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, surprisingly sweet — even without honey.
A few related things, 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. But 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 vodka and adding honey for a sweet and refreshing tincture/drink.
Fire cider is great for your immune system, leveraging garlic, onions, ginger, horseradish, cayenne, honey, and apple cider vinegar.
Healthful tonics like this one have been around and in use since ancient times — our ancestors knew what was good! In the 1970s, Rosemary Gladstar, a wonderful herbalist, coined the term “Fire Cider” and it stuck. The recipe is below – feel free to scroll down directly.
Fire ciders are popular; there are many recipes out there. A simple one: chop onions and garlic and grate horseradish and ginger, and add it all to apple cider vinegar, ensuring the roots are submerged. Let them stew, shaking daily for 3-4 weeks, and add cayenne and honey to taste (this basic recipe comes from Rosemary Gladstar’s herbalism certificate through ecoversity).
Whipping up a healthful potion is always fun, and It would be hard to overstate the value of Garlic, ginger, onion, and horseradish roots combined with apple cider vinegar, for good health:
Garlic: An ally against colds and flu, support for immune function, healthy cholesterol, and a vermifuge/in treating intestinal worms.
Ginger: Reduction of inflammation, joint pain, cramps, nausea, and morning sickness.
Horseradish: traditionally known for its power to clear your sinuses, horseradish is full of antioxidants and nutrients, antibacterial properties, and is good support for healthy metabolism, digestive health, healthy cholesterol and, of course, as a decongestant.
Onions: Rich in antioxidants and packed with flavor, WebMD says “They’re rich in chemicals that can help protect your heart, lower your risk of some cancers, and make it easier for your body to make insulin. Onions are also one of the greatest vegetable sources of quercetin, a plant compound with many health benefits.”
I think fire cider is fun to make. I’ve been cooking with garlic, ginger, onion, and cayenne for years–all are aromatic and lend food an irresistible flavor profile … but horseradish was a new acquaintance when I first made fire cider. Grating it releases volatile compounds and a pungent, strong aroma that was unmistakably familiar as an ingredient in winter and fall sauces.
I had to hunt around to find fresh horseradish; if you see it at the grocery grab it! It’s a cold hardy perennial that you can also consider growing.
I love having a remedy on hand for days when I or a family member feel a cold coming on – and fire cider does the trick. Tough love in a jar, you can take a teaspoon every day to support your immune system or use it on salads.
And keep it on hand! You’ll want to take 1-2 tablespoons at the first sign of a cold and repeat every 3-4 hours until symptoms subside.
Basic Recipe:
1/2 cup grated fresh horseradish root
1/2 cup (or more) chopped onions
1/4 cup (or more) grated ginger
1/4 cup or more chopped garlic
Apple Cider Vinegar (raw and organic if you can get it)
Cayenne pepper (fresh chopped or powder or flaked – whatever you have/can get)
honey to taste
Directions – add the horseradish, onions, ginger, and garlic to a jar and pour the apple cider over it to immerse the ingredients by a couple of inches. Seal and store in a warm spot. Let it macerate for 3-6 weeks and shake it
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!
Today I received an invitation to attend an event at Harvard Divinity School – The Path to Happiness: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times with Swami Sadyojathah. It got me to thinking about meaning, success, and happiness.
During my time at Harvard I learned some meditation skills and a whole lot about the practices and beliefs that animate different spiritual and religious traditions. After graduating I applied some of them, especially in my work with teams all around the world. What I learned in my MA of Religion – which for me was a survey of the world’s religions culminating in a thesis that compared 2nd century Buddhist and Christian mystical texts – changed me, and was a key to my success in corporate settings.
I worked days in offices in Cambridge Massachusetts as a quality assurance engineer and spent nights and weekends in the graduate program for Religion during those years. My manager at the time, a PhD of Physics, thought that Religion was a laughable choice. Why not pursue studies that would further my career? The company would pay for that! He was the most compassionate, supportive, and empathetic of people, and I learned a lot from him. But I persisted. I was sure that if I understood the people I worked with better, that I’d be happier. My colleagues then, including my then-manager, hailed from all over the world: Turkey, England, Barbados, Russia, India, Argentina, France, Jordan, China, Japan, Sri Lanka, Scotland, Greece, Ukraine, even Florida. ;-). Just kidding. But even folks from Canada and Colorado brought a slightly different set of assumptions and work habits to our projects. And in the years that followed that remained true; like so many people I worked at a global company. What would facilitate my success and well-being more effectively than understanding the traditions and beliefs that my colleagues were raised with?
