Anybody heard of Black Belt manure tea?

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I wonder as to the history behind this Manure tea, http://al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/xml/story.ssf/html_standard.xsl?/base/news/102456451543190.xml

Black Belt manure tea makers say brew cures what ails you 06/20/02 TOM GORDON News staff writer Excerpt from article: “The manure-based tea is called Many Weed because the chips contain grasses and weedy growths on which the cows commonly graze. But it has other ingredients that improve its taste.

When Mary Surles prepared her recent batch of the brew, she spread a white cloth on a plastic table covering. On that cloth she placed and moistened two large, dried manure chunks, two lemons with their tops and bottoms removed, several dried stalks of a common silver-green plant known as rabbit tobacco, and added a cup of honey.

After knotting the cloth about seven times to form a sack, she lowered the sack into the boiling water of the saucepan and the clear water immediately turned brown. As the boiling continued for several minutes, she added nine Halls honey lemon cough drops. Vicks drops, she said, would have been better. And a little corn liquor would have been a plus as well.”

-- BC (desertdweller44@yahoo.com), June 24, 2002

Answers

I would be concerned about disease transmission of parasites,e-coli & salmonella bacteria. If eating improperly cooked meats can be unhealthy and in my opinion this tea would be even more likely to harbor disease. I could be wrong but better to be cautious than really sick or dead. Many of the old time remedies do work, there's people in my area that every spring make up mayapple tea for a tonic. Mayapple is also known as American mandrake and can have serious effects on the digestive system & more, but the people who've used it there whole lives don't seem to have any trouble while newcomers get pretty sick when they try it. KA

-- Kathy Aldridge (beckoningwinds@yahoo.com), June 24, 2002.

I wouldn't want it. But my Grandaddy said moonshiners used to add horse turds to their mash for "flavor" :>)

-- Jay Blair in N. AL (jayblair678@yahoo.com), June 27, 2002.

I was just reading in an article last night that when Nicholas Culpeper translated the "London Pharmacopoeia" into English, he also named the exotic "pharmaceuticals" the Royal College had been prescribing. Thirteen kinds of dung, including dog and sheep, were in this list.

-- Bren (wayoutfarm@skybest.com), June 27, 2002.

UGH ! ! !

-- Granny Hen (Cluckin Along@cs.com), June 28, 2002.

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