Mad About Herbs

I guess if you’re visiting this website you are thinking about or have started to grow some herbs. If you’re still not sure growing herbs is for you, here are a few good reasons that you may not have thought of yet that show how useful, fun and versatile growing herbs can be:

• Herbs are easy to grow, suffer from few pests and diseases and are deocrative but also good to eat with many nutritional benefits!
• Many are perennials, which come up year after year without much work from you and will supply you with many years of beauty and a variety of uses ranging from culinary to medicinal, skincare and crafts and you don’t need masses of space to grow them.
• They create a visual and aromatic feast for your senses. Many herbs have beautiful flowers and wonderful uplifting scents.
• You can use your garden to provide herbs which are really best fresh, e.g basil, chives, marjoram, rosemary, tarragon and thyme, borage, salad burnet, chervil, coriander, scented geraniums, lemon balm, lemon verbena, nasturtiums, savory, sorrel and violets.
• Save money by growing your own culinary herbs and use them to create mouth-watering dishes for you and your family.
• Free herb plants. Once your herbs are established you will be able to propagate your own herbs for your garden or to give away or sell.
• Herbs will attract wildlife: bees, butterflies and other beneficial insects. This means that they can be used for companion planting in your vegetable garden to boost yields, attract beneficial insects and deter pests.
• You can grow your own herbal first aid kit. You could make your own tinctures, infusions, decoctions and salves. Just a few herbs will help you treat yourself for minor ailments, e.g. bites/stings - just rub plantain leaf or basil leaves onto your skin. Gargle with sage tea when you have a sore throat or rinse your mouth with sage tea when you have a mouth ulcer. Sip some fennel or peppermint tea to aid digestion. If you want to make a few remedies, I can recommend the Herbal Medicine Making Kit supplied by Learning Herbs. You can read more about it or purchase it  here or watch this 3 minute video of someone making the salve from the kit here.
• You can make your own skincare products: you’ll be able to make your own infused oils for use in ointments, creams or make your own hair rinses.
• A number of herbs aid digestion e.g. fennel tea, peppermint tea. Chewing on fennel seeds can help reduce appetite if you are trying to lose weight.
• Herbs enhance your health e.g. garlic for the immune system and a heart protector. Lavender, lemon balm or chamomile can help calm or aid sleep when drunk in tea.
• Make your own herbal teas with fresh or dried herbs that you’ve grown.
• Use herbs for your pets to help treat minor ailments.
• Fresh lemon balm leaves make a wonderfully calming tea.
• If you are a cat owner, they’ll love catnip and valerian planted in your garden.
• Make your own herb jellies, vinegars and oils.
• Create your own potpourri.
• Plant beautiful and useful herb containers for you and your friends and family.
• Use cut herb plants or flowers for flower arrangements in the home.
• Relieve stress by gardening; it is a fantastically relaxing and grounding activity.

What have I missed? What’s your favourite uses for herbs/what brings you the most joy?

This blog post is intended to inform and entertain. You should not use herbs in place of your normal medical care or take them with current prescriptions or medicines without first obtaining professional advice by consulting a trained medical practitioner or qualified herbalist. Herbs should not be taken whilst pregnant or breastfeeding without checking with your medical practitioner first.

{ 4 comments }

Contrary to popular belief, growing herbs in a shady area of the garden is possible, some of them will even thrive in it. The list below is an excerpt from my forthcoming e-book.

Here are a few herbs that will tolerate a shady position in the garden:

• Comfrey - this is an invasive herb so choose your spot carefully, it is a very leafy dense herb so good for ground cover. It has lovely flowers too that the bees love. Comfrey is a very versatile and therefore a useful herb to have in the garden or near a vegetable patch.  The leaves can be used as a compost activator and you can also use the leaves to make a good liquid feed although the smell will not be pleasant when brewing!  Leaves left in between rows of vegetables will add nutrients to the soil and also apparently attract slugs away from your crops (haven’t tested this yet). Comfrey leaves have healing properties so are great to have around to use to make comfrey oil or ointments.
• Lemon Balm  and Mints - these will tolerate shade and most mints are also happy in damp shade as well.
• Coriander - The most common problem with this herb is that it goes to seed too quickly, one way of slowing this down (apart from making sure you choose the right variety in the first place) is to grow it in the garden in a shady/semi-shady position.
• Parsley.
• Sweet Woodruff - this one is good for ground cover and has pretty little white flowers in the spring.
• Sweet Violet - usually found growing at the edge of woodland, under hedges or shrubs.
• Lungwort - another pretty plant with speckled leaves and purple/pink flowers (see photo above).
• Wild Strawberry - these will supply you with vanilla flavoured tiny strawberries and send out runners absolutely everywhere!
• Box - a traditional hedging plant.
• Primrose.
• Chives - a useful herb to have.
• Angelica.
• Lily of the Valley - n.b poisonous.
• Sweet Cicely - great with rhubarb to counter acidity and reduce the quantity of sugar needed in recipes.
• Chervil.

Feel free to leave a comment below to let me know what other herbs you have successfully grown in shady conditions.

{ 2 comments }

Last weekend I enjoyed two fabulous days on Aromantic’s Natural Skin Care Courses  which are run by the very knowledgeable owner; Kolbjorn Borseth.  He is a man on a mission to reveal the secrets of how natural cosmetics and skin care products are made, empower you to make your own at home, affordably, ethically and naturally, he provides up to date information on the natural raw materials and aims to help as many people as possible with their different skin conditions and problems. You can find out more from his website here.

I attended the Beginner’s day and Intermediate day. Having learnt so much and being inspired by it all I have even booked myself onto the Advanced Day course in a few months time. There are many more courses that cover specific products or theory in more depth including the cosmetic legal regulations when making your own products to sell.

