Herbal Medicine
New Year
After breaking my wrist in the summer of 2012 which impacted on allotment life through to the Autumn, and after the wettest Summer and Autumn that I can remember, followed by an extremely busy Christmas with a house full of lovely people, it is about time I got back to the allotment.
I visited today, managing to squeeze an hour in to eat my breakfast and drink my hot herb tea [I have a kettle and hob in my shed!] before the rain fell. All I managed to do was pull up the dead stems from last years Calendula, and mourn over my Spring cabbage – all 30 plants have been eaten by slugs and/or snails, razed to the ground by terrestrial gastropod molluscs.
This year I shall just sow flowers and medicinal herbs and buy in greens from Asda, unless someone, somewhere can tell me how to protect my veggies. BTW, I did put down slug pellets, the non-organic blue ones, loads of them….
I also need to construct, or get someone else to construct, some staging in my greenhouse. This is the time to to sow early seeds, and I have a greenhouse up and glazed, but no shelves or tables to work on or keep seed trays on.
The road to my allotment on a sunny day.
Plasters/Poultices
Apart from simple compresses where clean cloths are soaked in medicinal herbal infusions and applied to the skin, it is sometimes beneficial to have a mass of herbal product laid against the skin for 10-30 mins to help heal bruises, reduce inflammations or ease painful joints.
I am making poultices at the moment to help reduce the swelling of tissues behind an arthritic knee. This treatment doesn’t cure the arthritis but may help ease the pain and increase the movement a little. I usually make a pack of three, each poultice can be used for three days twice a day, rolled back up and put in the fridge after each use. I tell the patient to warm them up in the microwave before use then carefully wrap around the leg with the herb resting against the swelling, then rest with the leg elevated for 10 minutes if the poultices contains mustard powder, or 30 minutes if it is just linseed and/or slippery elm.
These are easy to make at home with some clean old sheeting cut into strips. You need about 60gms each of fresh ground Linseed, and slippery elm powder. You mix the linseed and slippery elm then add enough hot boiled water to make a paste which you spread on the strip of cloth. The photos below show how it’s done. I roll them up with cling film so they keep clean and don’t stick or leak. The cling film is removed when the poultices need to be used. The strip of cotton is long enough to be folded over to cover top and bottom, like a linseed sandwich…
Linseed & slippery elm paste spread on the cloth
- Cloth folded over and pressed down
- Covered with cling film
- Rolling up….
Elderflowers and Elderberries…
Elderberries in bloom
- Elderflower close up
By the side of the Taunton-Bridgwater Canal path you can find an abundance of medicinal herbs. Near West Street you can get down to the Canal path, and up until recently there was a beautiful Elder bush which always was loaded with fragrant flowers in the spring time, then later carried bushels of dark purple berries. This year two herbalist colleagues came down from London to help me harvest a few baskets of the flowers which I dried for tea, and made into tinctures.
When I returned in the Autumn to harvest some berries to make into Winter Tonic with cinnamon and cloves, someone had cut the bush down, right to the ground. Although I was disappointed, I knew there were more bushes towards the junction with Taunton Road, but walking along the Canal path all the bushes had a very very poor crop of berries. So far I have only managed to gather enough to make four 200mls of the Winter Tonic, but my its so good I have to restrain the children from drinking it. If you would like the recipe, please email me.
Scroll down to see how we did it….
Elderberries plucked from their stalks
I strip all the berries from their stalks with a fork or a snazzy little berry picker I bought in Finland where, like Norway, they gather a lot of berries and make jams and stuff.
Then I weigh the berries and bring them up to a boil before simmering them with some sugar.
Weighed and ready to boil
Simmering the berries
The simmering will reduce the liquid by about a third, so it is rich and gloopy. Then we have to strain out the berries before we heat again with some cinnamon and cloves thrown in.
Straining the berries
After the straining, we put the berries in some muslin and squash through a press to extract all the juice.
Pressing the berries
Then we add the cinnamon and cloves and simmer a while longer before pouring into bottles and labelling.
Eh voila!
