Mugwort

Mugwort is an herb used for lucid dreaming. It helps to sleep better, and it also helps with memory. It is useful for anxiety and depression. If you work with hypnagogia for creative problem solving, wake induced lucid dreams, and out of body experiences, you can make a tea or smoke mugwort. All the parts of the plant have active ingredients, including the flowers and stems. The best time to harvest is when it is flowering. I read that you can even wait to fall and collect the roots to use. Two years in a row I bought a seed packet (https://strictlymedicinalseeds.com/) and last year I started too soon. This year I waited a lot longer and now my cotyledon leaves are showing. Mugwort grows wild in a lot of places, but this way I will see it up close and learn what it looks like in all stages. It could be all over and I still won't see it until I see it for the first time. I want to fill a large jar with plant material and make an extract. There should be a way to do this that doesn't depend on alcohol, which I would prefer to avoid. As it turns out, I like dried mugwort leaves for tea. So maybe I will just go that route.
 

Used to use the oil on a pillow when going to sleep.

Mugwort does not grow everywhere here. If you are searching for mugwort here you have to search for heavy congregations of geese. I can't comment on Iowa flora but here mugwort follows gaggles of geese because the geese strip the grasses down to nothing and the rhizomes eventually die. Without the competition of rhizomes and heavy nutrient load of the goose droppings you'll get mugwort. Dandelion would take hold if the conditions were drier and more nutrient poor. From personal observation I think mugwort fills a somewhat similar niche as that of dandelion. So there is a compaction factor that lends itself to where mugwort will or will not grow. Geese will not touch it so just go to the park. Find the goose poop. Find the mugwort. 

My first problem is that I don't know what mugwort looks like, but I don't see a lot of dandelions, either. There are a lot of parks in town and some of them have creeks or ponds. Every day I cross the Iowa River to get to work and there is a bike path that goes a couple miles along the river. So plenty of geese. Getting mugwort seed and starting it so I know what it looks like seemed like a good idea. This way I can stop buying it online.
 

i searched for mugwort with google images and after seeing pics i know i`ve seen it growing here in the northeast. i just can`t remember exactly where it was. i  will keep an eye out for it. 

Some of my mugwort seed went into pots and some I scattered around the apartment building where I live in areas they don't tend to mow very well. There were two pots in front of my apartment door on the second floor walkway. The first pot was dug in, but they left the main larger one alone. That one started sprouting and the plants got to the stage of having two pairs of true leaves show up when the digging was repeated. I have one plant left and I don't know if it will live. In a couple months I will look up mugwort pictures online and see if I can find it around the building, but I really wanted it right in front where I could easily see it and learn what the leaves look like at all stages. And when it would start to flower. It is just so disappointing to learn that I can't have plants in yet another apartment building.