There is a lot of information to take in during each day and you then realise that you are learning just the basics and that you can go much deeper into the raw material properties, methods used, product variations etc.

The basic format was to learn about the theory first, then make a product in groups (four in each group for this particular course), then a question and answer session was held on that particular product.

On Day One we learnt about the raw materials used in skincare products, then we made creams, shampoo,  aloe vera gel, eye gel and lip balms. We could experiment with different essential oil blends for many of the products.

On Day Two we learnt about various methods of treating eczema including how to balance acid and alkaline foods in our diets to help prevent various ailments/diseases -this was a fascinating topic. We also covered how to use herbs to treat eczema including how to make a compress which was actually demonstrated on one of the course participants who had eczema. We then went on to make two types of cream; one to treat ‘dry’ eczema and one for ‘weepy’ eczema. After lunch, we made face cleansers and face masks using green, red and white clays. We then made two types of eye gel and some hair conditioner.  Phew!

The photos above shows all the different products we made over the two days: shampoo for dry hair, shampoo for oily hair, conditioner, 4 lip balms, aloe vera gel, dry skin cream (2 pots), eye gel, vitamin A cream (for dry eczema), active cream for eczema, green, pink, whie clay face masks, eye gel, chamomile eye gel.

So far I’ve tried out the shampoo and conditioner which were great, the dry skin cream and eye gel and I can’t wait to have a go at making some fizzy bath bombs, liquid soap and lots more!

My aim is to replace all the shop bought toiletries with my own homemade ones, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now I know even more about some of the potentially damaging/ineffective constituents they contain.

If you’re interested in this topic or want me to post more about this area, feel free to leave a comment below or let me know what in particular you’d like to know/are interested in.

{ 2 comments }

My new hop plant seems to be settling in well into the herb garden. I’m training it to grow up and over the arbour to create some cover and shade. This variety is a dwarf one called Prima Donna but it will be tall enough for this purpose.

I’m looking forward to having some hop flowers next year to dry for use in various craft activities.

I had to buy dried hop flowers this year when I made the hop and lavender pillow featured in the series ‘Grow Your Own Drugs’. It did turn out well and my mum tried it recently and declared she ’slept like a log’. Hops have historically been used to treat insomnia and I have some flowers left over so will be making myself one too with hopefully the same results!

I bought the plant shown above and the dried hop flowers from Essentially Hops, they are great quality.

{ 0 comments }

Just wanted to let you know about a free herb plant and vegetable seed collection on offer from the Guardian newspaper today.

It’s on page 28.  You get five herb plants (parsley, oregano, mint, sage and thyme) plus 5 packets of vegetable seeds (spinach, lettuce, carrots, broccoli and radish.  You just pay the cost of postage and packaging £3.49.

There are also some other plants available if you’re interested, eg  Coleus Canina Scaredy Cat - apparently the scent deters cats - I’ve yet to try this one.

You can order my telephone if you’re interested in ordering at least £10 worth of the other plants on offer. To get the free herb plants I think you need to use the order form in the newspaper.

You can see more photos and details here.

In tomorrow’s Observer you can claim five free tomato plants and fertiliser.

{ 0 comments }

{ 0 comments }

Quick, if you haven’t made any nettle soup yet it’s probably your last chance to search for some young nettle shoots. The photo is of some nettle soup that I made a few weeks ago, it doesn’t look that appetising and could have been blended it bit finer but it tasted delicious. You can read about how I made the soup in 2007 in my post from back then.

This year I tried Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s recipe but without the potatoes because I wanted a lighter soup. You can read an adaptation of this nettle recipe at the Wildfoodie blog or on the River Cottage website here.

Alternatively, you could just stir fry or steam the nettles or add them to a risotto i.e. treat them a bit like spinach leaves. You must make sure they are cooked to avoid any stings though! Oh and you’ll need some rubber or leather gloves when rinsing and preparing them..

Why eat nettles? Well, they are high in iron, magnesium calcium, vitamin B complex, A, C, K and chlorophyll and thus a great spring tonic.

Anyone got any other good nettle recipes?

{ 0 comments }

To celebrate Earth Day perhaps you would like to spend a few moments using your senses to notice and appreciate the wonders of mother nature.

It could be anything from digging your fingers in the earth, listening to the birds singing, walking barefoot on the grass, running your fingers through some herb plants and enjoying the scent, noticing the exquisite beauty of any flowers you see or the vivid green of the new leaves unfurling now.

How about taking some time to enjoy some fresh fruits or vegetables and savouring the taste and texture.

Have a go at sowing some herb, vegetable or flower seeds - there’s a fabulous detailed podcast all about greenhouses and seed sowing over at the Alternative Kitchen Garden (episode 86).

How about starting a herb patch - had to get that in of course! My e-book to help you do just that is coming out really soon…..

If you want some simple ways to save 10 euros and help the earth too, take a look at this video for some ideas:  http://tinyurl.com/cxoqne.

Hope you have a wonderfully sensual day!

Have you guessed what the herb in the second photo is yet?

Feel free to leave your answers or comments about how you are celebrating earth day below.

{ 2 comments }

The mother’s day craft activity that I recently created for the ichild website is now available here:

http://www.ichild.co.uk/activities/crafts/painting-plant-pots-new.php

Hope you like it.

If you’re interested in the more detailed instructions to expand the activity for older children just drop me a line or leave a comment below.

Please also note that the pot shown is for short term use - you’ll need a larger pot for your herbs to thrive in the long term or you’ll need to plant them in the garden depending on which herb it is.

{ 1 comment }