Straining out the berries
After we strain the berries, we simmer the reduced liquid with cinnamon sticks and a handful of cloves.
Hot sterilized bottles waiting to be filled
June Activity
So, I added pics of making tincture with Dandelion leaves in May.
Cleavers [Galium aperine]
The first photo is of the freshly picked cleavers twisted round in a bowl. Cleavers are long and sticky, and it’s sometimes hard to just break off the top half of the shoots and leave the yellow bottom leaves and roots in the ground. I usually take a pair of heavy-duty kitchen scissors with me and just cut off at a certain place down the stem.
You don’t try and remove the twirls of leaves, you chop it all up stems and all.
After you have chopped it up roughly then you need to blend it so it cuts down
Chopped Cleavers
finer, or you will not be able to get enough menstruum around it.
The herb doesn’t need to go too long in the blender, and don’t put in too much at once.
When you have comminuted the herb then press into jar and fill with vodka. Though I use a 96% ethanol mixed with water to make a 25-30% strength menstruum.
Always label the jar with the herb type, date and strength of alcohol, together with ratio of herb to menstruum and ideally place gathered and state [fresh or dried].
Cleavers herb in jar and labelled
The messy aftermath…
Tincture Making
It’s was about time.
I had bought the alcohol.
I had read the books.
And to be fair, I had been taught how to do it at Uni.
But out in the community, on my own, I never quite mustered the courage to go out and pick herbs and tranform them into my own tinctures. Instead, I have been buying them in from herbal medicine suppliers, [yes, there are such things...].
A tincture is a form of herbal medicine. You get the herb, put it in a mix of alcohol and water to extract medicinal constituents, leave it for a couple of weeks, then strain and bottle.
I chose dandelion leaf [Taraxacum officinale folia] from my garden lawn. I knew there had been no pesticides sprayed, we have no cats or dogs, and to be fair – it’s just beyond my patio….
I picked 200g of the fresh leaf. This is what it looks like;
You have to pick it over, take out bugs, check for blemishes, and generally ‘garble’, as James Green says in ‘The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook’ .
So, I sorted it out carefully
and snipped the end stalks off.
And then I weighed it…
Next step was to snip it up small. This would have taken all morning with a pair of kitchen scissors, so I fed it through my Kitchen Aid blender handful by handful:
This was quicker, but still took a while.
each load of leaves was comminuted
[useful word, look it up]
into a small amount at the bottom.
Until eventually, I had a bowl full of fresh, lush green-ness!
So then, I measured the alcohol. 25% ethanol with 75% water.
Put the mashed herb in a clean jar,
poured in the menstruum [that's the water and alcohol mix]
shook it about and sealed it up
And there, my friends, you have it.
This jar will sit in a dark place for 2 weeks.
I will give it a little shake every now and then, to mix it up.
And then, I will strain it and bottle it.
If I remember, I will take pics and post them up.
If you want to try using herbs, buy these 3 books!
1. Wild Drugs by Zoe Hawes [available from Amazon]
2. Practical Herbs by Henriette Kress [available from her website www.henriettesherbal.com]
3. ’The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook’ by James Green [available from Amazon]
Progress!
Lots of plants waiting to go to the allotment
So, been busy [daughter married and all], but some things have been done.
First, we have a greenhouse – presently in bits in my garden – but still…
Secondly, we have a shed – presently in bits on the allotment – but still…
We have dug over a vast expanse of the site. Well, my husband dug and I watched. Also helped by my lovely Henry [12].
About a couple of weeks ago I put in Potatoes, Onions, and Peas!
And a week before that I planted Raspberries!
Therefore, all in my garden would be lovely – except a lot of my little plants got eaten by SLUGS. So we have strewn eggshells round the most recent plantings and will see how we get on.
Before the slugs
'Resting' before being planted
Growing Medicine 3
Junk and Weeds!
This is looking from the top of the plot, looking down to the East, on a very hazy morning. My heart sank a little when I took in the 9 tyres, plastic sheeting and weeds. Not to mention that the whole site had been compressed after Wessex Water had been in with their equipment and dug a new hole for drainage [or summat]. Anywho, just look at the mess….
