Chamomile blooms right around the height of the sun’s arc, beginning before the summer solstice in the Northeast
Thoughts of chamomile seem apropos of the moment. Calming and helpful with digestion and anxiety, chamomile is, in its small but lovely way, an antidote to the fever pitch of the news this summer.
It’s easy to grow, not picky, not overly flashy or showy; in fact its a bit ordinary. All it asks for is a sunny spot and a bit of water during a dry spell. In return it gives a profusion of cheerful blossoms all summer long that you can snip and dry for tea or put into alcohol to tincture for the same benefits. Simple, lovely.
chamomile grows alongside roses and peonies in my garden, giving me cheerful blooms all summer.
Wishing everyone a bit of sunny calm today on the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.
That last piece of leftover pie I had for breakfast this morning left me thinking “I need a cup of peppermint tea.” Too many sweets over the last few days has taken a toll.
I drink peppermint tea whenever my stomach’s unhappy. Peppermint, the binomial name is Mentha piperita, is known to have other health benefits but it’s enough for me that that it tastes great and soothes my stomach. It’s fabulous after dinner with honey (and maybe even a dollop of cream) for a sweet treat, too.
To make it:
Boil water
Pop a peppermint tea bag into a mug of the boiling water.
Cover the tea – this keeps those volatile oils in your teacup. You can use a little dessert plate over the cup if I don’t have a proper teacup.
Let the tea steep for at least 5 minutes (10-15 minutes is better).
Enjoy the mint on its own or add honey or milk if that appeals.
You can buy peppermint tea bags at the grocery. Or you can grow it! It’s easy… so easy, in fact, that it will spread if left alone.
The peppermint show above is in my garden. Peppermint is perennial. If you plant it in good soil it will grow in sun or part shade. It isn’t fussy and I’ve never needed to water it once it was established, though it thrives with periodic watering. But be careful! It will take over your garden if you let it!
To make tea just cut the stems and hang them up to dry or use a dehydrator.
Last June during a work day at the Herbal Apothecary in Brewster Stephen asked me to help him harvest Linden from the tree that grows out behind the shop. It’s a beautiful, towering tree and to get to the flowers and bracts he raised me up in a tractor bucket with a basket. It was great fun.
Bees love Linden flowers so we had to be careful, but we came away with a giant heap of beautiful fragrant flowers that he made tincture from in the shop.
Right now I’m sitting with a hot cup of fragrant Linden tea, made from the flowers and bracts. I noticed as I was working on some paperwork that a nice warm feeling of mellow calm swept over me, relaxing me. Chilling me out. And yes, that was the effect I was looking for. I love this feeling.
This tea is lovely. I didn’t even add honey, and I have a sweet tooth; I add honey to almost everything.
A few related notes, just to round off my notes here about Linden.
Linden is relaxant and cooling. It gives wonderful support for conditions like high blood pressure, and stress related heart problems.
Soothing to the nerves it is helpful where Fibromyalgia or other nerve pain are present.
Linden is very safe, even for children and pregnant women.
Linden grows large and abundantly in the northeast and in many places, so we are free to harvest as many flowers as we like.
I have tinctured it and enjoyed it as tea. Bur during my Herbalism class (Commonwealthherbs.com) I learned that infusing linden in white wine makes a lovely cooling summer drink. Nice idea, right? They also suggest tincturing it in honey and vodka for a sweet and refreshing tincture/drink.
It’s always a good time to appreciate plant world magic. It’s a reason to be cheerful or grateful that is always there, always happening. We just don’t always notice.
A couple of magical little things at work in my garden right now: Calendula pictured above, still blooming beautifully (at least until a hard frost!)
white sage in afternoon sun
White sage – not a native of this area. And in danger. But this lovely plant pictured above grew in a pot for me this year from seed. White sage is the plant people buy to smudge a new apartment. As a traditional energetic cleanser it’s been over-harvested. I’m grateful it chose to grow in my garden!
leeks, dirt still in the roots, from the vegetable garden
Leeks. We don’t think about mid November as a time for harvest but my carrots, leeks, and swiss chard are still going strong. Not interested in tempting the fates, I harvested them today. Pictured above.
Swiss chard, a spring green, loves the fall, too. Yum.
Green spirits to feed, protect, and nourish us- still afoot in the garden. At least for now. And when the snow fairies arrive to bring the fallow season, some lovelies will sleep until spring – even more magic.
Oregano, still tender and green after a summer haircut, winters over beautifully to emerge again in the spring…
basil just cut from the garden or bought in the produce section of the grocery makes delicious pesto
Basil is easy to grow. The secret is watering with some seaweed emulsion fertilizer. If you don’t garden you can pick up fresh basil or even a plant at the grocery store and make pesto fresh at home. It’s *so* much better than jarred pesto.
As to basil’s health benefits: it’s soothing to the digestive and nervous systems. It can ease gas, stomach cramps, and nausea. It can be helpful for fatigue, depression, and nervous irritability. Full of antioxidants, it’s been shown to support healthy blood sugar, heart and vascular health, immunity, and cognitive ability. A delicious food that’s great for your health – truly food as medicine.
