Over at Growing Curious there is a beautiful post about gardening and the impact that gardens have. I don’t need to re-write the whole thing here, or even go into much detail, she spoke what was in my mind so accurately. Here is the essence that I want to have painted up somewhere (maybe the side of the chicken coop…)

“I don’t think it’s possible to raise a garden without being changed by the experience. I have to go out there and water even when I’m grumpy. Sometimes I’ll be watering the tomatoes and realize that those big, succulent leaves on nearby plants aren’t leaves at all but are maybe a hundred cucumbers perfectly ready to be plucked. A discovery like that can change weekend plans.

And I witness death up close — daily.

I’m changed.

It’s hard to have an intellectual discussion about it all. I’ll try to participate in the talk because I do see how the intellectual, political, emotional, physical, social, and cultural layers work together. (There’s plenty of time to think about all of that while weeding.) But I’d much rather take turns meeting in our gardens — talking about big and small things (even political candidates) — while we admire the growth, share strategies, encourage one another.”

Now get out in your gardens! It’s going to go from absolutely gorgeously sunny back to wonderfully rainy this week, and then I hope to give some time to sharing more of my own thoughts of the importance and benefits of working your own dirt. For now, I am off to plant some plants while the sun shines.

Remember the snow covered apple tree of the winter? It’s currently filling the backyard with apple-blossom beauty.

There’s not a lot to report - most the seeds will go in this weekend, and there will be a trip to the farmers’ market to get starts. The hoses will go down, the chicken fence will go up, and then things should really start to roll.

The real garden excitement is our New Chickens! I’m not going to force the many chicken pictures on you here, but you can click on the link for a photo page full of chicken-ness. We are really excited. Already, their poo-covered bedding is bulking up the compost pile. We are looking forward to lots of eggs, some awesome pest control, and good manure for our soil.

Meanwhile, the peas, potatoes, and onions are popping - these pictures are about a week old so there have been inches of growth since they were taken!

So things are growing along, and the garden looks like it will give us a full, rich harvest this year. I love everything about gardening - the dirt under my nails, the ever evolving landscape of the yard (soon to be garden), all the learning that this path provides, the tasty food and potent medicines… It is a daily reminder of blessings and abundance. We will let the apple blossom (that sacred tree of Avalon) close this journal entry.

Well, when the question is write a new blog post or play in my garden… it’s a pretty clear choice. I am trying to keep up with it all, but the garden always takes priority at this time of year. Be patient and great things will be posted as the garden really begins to flourish.

Our celebration of early spring, often concomitant with the Equinox and Easter (some years supplanting organized celebration) is the spring Nettle harvest. We drive out to our Nettle patch - I’m not telling you more about the location than that - and Sam takes a wander/hike while I harvest bags of Nettles.

Nettles? you think. Those evil, stinging weeds that grow in boggy areas?

Those are the ones. Nettles (Urtica spp.) are so nutritious it’s ridiculous. They’re so packed with chlorophyll you can hardly taste anything else. Nettles make a wonderful tea, elegant tincture, and fabulous addition to dinner. We wait all winter for that first plate of steamed Nettles, telling us that spring is truly here and more fresh food will be on our plates soon.

Many people hesitate when I mention eating Nettles because of the stings. Never fear. The stings wilt down with cooking - a light steaming will do the trick. Nettles can be used as a substitute in any recipe that calls for cooked spinach. Spanakopita is particularly lovely, though I find mixing half Nettles and half spinach makes the best result.

Nettles can prevent/reduce kidney infections, will deliver a powerful amount of nutrients (including folic acid!) to the body, clear up allergies (fresh only), and strengthen the bones. And that is a short list of Nettles attributes. It is the rare client I see that doesn’t get a bit of Nettle added to their tea or tincture blend. Nettles are safe for everyone, and highly beneficial throughout pregnancy and while nursing.

We adore Nettles - so much that I gently transplanted some from my favorite wild patch to a little corner of my garden. I’m hoping they go crazy and I can snip a few here and there for an addition to dinners and soups in the early spring. So far my transplants are doing well - they’ve been in almost a month. I hope they spread and fill in well.

