RICHMOND -- For 60 years, whenever Harold Brown found himself with poison ivy or other skin rash, he used the sweet fern his grandfather showed him to make the itching and rash go away.

Last year, after years of giving it away, he decided to make a business out of sharing his cure, which he harvests wild and packages at his home just down the road from the Richmond dairy farm of his boyhood.

"This is what we used growing up," to treat poison ivy, Brown said. "It's an old Native American medicine. It works great. It stops the itch in a couple of hours and stops the rash in a couple of days."

His Nature's Poison Ivy Cure is now available in 105 stores in New England, and customers from across the country have found the product through www.naturespoisonivycure.com. He said he's shipped it as far as California.

Though the 70-year-old Brown was a farmer most his life, his product grows in the wild. He harvests it in Richmond and just about anywhere else he can find it.

"It grows many places," Brown said. "I find it wherever I can. Anywhere I don't get shot at."

Users boil the sweet fern -- its scientific name is comptonia peregrina -- for 15 to 20 minutes, let it cool, strain the leaves away and collect the liquid. Brown recommends applying the cooled liquid to the affected skin four to five times a day with a clean cloth or paper towel.

James Duke, a botanist, retired U.S. Department of Agriculture official and author of "The Green Pharmacy" and "Dr. Duke's Essential Herbs," writes that comptonia peregrina has been found to be effective in treating poison ivy in his "Dr. Duke's Phytochemical and Ethnobotanical Databases."

The plant is not actually a fern, it is more of a shrub, Brown said. It is a member of the wax myrtle, or bayberry, family.

Karen Purinton, owner of Harvest Time Natural Foods in Augusta, said the store sells a lot of Nature's Poison Ivy Cure and customers say it works.

"It's wonderful stuff, and it's easy to do," she said. "It's not a new cure, Native Americans have been using sweet fern for a long time. It works."

Harold Brown is his company's only employee and, if the business continues to grow as it has, he said he may have to get help, likely from family -- he has five children and 10 grandchildren.

He dries and packages the sweet fern -- the product's lone ingredient -- in the sun on the enclosed porch of his Beedle Road home. He advertises the product as 100 percent organic.

"Unless I put a light on, I don't even use any electricity, I guess," Brown said, smiling.

Brown said he also uses his cure on any other rashes or sores he gets.

And he said a customer told him it works on pets, too, relieving the itching of hot spots on dogs, for example, so the animal stops scratching at the spot, allowing it to heal.

He said that, about a year ago, he went out looking for stores to carry his product, though he's picked up some stores at trade shows.

He said he spent more money than he made initially, but business is picking up.

Deliveries are made by mail or in person. Last week, he drove a route along U.S. Route 1 between Wiscasset and Belfast to deliver to several stores that sell his product.

One of the stores had a single box of it left. The others were sold out.

"I haven't been on 'Oprah' yet," he joked. "But it seems to be picking up. People are finding it."

Keith Edwards -- 621-5647

kedwards@centralmaine.com