It’s easy to make Pesto with or without nuts. For that matter, the french make something very similar, Pistou, that omits the cheese and the nuts and focuses on the garlic and the basil. So you can make this sauce in whatever way you please. Here’s a variation recipe:
a blender full of fresh basil (blanched or not, optional)
2-4 bulbs of garlic, roasted.
1 Tbsp lemon juice
1/4 c parmesan or romano cheese
olive oil
salt and pepper.
optional – pine nuts or walnuts
Roast garlic by putting unpeeled bulbs in a toaster oven or toaster and toasting at 350 until the peels are starting to brown.
Roasting the garlic really adds a warm, nutty flavor to the pesto that I love.
To make your pesto place the basil in the blender with the roasted garlic, cheese, salt and pepper, lemon juice, and nuts, and blend away.
Delicious on pasta, toast, chicken, sandwiches, whatever… And so good for you.
Last night at 11:30 PM I received a text from my youngest, now away at college. “I’m at the ER with a fever, feel awful.” And later at 2:30 AM, “I tested positive for the flu. They gave me Tylenol. I’m heading home now.”
We are a four hour flight away, so there wasn’t much I could do other than to ask her to keep me posted. I hadn’t yet put together cold and flu capsules for this coming season and was planning to make and send them this week. I didn’t know when I mixed and made them yesterday that she was already sick. I think that comes solidly in the Murphy’s law category!
I did in fact make cold care capsules (pictured above) yesterday, pack close to 50 of them – more than she’ll need – in a box, and mail them to her. I anticipate they’ll arrive right around the time she’s starting to get better. Oh, well. Next year they will be on the plane with her.
These capsules are very effective. When taken at the first sign of symptoms they always seem to prevent a serious cold or flu from setting in. I often pair them with a nice dose of Emergen-c to hedge my bets, being a belt and suspenders kind of girl. 🙂
The formula, which comes from Rosemary Gladstar’s recipes, is simple:
1 part powdered Echinacea angustifolia
1 part powdered Hydrastis canadenis/Goldseal root
1/2 part powdered Althaea officinalis/Marshmallow root
1/4 part Capsicum annum/Cayenne
Mix them together evenly and encapsulate.
making capsules is easy with a capsule maker. And you can buy gel capsules online inexpensively.
Dosage: Take 2 at the first sign of cold or flu and every 2 hours up to 9/day and not exceeding 3 days.
If you would like to buy capsules I make and send them. A trusted technical advisor and I are working on an on-line store for these kinds of apothecary essentials. Till that’s up and running, and mindful that flu season seems to have started early, please drop me a note at kirsti.frazier@gmail.com. The cost is $47.99 for 30 capsules or $84.99 for 60 of them.
Goldenseal root, an herb endangered in North America from over harvesting, emerging from the forest floor in spring
This is no ordinary plant. You might say “well, Kirsti you think all plants are special,” and that’s true. But I have a real love affair going with this one.
Overwhelm is a real thing in our society. We all know the feeling of a too-long to-do list. And the overly full chest, overly heavy feeling that accompanies difficulty focusing in the face of a long list of tasks. And the anxiety that accompanies that has a way of setting in and staying.
Motherwort, pictured here, is widely used to truly calm that kind of anxiety in just such moments. A few drops of the tincture under the tongue definitely chases the feeling of overwhelm away. It’s legendary, used also in blood pressure remedies, to strengthen the cardiovascular system, and as support for premenstrual and menopause symptoms. If I had only known about it years ago, I could have eased many years of intense premenstrual cramps.
Just the other day I was out walking with a clinical herbalist, Stephan Brown, in his garden here on the cape. I’ve been taking motherwort tincture for months, originally to help with my blood pressure, I soon learned it benefits my mental state, as well.
But I have never seen the plant growing and I could not have identified it if it jumped up and slapped me in the head.
Knowing nothing about me or the remedies I favor, Stephan plucked a stem of motherwort from a nearby plant and presented it with a flourish. Herbalists and plants are both naturally psychic. There’s no getting around it.
square stems of the lamiaceae; motherwort has an especially strong stem
I went back today to gather some with his permission. A member of the mint family with the characteristic square stem of that species, you can see the shape in the picture above, making it easy to identify.
The lovely leaves are drying now, which means I can make my own bottle of tincture. Pure magic.
With so much bad news all around us, especially in Gaza, before that Ukraine, and in the middle east for so long, it’s been challenging to focus on simple things, like a garden. To the point of it feeling irrelevant and even silly to focus on such an ordinary small thing. I’ve felt guilt at not making this horrible news more central in my life. And yet, I’m not there, there is little any of us can do beyond pray, sympathize, donate, commiserate. And this beautiful planet, devastated by the blasts just as her children (us humans, animals, plants- everything) are – suffers, too. So I do the things I can do, honor the life that arises here, and try not to let anxiety prevail.
