Herb Garden Planning

Now is a great time to plan which herbs you would like to grow.  Making a list now will reduce the chance of you purchasing something you have not prepared a place for and the chance of buying something you won't be able to care for or find a spot to grow.

What herbs do you use now in cooking, for crafts, or for other purposes?  I would recommend starting with a few you are already somewhat familiar with even if you have only used them dried.  Chives, parsley, mint (if grown in a container), sage, lavender, tarragon, thyme, and oregano are some that are usually easy to find and grow. 

Once you have a list check to see if they will grow in your area by researching the herbs and finding what climate zone you are in.

Even if you can't grow an herb outside in your area you may still be able to grow it indoors.  I grow several herbs in pots that would not survive the winter in my yard.  I can still enjoy them and have some houseplants to eat over the winter.

Wreaths, Swags, and Pomanders

Wreath

Swag

My daughter and I made our first Christmas wreath and swag.  I bought the frame, moss, and florist tape.  The boughs came from a tree lot.  I looked through books and online for ideas then experimented.  We added from our yard with juniper, hawthorne, mountain ash, and oregon grape berries and greenery.  Ribbon was chosen from my box of ribbons.  I think for a first try we did all right.   For the swag I just gathered boughs together with wire and decorated in a similar manner.  I think the swag turned out much better.

Pomanders - lemon, orange, pear

Potpourri and pomanders can be used for ornaments or placed in a dish for decoration and to add some seasonal scent.
I have made pomanders from oranges, tangerines, small lemons, small pears, and small apples.  Stick whole cloves into the fruit. For fruit with tougher skins you may need to poke a hole with a needle or nail before placing the cloves.  Either cover the entire fruit or leave areas for ribbon for hanging as I did in the ones pictured.  After adding the cloves roll the fruit in a mixture of ground spices - cinnamon, cloves, and/or nutmeg.  Leave in a dish of the spices turning regularly until dry.  Add the ribbon if desired after fruit has dried. 
Pomanders can also be made from a clay of applesauce and ground spices.  Mix throughly and form into balls or cut out with cookie cutters.  Set in ground spices turning a few times per day until dry.   I wrapped mine with sheer fabric and hung them from the tree.  They did not last as long as the fruit pomanders I made but were still fun to make.

Gifts for Herb Lovers, Gardeners, Cooks, Crafters

Herb related gifts are a great choice for crafters, cooks, gardeners, and anyone who loves herbs or wants to learn more about or try using herbs.  

For some garden and herb related ideas including books, DVDs, dried herbs, herb posters and more check here.

Do you know someone who loves essential oils and/or natural personal care products?  
Therapeutic grade essential oils are best for crafts, aromatherapy, culinary use, and health improvement.

You can order directly from the above sites for delivery to your family or friends.

Herbs for Christmas/Chocolate Dipped ???

There are so many ways to use herbs during the holidays: ornaments, pomanders, potpourri, wreaths, and of course in food and drinks.

Ideas and directions for some of these - Squidoo

Some foods you can enhance with herbs are cheese balls, hot cider, butter, cookies, breads, soups, dips, and chocolate.

Ever dipped chocolates? 
What about chocolate dipped dried fruit or garlic? Chocolate dipped peppers?
I found two more recipes for chocolate dipped hot peppers - 1& 2

I am interested in trying all of them except maybe the habaneros. 
If anyone tries any of these please comment on this post.

Thanksgiving Recipes Using Herbs

The Herb Companion Magazine has several Thanksgiving recipes including Cornbread Sage Dressing and Whole Roasted Salmon with Fennel & Rosemary.
Check them out here.

Salad From My Garden in November

Today, 5 November, I harvested vegetables and herbs from my garden for a salad.  That is pretty remarkable in my zone 6 garden. 
My salad contained home grown kale, beet greens, chard, lovage, green onions, miner's lettuce, dandelion leaves, and most amazing - currant tomatoes. 
This is the first year I have grown currant tomatoes.  The flavor was fine though not spectacular.  Due to their small size you have to pick many for them to be usable so I had not planned to grow them again. The weather has been cool enough that larger tomatoes struggle to ripen.  The currants have continued to ripen though more slowly.  I lost some squash to a freeze a couple weeks ago but everything else - including peppers and tomatoes - are still alive.
The cool season plants are doing great.  It will be interesting to see how long I will be able to harvest this year.  Maybe I will contribute a homegrown green salad to Thanksgiving dinner at my brother's house.

