Potassium and Its Uses as a Health Tonic

By D. C. Jarvis

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473358300

Book preview

Potassium and Its Uses

The more one observes that the principles and applications of Vermont folk medicine are interchangeable among all living things, the more one is impressed by the underlying importance of potassium as a common treatment agent. The different remedies prescribed in Vermont folk medicine are but different ways of presenting the body with potassium. Green leaves, plant and tree buds, tree barks, plant roots, fruits of the grape vine, cranberry bush (whereas cranberries grow in bogs on Cape Cod, in Vermont they grow on bushes) and apple tree all are sources of potassium.

In humans and animals alike, the body definitely wants potassium and if necessary will go to great lengths to get it. Take children for an example. It does not always please mothers when children eat dirt, but perhaps that is because they do not realize that instinctively children find the potassium needed for their bodily growth in the dirt.

A horse will chew the wood of his stall because the wood contains potassium. Put a section of tree limb in the manger for him to chew on, and he will stop chewing his stall. Calves will not chew the wood of their pens if apple cider vinegar is added to their drinking water. If cows are fed ocean kelp they will leave off licking their iron stanchions.

In the course of my interest in potassium as a means to winning the contest between bacteria and body cells, I applied potassium associated with other minerals to the soil in my flower garden. I had used potassium each year but then it occurred to me that what I was using lacked the associated minerals found with potassium in Nature.

Barre, Vermont, being the largest granite-cutting center in the world, I decided to try adding granite dust which, as it comes from the dust-removing device, is fine, like flour. Granite dust contains 5 per cent of potassium, and has associated with it sixteen minerals. When I applied it to the soil around my garden plants, a number of things happened.

Among my flowers, I have 125 plants of delphinium. Each year I had been having to combat a tiny mite which caused the leaves to curl up and turn black. These harmful mites were so small that I had to use a magnifying glass in order to see them crawling on the leaves. I used a spray but it did not do away with them. When I added the granite dust to the soil around the plants, these harmful mites deserted my garden and have not returned.

It has not been necessary to spray my collection of 60 rose bushes since I began applying the granite dust to them in the spring, midsummer, and fall. I have come to the conclusion that potassium alone is not as effective in producing results as potassium with associated minerals, some of which must activate the potassium.

Vermont folk medicine holds potassium to be the most important mineral, in fact the key mineral in the constellation of minerals. It is so essential to the life of every living thing that without it there would be no life. Nature has flung it about with such prodigality that one may say it is among the most generously and widely distributed of all the tissue minerals. Yet, notwithstanding its diffusion over the whole earth, the mineral potassium never occurs in a free state. It is never found pure, but always in combination with an acid.

Here in Vermont the topsoil is poor in potassium. Minerals in the soil hitchhike in the vegetation grown on the soil, in order to gain entrance to the body in animals and human beings eating land-grown foods. When one or more minerals are lacking in the soil, they are lacking in the food grown in that soil. When mineral-deficient food is eaten, the cells of the body are cheated of needed minerals on which they depend for balanced cell action. A disturbance