So a story about time passing here.
My 19 year old daughter Inga got a summer job at a local med spa working the front desk. She started applying for summer jobs in April, interviewed remotely, and was offered this job before her final exams started. She was thrilled. She’d worked with the software they use and had done exactly this job last summer. She was especially happy because she wants to work as an injector when she finishes school, all goodness spring from beauty as it does 😉 and so a med spa would be good experience for her.
The night before her first day of work, which was scheduled for last week, she received an email from the med spa owner saying she’d given the position to someone else who can work year-round and that Inga didn’t “need to visit.” Inga hadn’t been aware they were (still) looking for someone for the job, or that they wanted a year round person. She was crushed.
I told her (in a more confident tone than I felt) that it was early enough in the season that she would find something else, and that she was better off. Who would want to work for someone that would behave that way, anyway? She saw the reason in my words and went back to job hunting. This went on for weeks and she had very few call backs and started to feel “helpless.” Most kids had secured summer jobs in April.
Then there was an offer to interview as … a jet ski guide. I laughed. Perfect for Inga who is spirited, athletic, and adventurous, and who has vowed in past summers to someday own a jetski because she thinks they are great fun. Yesterday she was offered the job with tips into the hundreds of dollars on the busiest (long) days… a small example of how sometimes things don’t go the way we hope, want, and expect them to, but somehow they work out.
Inga last summer
And, returning to the garden.
I’ve been wandering out to my herb garden every day to see if I could spot a sign of my echinacea angustifolia. Echinacea A. is the variety of echinacea most prized for it’s infection fighting power. I’ve read it’s a little harder to cultivate than purpurea, which, admittedly, is usually pretty easy going. But there hasn’t been a sign of it germinating and I was beginning to think it won’t happen this year…
Until today!
tiny echinacea angustifolia seedling leaves poke up through the dirt
I hope and pray every day for things to come right, for healing, for the right outcomes, for people and planet to find balance, acceptance, equanimity, and well-being. May we all have a hand in creating peace and presence where and when we can, remembering to be. Not to be this or that. But just to be.
Aloe is popular. You can buy it in most garden shops, I’ve even seen it for sale at the grocery store! It’s beautiful, easy to grow, and it’s medicine! Most folks know it’s great pain relief for a sunburn, and promotes rapid healing and tissue repair. It also has the same pH as our skin, and is a natural sunscreen.
You can make aloe vera gel at home very easily:
cut a firm leaf from your plant
slice it open (on a plate is best).
Use a tablespoon to scoop out the gel.
optionally, but this is really much nicer, puree it in a blender.
Goldenseal root, Hydrastis Canadensis, is an herb endangered in North America from over harvesting, seen here emerging from the forest floor in spring
The beauty you see pictured here is Goldenseal Root. It’s the medicinal herb you often see in the herbal remedies aisle combined with echinacea in cold care formulas. Incredibly valuable medicine, it was popular with Native Americans on the East Coast of the US, and they taught us a lot of what we know about it.
My first experience with Goldenseal Root was when I was a young professional living in South Boston. I left work one Wednesday evening just before Christmas, trudged through the cold, damp winter air of Cambridge, and boarded the T to head back to my apartment – and specifically my bed – in South Boston, knowing I was getting sick. I could feel it coming on – chills, body aches, sore throat. An acquaintance at work, seeing my pasty pallor, instructed me to stop on my way home to buy echinacea and goldenseal root capsules. She swore by them and was sure it would be worth my time and money to stop at the coop for them. I took her advice, in part because I had a date the Friday following for a holiday party that I did not want to miss, and in part because I was willing to take anything that might help.
No sooner had I arrived home, herbs in hand, than the fever and chills overwhelmed me. I crawled into bed with my bottle of echinacea and goldenseal, only half believing they would help at all. I think I took between 8 and 10 of the capsules with water before falling asleep – more than the recommended dose.
All night long the fever and body aches raged, I alternated between sweats and chills. But, when I awoke the next morning, I felt miraculously better. The fever was gone.
I’d never recovered from a flu-type virus so quickly and I was convinced I was better because of the herbs.
Goldenseal contains infection-fighting alkaloids and bitters, and can be used internally or externally to fight infection. I use it in cold care capsules to fight bronchial congestion. It can be used in salves to fight skin infections, fungal infections, and athlete’s foot, in eye washes for conjunctivitis and eye infections, and as a remedy for poison ivy or poison oak.
The most potent medicine is in Goldenseal’s roots. Because this beautiful plant has so much healing power it’s been harvested in the wild to the point of becoming threatened.
Last year, I bought some of the roots from United Plant Savers, a group that is committed to preserving native North American medicinal plants, and planted them in a forested section of our backyard. No care, other than not trampeling over them or letting the chickens scratch them up (which, god bless them, they would) was taken with them. They emerged after spring rains quite independently.
Aside from wonder, the site of these baby healing plants unfurling their lovely glossy leaves evoked gratitude and deep relief. There’s hope for us, yet!
Backyard Botanics 