Chamomile - guest post by Kiva Rose

Today we are excited to have a guest herbal columnist on our site today. Kiva Rose is a well-known herbal blogger, and co-founder of the Traditions in Western Herbalism Conference.

Kiva is finally coming out with her secrets of how she learns so much about plants without using books. Her plant monographs, like the one below, are famous for their deep exploration into herbs that you will not find in other places.

Click here to learn just HOW she does it. 

Do you REALLY know chamomile? I doubt it. Enjoy the article…

Earth Apple: The Bittersweet Medicine of Chamomile

By Kiva Rose

I am excited to finally be able to go deeper into explaining herbal energetics in my upcoming course, Herb Energetics

Let’s begin with an herb we all know and love, chamomile.

However, do you REALLY know Chamomile?

Chamomile means “earth apple” which is easy to understand when we accidentally trample the flowers and underfoot and suddenly smell the welcome fragrance of apples rising from the earth. In the same way, Spanish speaking peoples often use the name Manzanilla, literally meaning “little apple”.

Even for those largely unfamiliar with herbs, the distinctive sweet scent of Chamomile is often both familiar and comforting. This plant is many people’s first and perhaps only introduction to herbalism, often from a cup of honey-sweetened and belly-calming tea from their grandmother.

Many children enjoy eating the buds or just opened flowers, savoring the sweet aromatic taste of the plant, and rarely seeming to mind the slightly bitter aftertaste. Some patches of Chamomile, depending on phase of flowering and availability of moisture, are much more bitter than others but the fragrant sweetness persists even in the most bitter batches.

Far from irrelevant, these signature sensory characteristics of Chamomile that make the plant memorable in our minds are also the primary keys to understanding how to work with Matricaria as a medicine.

As with almost any herb, the taste and scent of Matricaria tells us a great deal about its properties, allowing us to use our senses to listen to the plant and understand its essence as a medicine. That blissfully apple-like scent that children so love to breathe in from the flowers tends to bring relaxed smiles to their faces and anyone who’s ever drank a cup of the tea can testify to the relaxing, tension alleviating effects of the plant.

That aromatic component, stemming from the plant’s high volatile oil content, is predictably nervine, meaning that it has a discernible effect on the nervous system. In this case, a specific relaxing, calming effect. Additionally, that same volatile oil content is responsible for Chamomile’s actions as a carminative, relieving digestive stagnation in the form of gas, gut cramping and mild constipation. A traditional remedy by several North American indigenous tribes for the uterine cramps of girls just beginning their menstrual cycles, Chamomile is a mild relaxant for the smooth muscles of the gut, uterus, bladder and respiratory tract with a specific affinity for the gut.

Matricaria is not just aromatic, even in the sweetest Chamomile flowers we find a notably bitter aftertaste. Rather than ruining the flavor of an otherwise tasty herb, that bitter element enhances and expands the medicinal properties of the plant. The bitter flavor tells us that it has a distinct effect on the digestive system, even beyond the aromatic/carminative qualities.

The bitterness increases the secretion of digestive juices and enzymes in the gut, thereby improving digestion wherever there is a lack of secretions, which is a common cause of heartburn and many cases of general gut discomfort. This combined with its obvious nervine properties; Matricaria excels at treating what is commonly known as a “nervous stomach”, which generally implies digestive upset concurrent with anxiety and nervous tension.

Volatile oils and bitter principles together make for a powerful ability to reduce inflammation and promote healing, especially in the gut. I rarely create a formula for those with leaky gut, irritable bowel syndrome or even Crohn’s disease that doesn’t contain some proportion of Chamomile. Even as a simple, this pleasant tasting plant can very effectively reduce gut inflammation, pain and cramping while promoting healing of the mucosa and improving overall digestion. And of course, reducing any anxiety that may be aggravating or triggering the gut issues in the first place.

Just as it soothes and heals internally, Matricaria is also a first-rate external application for almost any case of inflammation, irritation, swelling and even potential infection. It finds its way into many of my compress formulas for eczema, psoriasis, atopic dermatitis and other common inflammatory skin conditions.

Steams, baths and infused oil are other effective ways of utilizing the calming, decongestive and healing properties of the herb. It’s also the first plant I think of in addressing the discomfort, irritability, insomnia, belly upset and fever of teething in small children.