The nicely dug area at the back of the centre photo is nothing to do with me, that’s the next plot with the grass path between. At some stage one person had both plots and grew Tay berries right across both plots spanning the path. I have to begin to demarcate my edges as the path has merged with the weeds almost everywhere so I am not sure where my allotment ends and the paths begin. So, first job was mark the boundary:
Marking the Boundary
This is the right edge of my plot with the path separating me from the plot of a very helpful young man from Yorkshire… This doesn’t look like much, but it took me ages.
All mine!
I got a chair out, [borrowed from a neighbour] and proudly bashed in my plot marker for all to see. Actually, the view from my allotment is lovely. Take a peek.
Nice!
Hills in the distance
Not bad, eh?
The View
Growing Medicine 2
The Plot Develops
The plot that my friend and I share has been dug over and planted with a lot of soft fruit and flowers. My friend was given a green house that was erected near the base of the plot. My own little area was planted with some herbs, but during planting I heard that I had been given my very own allotment, so I dug them all up again! The photo above shows my space after I removed my Ladies Mantle, Joe Pie Weed, garlic etc etc. the children were very quick to plant some more stuff. I think that’s a cherry tree gone in there…
From the South
And above you can see the whole plot looking up from the South.
My friend’s children have been frequent visitors to the allotment and take a keen interest in what is being planted.
Below is their progress.
Planting rows of fruit bushes
You can see their little footprints all over the place, but I think here we have raspberries and gooseberries. This is quite a transformation from what the plot looked like when they first took it over. You couldn’t see the soil for the weeds. Which is kind of where I’m at at the moment. OK, so they have plot 39, and I have been given plot 14 which is waaaay over there to the left.
My plot is going to have a page all to itself, so click out then click back in…..
Growing Medicine
The Beginnings
OK, so having a website called Growing Medicine refers to two things.
1. The medicine I give my patients grows. It has been a living, photosynthesizing, independent fresh plant. Full of natural goodness, as they say. Vitamins, minerals, secondary metabolites….all there in the various parts being made, ready and waiting to be used.
This is in stark contrast to the medicine produced by Big Pharma; synthetic chemicals produced in a factory.
2. I intend to actually grow some of my medicine myself. Lots of the stuff I use I buy in from specialist herbal suppliers, especially anything exotic or difficult to grow.
Lots of stuff I can pick freely from the fields, woods and canal path near my home. This includes Meadowsweet, Nettle, Cleavers, Elderflower, Elderberry, Hawthorn, White Dead Nettle, Comfrey, Yarrow, Ground Ivy, Ribwort…
But some stuff is elusive, like Marigold, Self Heal, Violets, St John’s Wort, Scullcap, Chamomile, Goldenrod, Boneset and more. Last week I was offered a share in an allotment and I didn’t need to be asked twice. I have my key to the gate of the plot, and went there today after lunch cleverly getting the timing right as the sun went in behind the clouds and the driving rain whipped the back of my head just as I started to dig.
The whole plot is a mess…
Dismal Plot
…so you can see it is quite a task. This is my end [above] where the compost will go. I have dug out a small 6′ x 3′ area ready to put cardboard on and cover with ‘soil improver’ from the local council at £10 a ton. I will lay this to a depth of 6″ then put in out my little herb plants when they have started to grow.
I have sent off a big order to www.poyntzfieldherbs.co.uk who specialize in medicinal herbal seeds up in Scotland, so I know they should be hardy enough to survive Somerset.
Although I have been University trained in Herbal Medicine, and have been educated in Phytochemistry, Pharmacognosy and Botany etc, I haven’t been told how to grow the plants we use in our medicines.I think it is assumed we will buy them all in as I have been doing. But hopefully soon I will make some lovely fresh tinctures and will have an Open Day when you can drop in and taste some…
The greenhouse at the top of the photo belongs to the next plot up, ours starts where there is a square of freshly dug soil. Anyone with any allotments tips, please feel free to put them in the comments box. I am a novice here…
Long and thin, but all ours!
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