The sting of the Nettle helps prevent arthritis when applied to weak joints. This means you have to use the fresh leaf to sting your knee/hand/wrist/shoulder. I sting my wrists several times each spring when I am harvesting and processing this lovely plant. Once the sting has worn off my wrists are feeling much better and stronger. It may be a little unpleasant at first, but not nearly as much as arthritic wrists might be.

Harvest the leafy tops of the Nettle in the early spring, before the plant blooms. What to do after you harvest it?

Cook some up for a healthy helping of greens:

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Pack in freezer bags (we use a FoodSaver, ziplock works too) to use throughout the year:
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Hang them to dry and enjoy a cup of tea from the dried leaves:
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Most of all, enjoy this amazing plant.

For me (and for every herbalist I have ever met) plants are vibrant, unique, sentient beings. Just because something/someone doesn’t move or make noise doesn’t mean it/they aren’t sentient. One of the best conversations I have ever had was with a small willow tree.

That said, The Herbwife wrote a lovely post on her blog about how to sit down and get to know a plant.

The Herbwife’s Kitchen - Introduce Yourself to a Plant This Spring

It doesn’t matter if it is a pea sprout that you planted in your garden, a wild ginger deep in a forest, a blackberry vine invading your yard, or the spider plant in the corner of your living room. All plants want the same respect and appreciation that any living being wants, and the first step is getting to know them as individuals. So check out that blog post and then go find a plant who will soon be your new friend!

Happy Spring.

A two-and-a-half-year old friend has had a deep cough all winter and nothing seems to shake it. Here is what I recommended to her mom this morning.

The Cough:
Wet, spasms, hacking. Seated deep in the little one’s lungs. Persistent.

The Goal:
Soothe and move.

The Recommendation:
A syrup of elderberries and elecampane. There are numerous options here, but I wanted was keeping several things in mind: 1) Safe - both plants I have used extensively with kids without any problems. 2) Effective - this is similar to the formula I have used for whooping cough, so I know it’s going to get things moving. 3) Simple - a mom with a toddler doesn’t have a lot of time to be mixing this, preparing that, and convincing a kid to take yet another spoonful of something. 3) Tasty - no one wants to fight with a kid about their health, so I made it tasty and easy to administer.

The Instructions:
Heat 4 tablespoons dried elderberries, 1 tablespoon dried elecampane root, and 4 cups water in a covered sauce pan. When the mixture boils, turn the heat to medium-low and simmer for 20 minutes. Remove from heat, leave covered, and let steep for many hours (I usually start this right before bedtime and steep it overnight).

Strain off the plant matter and heat the resulting tea slowly on medium-low (keep it covered). When the mixture is warmed through, add 3-5 cups of raw, organic honey, stirring to mix the honey and tea throughly. I add an “equal part” honey - if there are 3 cups of tea I add 3 cups of honey - but more honey will make a thicker syrup, less will make a thinner syrup. Taste it as you add the honey. Your syrup should be very sweet, thick, and deep purple.

Pour syrup into clean bottles and store in the fridge. These instructions should make 6-8 cups of syrup. The honey keeps this preserved for a long time. I don’t know how long, because we use it up fast! Administer it by the spoonful, add to oatmeal, drizzle over ice cream, put it in pie, mix it with other tea. . . you begin to understand how our family can go through 8 cups quickly!

This should shake out a stubborn cough - I recommend taking 2-8 tablespoons daily. Do not give to anyone under 2 due to the raw honey. If you have any concerns or doubts, double check with your favorite herbalist or naturopath.

Enjoy!

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This idea is not intended to treat, prevent, or cure any disease or discomfort, and has not been evaluated by the FDA. I am simply reporting on what I recommended to a friend and what I do for my own family.

by Barbara Kingsolver.
The first step towards filling yourself with vibrant health — before you call your herbalist, your aromatherapist, or even a regular old doctor — is to take back your dinner plate (breakfast, lunch, and snack dishes too!). Eat less packaged foods. Eat more whole, raw, fresh, local foods. And the big one, the one that seems to make a huge difference for everyone who tries it: get involved in your food!

