we've finished developing and evaluating the recipe!

❤️ God didn't just provide us with plants containing antioxidants. He also designed our bodies with their own powerful antioxidant defense systems, and some of those plants contain compounds that can help activate them. The more we learn about His creation, the more amazed we become!

🌱 Back to Eden Natural Health and Wellness Getting back to health, the way God intended.

10/12/2026

🌿 YELLOW DOCK: THERE’S TREASURE UNDER THAT “WEED”!

Sometimes the most valuable plants are the ones growing right under our feet.

Recently, while working with my brother near Orrick, Missouri, I came across a beautiful stand of healthy yellow dock. Fortunately, I almost always have a spade shovel with me, so I brought home a nice harvest of roots!

And harvesting yellow dock root is no small job. In good soil, those taproots can reach a foot or more into the ground, and they have a frustrating habit of snapping off before you get the whole thing out.
There’s also a reason I’m digging them now. As perennial plants prepare for winter, they move resources underground to help fuel the next year’s growth. That makes late fall, along with early spring before vigorous new growth begins, a traditional time for herbalists to harvest roots.

So why go to all that trouble?

Yellow dock root has a long history in herbal medicine as an alterative, or “blood cleanser.” That doesn’t mean it literally scrubs toxins from your blood. Traditionally, the term refers to herbs used to support the body’s own processes of elimination, particularly through the liver, bile, digestive system and bowels.

Yellow dock is also surprisingly mineral-rich. Analyses of the root have found iron, calcium, magnesium, potassium and zinc, with especially noteworthy amounts of iron and calcium. That doesn’t mean yellow dock is a treatment for mineral deficiencies, but it certainly helps explain why herbalists have long valued this humble root as a nourishing tonic.
Traditionally, yellow dock root has been used to:

🌿 Support healthy liver and gallbladder function
🌿 Encourage healthy bile flow
🌿 Support digestion and regular elimination
🌿 Serve as an alterative or traditional “blood-cleansing” herb
🌿 Provide a natural source of valuable minerals

At Back to Eden, yellow dock root is one of the herbs we put into every batch of our Fire C***r, and some of this fresh harvest will be dehydrated and ground for use in other preparations, including a liver-and-gut-support herbal tea blend we’re developing.

It’s amazing what God has provided for us in plants that most people simply walk past as weeds.

Sometimes you just have to know what you’re looking at...and carry a good shovel! 🌿😊

10/03/2026

10/02/2026

I went to Tractor Supply the other day to pick something up, and while I was standing in the animal-health aisle, something stopped me in my tracks.

Look at the video.

MSM. Glucosamine. Minerals. Joint support. Gut support. Herbs and nutritional compounds I recognize because they're the same kinds of things we talk about all the time for human health.

And suddenly I remembered a cassette tape my dad gave me nearly 30 years ago.

Yes, a cassette tape. 😂

It was called Dead Doctors Don’t Lie, by Dr. Joel Wallach. Wallach was a veterinarian, and one of the central ideas he presented absolutely fascinated me: veterinary medicine and animal husbandry had learned to look closely at nutrition and deficiencies when animals developed disease. In fact, what he said exactly was, veterinary medicine had already learned to cure many diseases in animals naturally, while humans opt to continue suffering with them.

He gave examples that stuck with me.

He talked about ulcers in pigs, and how veterinary medicine had recognized bacterial involvement and used bismuth as part of the treatment, while human ulcers were still widely being blamed on stress.

He told the story of turkeys dying from ruptured aortic aneurysms, which he attributed to inadequate copper in their feed. Correct the nutritional problem, he said, and the losses stopped.

And he talked about osteoporosis in livestock. Think about it. If you've got a valuable breeding bull whose bones are deteriorating, your plan isn't to wait until his hips fail and then schedule a hip replacement. You pay attention to what that animal needs nutritionally to maintain strong bones in the first place.

Those examples opened my eyes all those years ago.

And standing in Tractor Supply looking at shelf after shelf of nutritional products for horses and livestock brought the whole thing rushing back.

We pay enormous attention to what goes INTO an animal because we understand that its body needs the proper raw materials to function.

So why don't we always begin there with ourselves?

I often call our modern healthcare system the "sick-care system." That's intentional. When we're sick, the conversation too often begins with, "What can we give you for the symptom?" A pill. An injection. A procedure. Sometimes those things are absolutely necessary and lifesaving.

But there's another question we should be asking:

WHY is my body doing this?