Some years later, after 9/11, he told me he thought my decision had been a good one.
Which brings me back to Swami Sadyojathah. The ancient practice of meditation remains, I believe, the single most effective practice for achieving happiness. It’s better, even, than wine, which I have been known to leverage toward blissful forgetfulness on more than one occasion.
Meditation and self reflection yield more than happiness, too. Self understanding and forgiveness – by-products of meditation – put us in touch with our selves in a way that deepens empathy, compassion, and ultimately understanding. And THAT is a key skill in any collaborative work environment.
Happiness may be the grail many of us seek, but the skills that help us cultivate happiness benefit the people around us. Anyone who has meditated likely knows that it is not a silver bullet, it’s more like a workout; It’s an investment in ourselves. And it builds capacity for leadership, teamwork, and being in community– all skills that evolve from self understanding and insight, which meditation helps cultivate.
I won’t make it to Cambridge for the talk this time. But I appreciate the reminder and the important work that Swami Sadyojathah is doing in the world, for everyone.
Some time ago a friend approached me about his case of chronic colitis. Which is to say — he has had it for a long time and it’s pretty miserable, and did I have any suggestions?
Off the top of my head, other than demulcents, which are mucilaginous herbs that coat and soothe inflamed or irritated membranes, I did not. But I did a bit of reading and found that there is an herbal formula that has been used for IBS and similar problems related to the digestive system for a long time with good results, and has been adapted for use with modern constituent derivatives, etc. Looking at the ingredients list, it seemed to me that the formula addresses inflammation and virus in the gut. None of the ingredients had contra-indications that discouraged me, though these are definitely medicinal, rather than tonic herbs. By that I mean that these herbs are known to have powerful and immediate effects, as opposed to herbs that are gentler and can be taken daily and indefinitely.
I decided to make the traditional formula myself and share it with him.
There are versions of the formula that can be purchased online and have been modified from the traditional version by their makers, but I found an “original” formula that did not include derivative compounds, and purchased those herbs.
the individual ingredients in Roberts formula pictured here and combined at front in a mixing bowl before encapsulating
I will give away the ending before continuing this story: this formula worked for him. It corrected a chronic and persistent case of colitis that had been present for over a decade in a matter of weeks.
encapsulating Robert’s Forumula
When the herbs arrived I had to grind some in order to be able to compound them, so I spent a Saturday morning grinding and combining them in equal parts. The old formula did not specify the quantity or ratio of each herb. I know from my herbal studies that often we combine in equal parts unless we know an herb (like cayenne or in goldenseal, for example) should be used more sparingly. I made the decision to combine them in equal parts.
The ingredients in the formula I made: Purple Coneflower root (Echinacea angustifolia), Marshmallow Root (Althaea officinalis), Wild Indigo Root (Baptisia tinctoria. note here the original called for a different genus – Baptisia australis, but the tinctoria was available and I judged the substitution to be fine), Slippery Elm Bark (Ulmus rubra), Poke Root (Phytolacca americana), American Cranesbill Root (Geranium maculatum), Goldenseal Root (Hydrastis canadensis. A note, this is an endangered species at this time so I was careful to order it organically cultivated. Please don’t buy this wildcrafted.)
We know that herbs are the original medicine of the people, and that they are powerful and effective, but I was surprised at how quickly and effectively this formula worked because traditional allopathic medicine had tried and failed to treat him. The truth is that allopathic medicine often is more quickly effective for some things – for killing pain, for example. But in this case these herbs, which are whole foods, worked with his body to remedy a problem that had been serious and persistent for many years, and had not been treatable with allopathic medicine.
Some of the versions of this formula you can buy are liquid and arguably more easily absorbed. I felt that in this person’s case the ease of the capsules would help ensure he’d take them, and the pure nature of the herbs compounded together with no “carrier” ingredients (tincture or syrup) felt intuitively right and was more accessible to me.
If you have questions about this please feel free to reach out to me. I’m not a doctor, just a simpler herbalist, but I felt sharing this was important because of the profound effect it had for my friend , and I know that many people have similar digestive problems.
Bespoke Herbals @ Backyard Botanics 