But what does it mean to get involved in your food? It’s not that hard, but takes some practice.

*Grow your own food - things will taste better if you worked for them. Sitting down to a meal in which your labor provided some (or all) of the ingredients just feels good. You will savor every bite.
*Get involved in a local food cooperative. As above, if you are doing some kind of work, or making a donation toward good food/good business, your food will feel better to you. Also, joining up with a co-op gives you an instant community of people who also are interested in good food!
*Shop at your Farmer’s Market. Get to know your farmers. Take a day trip out to farms and see how things grow.

And that is just a taste - the most basic sampling - of the inspiration that Barbara Kinsolver offers in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It is the story of her family’s experiences when they commit to eating what grows on or very near their property. No bananas, no January strawberries, no packaged chips-crackers-similar. They grow and preserve a lot of their own food, including turkeys and chickens. They shop at the farmer’s market. They realize that fruit is sparse in the winter and early spring.

Most importantly, Kingsolver makes this experiment in eating accessible, exciting, and even seem possible for the common person. I know that I came away from this book with a fresh outlook on how much I can grow in the space and time I have. This is an awesome book for those of us already walking a path toward whole food and complete nutrition (away from corporate farming, processed foods, and impersonal grocery stores). I imagine it would be profoundly inspirational for anyone out there who is thinking about checking out a farmer’s market for the first time, or wondering just how much work it is to have a little veggie garden.

I actually can’t think of anyone who shouldn’t read this book.

Check out the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Website!

I once had a friend who was hospitalized with a head injury after a serious bike accident. During the weeks he spent in the hospital while well enough to consume food, the hospital staff was extremely concerned about constipation and a laxative was included in his daily medication regime. Of course constipation is a concern and should not be treated lightly, but his fiancée (also an herbalist) and I nearly had a fit when he would receive his dinner tray – pasta, a milkshake/ice cream thing, milk, and a small serving of extremely processed applesauce. There was no solid source of fiber available, no alternative to the excessive starch, and clearly little thought of good nutrition for a healing body.

Hopefully the point of this brief anecdote does not escape the reader. With good sources of fibers and whole grains, as well as a minimization of dairy, refined sugars, and over-processed food, my friend could have spend less time on the laxative or perhaps avoided it altogether. I find it ironic and sad that the hospital is apparently the last resort for those seeking good nutrition or related information. We can find the majority of nutrients – both macro and micro – in our daily diet if we take the time to consider our eating choices. For that reason, nutrition and diet is often uppermost in my mind when I think about herbalism and alternative medicine. Also, I would rather include medicine in the foods I eat; getting my essential fatty acids by adding some flax seeds to my nerve toning oatmeal, soothing my liver with some burdock in my soup, and pepping up the kidneys with dandelion greens in my salad, for example.

It is my perception that the majority of health problems I am consulted about are not, in actuality, based on a medical condition, but rather on a lack of proper nutrition. Many discomforts that afflict people can be rectified with basic dietary adjustments. Because of this, it seems essential that a primary focus of this blog should be nutrition, the myriad effects that food has on the human body, and how to make our medicines our food.

It is important to realize that we will all be healthier when we have an understanding not only of the positive side of nutrition and other consumables (I use the term consumables because not everything we in the United States eat is actually food) but the negative side of many daily-consumed products. This brings to mind a former client that wants to deal with her weekly migraine, but refuses (even with information) to give up her 2 daily Diet Cokes, laced with migraine-causing aspartame; also the client who discovered through our mutual research that Red #5 could be contributing to her son’s ADD and was pleasantly surprised when the intentional removal of this dye from his diet greatly reduced his symptoms.

A strong working knowledge of nutrition can help anyone understand why their body is not working at peak efficiency, why an illness is hard to shake, or what happens when one eats a diet based on Oreos and strawberry jam. Through education of ourselves we can ultimately find better health as each of us is educated and empowered to take an active role in our own nutrition and therefore our own health. Let each and every one of us take the words of Hippocrates to heart:
“Let food be your medicine and medicine your food.”