What's missing? What's excessive? What's damaged? What's irritating it? What nutritional, environmental, lifestyle, microbial, or other factor might be contributing to the problem?

Because your body isn't stupid.

You are a created being. There is extraordinary intelligence built into every system of your body. God designed it with astonishing mechanisms to protect itself, adapt, rebuild, defend, heal and maintain balance.

That doesn't mean the body can heal every disease or injury by itself.

It DOES mean that instead of always asking, "What can I take to make this symptom go away?", maybe we should also be asking:

"What does my body need in order to function the way God designed it to?"

That's a question that changed the way I looked at health nearly 30 years ago.

And it's really at the heart of what we want Back to Eden to be.

If you're dealing with something in your health that just doesn't make sense, come talk to us. Bring us your questions. Bring us the things you've struggled with for years. Bring us the challenges where you've been given an answer for the symptom, but you're still wondering why.

We won't pretend to have every answer. We don't.

But we love digging in. We love researching, asking questions, looking for connections, and helping people explore what might be happening underneath the symptoms and what natural approaches might make sense to consider.

We've already had the privilege of doing that with people, and every time we see someone begin to understand their body differently and actually begin to recover, it reminds us why we're building Back to Eden in the first place.

So if you've got a health challenge and you're wondering,

"What would addressing the root cause look like for me?"

Come talk to us.

That's exactly the kind of conversation we want to have.

09/30/2026

🌿 YOU’VE PROBABLY DRIVEN PAST THIS PLANT A THOUSAND TIMES…

Those beautiful, upright clusters of deep red berries you see growing along roadsides and field edges? That’s sumac — and there is a whole lot more to this native plant than meets the eye!

Yesterday, Jen and I spent some time foraging on a large acreage near El Dorado Springs and came across a beautiful patch of staghorn sumac. Naturally, we couldn’t pass it up! We harvested as much as we could carry and brought it home to process.

So what’s so interesting about sumac?

For generations, people have used the red fruit of sumac both as food and in traditional herbal preparations. One of its simplest uses is making a refreshing drink sometimes called “sumac-ade.” The fruit is steeped in water, producing a pleasantly tart, almost lemonade-like drink.

Traditionally, various preparations of sumac have also been used for sore throats, digestive complaints, respiratory complaints and wound care. Modern research has found another interesting reason this plant has attracted attention: sumac fruit contains an impressive assortment of plant compounds, including polyphenols, flavonoids, tannins and anthocyanins, and extracts of the fruit have demonstrated antioxidant activity in laboratory research.
And that wonderfully tart flavor? That comes naturally from the fruit’s organic acids (malic and citric acid) and tannins. No lemons required!

One question people often have is: “Wait… isn’t sumac poisonous?”

The sumac with these upright red berry clusters is not poison sumac. Poison sumac is a different plant that typically grows in wet, swampy areas and produces loose clusters of pale whitish berries. As always with wild plants, positive identification is essential before harvesting anything.

So what are we doing with ours?

We rinsed every cluster by hand, spread them on trays, and slowly dried them overnight. This morning we separated the little fruits from their woody stems, leaving us with the enormous bowlful you see in the pictures. Our next step is to gently process and sift them, separating out the hard seeds and keeping as much of that beautiful tart red fruit material as possible.

And nothing needs to go to waste. Even the berry-covered stems and leftovers are headed to our chickens to investigate and enjoy. 😊

The part we keep will eventually find its way into some of our Back to Eden herbal tea blends, where sumac can contribute its bright, pleasantly tart flavor along with all of that fascinating plant chemistry.

This is one of our favorite things about learning to forage. Sometimes what looks like just another plant growing beside the road turns out to have a history stretching back generations.

God has placed an extraordinary pharmacy and pantry all around us. Sometimes we just have to learn how to recognize it. 🌿

Back to Eden Natural Health & Wellness

09/23/2026

Sometimes Your Body Needs a Reboot

Right now, I’m on day three of a green juice fast.

For three days, I’ve eaten no solid food. When I’m genuinely hungry, I drink fresh green juice. When I’m not hungry, I don’t. And honestly? My energy has been great. After the first 24 hours, I even slept better than I normally do.

Sometimes we simply need to give our bodies a break.

Think about how much work your digestive system does every single day. Meal after meal, snack after snack, it is constantly digesting, absorbing, processing and eliminating. A short juice fast gives that system a chance to rest while continuing to flood the body with nutrients from fresh, living foods.