Chamomile is one of my favorite remedies for all sorts of eye inflammations and infections. It can be used as a warm compress or saline eyewash to reduce inflammation, possible infection and pain in the treatment of styes, conjunctivitis, pink eye and similar maladies.

It teams up especially well with any Rosa spp. petals where there is a great deal of redness, irritation and swelling in the eye and the surrounding area. Just be sure to strain all those tiny (and potentially irritating) bits of Chamomile flower before using as an eyewash.

Chamomile has a well-deserved reputation as an archetypal remedy for children (or as Matthew Wood says “children of any age”), especially where there is fussiness, restlessness, frequent digestive upset and a tendency to react strongly to any irritant or discomfort. If one were to read the first dozen monograph on Matricaria they came across, the word “soothing” would be likely to show up in nearly every one. While now a somewhat clichéd representation of this common herb, it is nonetheless very accurate.

There’s a tendency by some of us to be less interested in the classic gentle herbs whose effects seem obvious, mild and less than profound. And yet, Chamomile has retained it’s popularity and reputation over the years for a very a specific reason. It works. It’s an effective, widely applicable, safe medicine well-loved by countless generations of mothers, herbalists and more recently, even medical doctors. This small but fragrant apple of the earth remains an invaluable medicine for all of us. Through both sweet and the bitter tastes, Chamomile provides us with a simple yet essential remedy.

Considerations: People with sensitivities to plants in the Aster family may have similar problems with Matricaria. Also note that Pineapple Weed (M. discoidea) often has a stronger bitter component and overall action than the common garden grown M. recutita.

The low down…

Common Name: Chamomile, Manzanilla, Pineapple Weed

Botanical Name: Matricaria recutita (as well as M. discoidea)

Botanical Family: Asteraceae

Taste: Aromatic, sweet, bitter

Vital Actions: relaxant nervine, relaxant diaphoretic, aromatic bitter/carminative, vulnerary,

Specific Indications: Irritability, tension, heat, hypersensitivity to pain

Energetics: sl. Cool, dry

So, exactly how does Kiva learn about plants by using her senses?

Just click here

Chives

Chives

Chives are fairly easy to grow anywhere.   You can grow a pot on your kitchen table or counter or you can grow them in your yard or garden - or both.  Garlic or Chinese chives are also easy to grow.

Chives are small onion like plants which grow in clumps.  Chives have purple edible flowers, rounded leaves, and a light onion flavor.  Garlic chives have white edible flowers, triangular shaped leaves, and a garlic flavor.  If using chive flowers harvest just after they open.  The flowers will separate into small pieces (florets) which can be scattered into salads for an attractive appearance and a chive (or garlic chive) flavor.

Both types of chives can be started from seed, purchased as a plant, or divided from an existing plant.  When starting from seed plant many seeds together since each seed will grow to be one plant.  At first they will look like tiny grass plants but as they grow the stems will thicken and they will be more obviously chives.  Chives can be harvested when the leaves are just a few inches tall.  Since you probably won't have many at first you can still cut them (leaving 1/2 - 1" for regrowth) and throw them in a salad.

To divide chives just cut into the bunch with a trowel or spade.  Dig up the portion you want and plant in another location or into a pot filled with good quality potting soil. The pot need not be much larger than the clump you are planting.


If moving indoors to or in a pot your chives will do better if exposed to the first light frost first - then move indoors.

As with other herbs use your imagination: top a baked potato, stir into scrambled eggs, throw into a salad, mix some with softened butter or cream cheese.

Edible Landscaping Blog

In addition to this blog I now have an Edible Landscaping Blog.  You can view and Follow it here: Eat Your Landscape
I also have a general gardening/landscaping blog on my website: Herbarium
I look forward to hearing your comments here as well as there.

Potted Herbs - Moving back indoors

The nights and days are getting cooler so it is time to prepare some of my herbs for the move indoors.  Those I already have in pots include 2 lemon trees, scented geranium, lemon verbena, pineapple sage, and bay.  I will need to move my lemongrass from the garden where it spent the summer back to a pot.

Before moving my herbs indoors I will prune any broken or dead growth or any that seems to be growing in an undesirable direction.   As it gets closer to the move I will then spray them off with water and apply horticultural oil to the leaves, trunk, and stems.  This should take care of any pests that try to move inside with them.  It has always worked so far.