Some teachers hand you a theory. Walt Cross hands you a poultice. A lifestyle educator from the Tennessee mountains, Cross spent years as a healthcare administrator, a lifestyle-center director, and even a fire chief and emergency medical responder before turning full-time to teaching families the old, simple ways of caring for the body. Today he and his family run The Mustard Seed, a health food store and lifestyle education center in Newport, Tennessee, and he travels to churches and camp meetings across the country with a message he calls the Old Mountain Remedies.
His starting point will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time on this site: the eight simple agencies of health — good food, exercise, water, sunshine, temperance, fresh air, rest, and trust in God. Cross holds that the Creator has scattered gentle helps for the body all around us, many of them growing along the nearest fence line, and that an ordinary kitchen can double as a medicine cabinet for life's everyday complaints.
The herb cabinet, A to Z
The heart of his teaching is a lecture series he calls The Herb Cabinet — a patient, alphabetical walk through dozens of healing plants, from alfalfa all the way to wild lettuce. For every herb he asks the same four questions: which part of the plant do you use, what does it do, which complaints is it traditionally used for, and what precautions go with it. That last question matters to him as much as the first three — his lectures are as frank about cautions as they are warm about benefits, and that balance is exactly what we aim for on every remedy page here.
Many of the herbs on our own shelves appear in his cabinet: chamomile for restless nights and earaches, cornsilk for gout, milk thistle for the liver, ginkgo for memory, oat straw for sleep, olive leaf for shingles and eczema, and wild lettuce — the humble roadside plant he saves for the very end — as a gentle evening calmer. Wherever his teaching touches a remedy we carry, you'll now find a small 🏔️ Old Mountain Remedies note on that page, with a link to the lecture it comes from.
Kitchen medicine
Alongside the herbs runs his kitchen-remedy track: mustard plasters, charcoal and raw-potato poultices, onion poultices, castor oil packs, and a wound care standby that may surprise you — clean pine sap, the same resin the tree uses to seal its own wounds. He teaches the handcraft, too: the four kinds of herbal poultice, fomentations made with juices, oils, or herbal teas, the difference between an infusion and a decoction, and how to put up alcohol-free glycerin extracts at home.
A few of his recipes are specific enough to pass along whole. For gout, his pair is tart cherry juice and celery seed. And for anyone fighting free of tobacco, he mixes a quarter cup of honey, three-quarters of a cup of lemon juice, and a third of a teaspoon of peppermint essential oil — a small sip whenever a craving hits. He is quick to say the most important ingredient in that battle is prayer.
An honest word
As with every voice we feature, we pass his teaching through the same honesty rules that govern the rest of this site. A handful of his stronger claims are sitting in our review queue rather than on our pages, and nothing here is a promise of cure — these are gentle, time-tested supports, meant to work alongside your doctor, never instead of one. Where his remedies appear in our rankings, his endorsement counts exactly the way any respected source's does — openly, as explained on our How We Rank page.
Where to watch
- The Herb Cabinet series (poultices, teas, tinctures, essential oils, and herbs A to Z) — free on Amazing Discoveries TV.
- Old Mountain Remedies (kitchen cures, immune support, stress, foods that heal) — also on Amazing Discoveries TV.
- The Mustard Seed (themustardseed.us) — his family's lifestyle education center in Newport, Tennessee.
If his teaching blesses you, give the remedies he loves a thumbs-up where they help — that's how honest experience rises here.