Some husbands get their wives clothes, flowers, and other romantic items. Mine, being the thoughtful and wonderfully romantic man that he is, made me a double compost bin out of reclaimed/recycled stuff. This is more romantic than flowers, and in a round-about-way will net me a lot more flowers than he could have bought me anyway.

Isn’t it a lovely compost bin? We plan on putting active compost where you see the small pile of leaves, then covering that and letting it sit and do its dirty magic while we fill the other side. A little turning, a little water, a lot of carbon and nitrogen. Voila. ((Almost)) instant dirt!

It was a big weekend for gardening. The first weekend that we got warm enough to take off our sweaters while weeding, turning, hauling, etcetera. We got a good start on next year’s garden expansion. It doesn’t look like much now, but under the tarp is a sheet of cardboard, a sheet of compost, and a thick layer of leaves. Over the summer heat, that will all breakdown, compost, and otherwise decay. We will then add a layer of dirt and a cover crop such as fava beans, clover, or other similar nitrogen fixing plant. Then early next spring we will dig the cover crop under and have a fun, large, new garden space!

And the growing year is off to a start - the peas are up and the bed of spinach, chard, and leeks looks like it is doing well, though growing more slowly that I would wish. But it has time - it is still 2-3 months before we can put in warmer crops like peppers and tomatoes. So we’ll give the leeks and their friends the time and space to do what they need to do. The fun of the garden is just getting rolling.

Coming soon - a bed for grapes, hyssop, and other lovelies! Stay tuned.

I haven’t done anything to even begin thinking about the blog, a post on Xylitol, or my garden in the past week and a half. What have I been doing? Well, about a week and a half ago, Arthur (17 months) was rubbing his left eye…a lot. We looked close and it was pretty irritated. I washed it with cool Chamomile Tea in hopes it was just a minor irritation. The next morning his eye was glued shut with discharge (ewww!) and the other one had started to turn pink.

Ahhhhh….conjunctivitis (more commonly known as Pink Eye). What would a parent’s life be without it?

There is lots of good, general information out there about this pernicious childhood ailment. From WebMD:
Pinkeye (also called conjunctivitis) is redness and swelling of the conjunctiva, the mucous membrane that lines the eyelid and eye surface. The lining of the eye is usually clear. If irritation or infection occurs, the lining becomes red and swollen.

I’ve had it several times (this happens when one does childcare) and it is awful. It feels like a layer of sand is covering your eyeball.

Luckily, there are lots of easy, natural remedies.

Note that none of my remedies are antibiotics, so the person will be contagious until the eyes clear. If you or your child must continue attending school/daycare/work, please consider getting a prescription antibiotic so you don’t spread this around!

Some basics - the best way to not get pinkeye is to wash your hands, be extremely vigilant about touching your eyes, and wash your eyes with your remedy of choice as often as you wash the infected eyes. Don’t wipe the eye-goobers and then put the rag in your pocket - take it straight to the laundry! Wash pillowcases, towels, sheets, etc. as frequently as you can. Consider you and your child quarantined for the duration. If you have to go out (grocery store, etc.) keep your child in a carrier, or put mittens on bigger children, and don’t let them touch anything in the store. Other parents thank you for this. Call anyone your child has spent time with the couple of days prior to the outbreak and let those people know to rinse their eyes just in case.

That said. Are you still nursing? Fresh breast milk used as eye-drops is an excellent (and ancient) pinkeye cure. Squirt it on your child’s eyes, your partner’s eyes, and your eyes if you can.

A mild case can be cleared up with Chamomile Tea used as an eyewash. This is safe enough for anyone and I don’t think you could over use it.

We used (and really loved) a concoction recommended by another Mom.

1 cup boiling water
1/4 cup Calendula Flowers
1 tsp. sea salt

Make a strong (20-30 min.) infusion of the Flowers and Sea Salt. Wash eyes, apply with a dropper, or soak using an eye-cup - 4-6 times a day.

When making any herbal eyewash you want to strain the infusion through a coffee filter to make sure there are no small, irritating particles in the wash. Apply with worn cotton/flannel rags that will be mostly lint-free. Be patient - pink eye takes 5 to 9 days to clear.

But here’s hoping that you never need to know this!