Our juice is simple:

🥬 Kale
🥒 Cucumber
🌿 Celery
🥕 Carrots
🍏 Granny Smith apples
🍋 Lemon
🫚 Fresh ginger

We run everything through our juicer, and because some of the fine pulp makes it into the finished juice, ours retains some of the plant fiber as well.

For us, the idea is a reboot.

Stop the constant intake of solid food for a little while. Give the digestive tract a break. Give the body some breathing room. Continue supplying vitamins, minerals and all those wonderful plant compounds, but simplify the workload.

You don't have to start with anything extreme, either. A two- or three-day juice fast can be an approachable way to experience it. Some people choose to go considerably longer.

If you've never watched the documentary Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead, we highly recommend it. Joe Cross began the film overweight, sick and dependent on medications. He undertook a 60-day fresh juice fast while being medically monitored, and the transformation documented along the way is remarkable. The film also follows Phil Staples as he undertakes his own extended juice journey.

It is one of those documentaries that can completely change the way you think about food and what the human body is capable of when we change what we're giving it.

One other thing to know: the beginning of a fast doesn't feel identical for everyone. Some people experience headaches, fatigue, digestive changes or other temporary symptoms as their normal eating patterns change. Others, like I've experienced this time, may actually notice surprisingly good energy.

I'm wrapping up my own three-day fast now, and it has been a good reminder of something we believe strongly at Back to Eden:

Sometimes health isn't about adding one more thing. Sometimes it's about taking things away for a little while and giving the body room to do what it was designed to do. 🌿

If you've never considered a juice fast, Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead is a great place to start learning about the idea. You can watch it here https://youtu.be/R15FezDA6t8?is=jaOb3ov5tITCnRo0

Back to Eden Natural Health & Wellness 🌱

09/21/2026

Ten gallons of fire c***r!
Cold and flu season is coming, and ours is already brewing.

Today, we packed ten one-gallon jars full of fresh fruits, roots, herbs, peppers, and spices, then covered all of that goodness with raw, unfiltered apple c***r vinegar with the mother. If you've never heard of fire c***r before, you might be wondering: What in the world is it and why would I want it?

Fire c***r is a traditional herbal tonic people have kept on hand for generations, especially in the colder months, as a way to support the body and its natural defenses. It's bold, warming, invigorating, and packed with plants that each bring something different to the table. And that's one of the things we love about it. Every layer going into those jars has a job. Garlic, onions, horseradish, ginger, cayenne, and jalapeños bring the heat and pungency traditionally associated with warming the body, supporting circulation, and opening up the sinuses. Ginger and turmeric bring powerful plant compounds valued for their antioxidant properties and their ability to support a healthy inflammatory response. Rosemary and oregano are wonderfully aromatic herbs, loaded with protective plant compounds, and long used in colder weather months. Echinacea is one of the best-known traditional herbs for immune support, particularly when you feel something beginning to come on. Burdock and yellow dock are deeply rooted in traditional herbalism, where they've long been valued for nutritive and digestive supporting properties. Oranges and lemons brighten everything, and cinnamon, cloves, star anise, peppercorns, bay leaf, add another layer of beneficial plant compounds, warmth, aroma, and flavor. And all of it is submerged in raw apple c***r vinegar where it will stay for at least six weeks while the vinegar extracts flavor and plant constituents.

But wait, cayenne and jalapeños, isn't this stuff crazy hot? Surprisingly, no. If you don't tolerate spicy foods well, don't count yourself out just yet. The finished c***r isn't like biting into a hot pepper. As all of these ingredients infuse together, the heat becomes part of a much more complex flavor, and when the extraction is finished, we'll strain it and blend the infused vinegar 60/40 with raw honey. That honey beautifully balances the acidity and heat, leaving a flavor that is sweet, tart, warming, and surprisingly easy to take. We actually have family members who can't tolerate spicy foods at all, but handle our finished fire c***r very well.

And six weeks from now, we're still not finished. Once we strain these jars, we're not throwing all those beautiful herbs, roots, fruits, and spices away. We'll dehydrate the strained botanicals, grind them, and turn them into our fire c***r tea. We've done this before and it makes a wonderful warming tea. We'll show you that whole process when the time comes. Around here, if something useful can be given another purpose, we'd rather use it than throw it away.

For now, these 10 beautiful gallons are going to sit, steep, and transform. And right about the time cold and flu season is settling in, our fire c***r will be ready.

If you'd like first dibs on this batch, let us know in the comments or send us a message. We're starting a list now. We made 10 gallons, but judging by how much interest we've already seen in our handmade products, we're not assuming that's too much.

Six weeks and counting!