MamaStories

Computer crashed while saving a file. Two days of work gone. My garden design image had 82 layers (some of them very complex). All but 2 are lost.

Need a calming tea.

Amie is grinding it up in the mortar for me: chamomile flowers, echinacea leaf, rosehip, and a tiny bit of licorice root.

We brought in a little more than 1/3 of a cord of well-dried wood today. We still have a good two and a half cords under cover in the back yard, which should get us through the Winter. The trees that came down this year and that we’re still bucking will make for good dry wood next year.

We also scavenged three boxes of kindling from our property (thanks, Irene!).  Good (small anddry) kindling, I find, is worth as much as the firewood itself for getting a good fire going. Amie helped a lot with that so she wanted to pose with her handiwork.

Hanging above her is the drying sage.

We’ve still only had one night of frost here. Today was another rather balmy day. The tomatoes and peppers in the hoop house (still doorless) keep on growing and ripening.

Right there, behind the sunchokes

What with the flurry of activity/activism around here, the garden has been neglected somewhat. On top of that, the deer decided to cross from backyard where they usually hang out (an extensive wildlife corridor runs behind our property) to the front. In the front yard they ate the weeds and strawberry plants. Then they started browsing my veg garden, first defoliating the sweet potatoes, then finishing off the green beans and swish chard and trampling the carrots.

Trying to chase it away. It couldn’t be bothered!

Still, we had some harvests.

It was mainly green beans, peppers and eggplants. Tomatoes did extremely poorly this season.

the sweet potato bed once the deer were done with it

sweet potatoes, freshly dug

sweet potatoes, curing. Once washed it was obvious that there is a lot of vole damage on them.

deer-grazed chard

deer-grazed green beans (the end of our green beans)

Remember that beautiful elecampane? It grew enormous. All those flowers have now set seed – billions of seeds, some of which I harvested.

And then there is all that wood that came down in Spring. The pile originally looked like this:

I believe we’ve bucked half of that now. Our property is lined with sawed logs, waiting to be split (we’ll rent a splitter). Amie is very much into counting and tallying these days. She counted 157 of these! In the picture she’s wearing ear protection because DH was running the chain saw.

John Root conducted an Edible Wild Plants Walk at the organic Lindentree Farm in nearby Lincoln yesterday evening and I was there. I learned that that weed, of which I pulled thousands from the old compost heap, is Lamb’s Quarters, that it is absolutely yummy and nutritious and grew itself for free and without my care or attention (but I already knew that). And I ate not a one. They all went into the (new) compost, though, so eventually I’ll eat them, but still.

The entertaining  and knowledgeable John Root introduces us to Jewelweed

Today I pulled several weeds from the strawberry patch. I spent some time with one of them, Botany in a Day, and Amie’s loupe and discovered it is a Mallow, probably Cheese Mallow (Malva rotundifolia). Here’s the distinctive funnel-shaped five-petaled flower with a column of stamens.

Mallows have 3 to 5 partially united sepals and often several bracts. This one has 5 sepals and 3 bracts (smaller sepal-like modified leaves):

My plants has these beautiful round leaves – hence my hunch that is is rotundi-folia:

The ovary of the Mallow matures as a capsule, or a “cheese”:

Matured flower next to immature flower:

The Mallow is mucilaginous or slimy when crushed and contains pectin. The marshmallow we roast over the fire used to be made from the roots and seeds of the Marshmallow (Althaea officinalis – which comes from Europe and which I purchased and have thriving in my herb garden) and our indigenous Malva can be used to make marshmallow too.

Because the Mallows are so slimy, they are a great external emollient and an internal demulcent and expectorant. Roots, leaves, flowers and seeds (cheeses) can be eaten and are rich in calcium and iron.

Today I got to experiment first-hand with a remedy for Stinging Nettle stings. Some nettle was growing in my  mint patch and though I am aware of it and am careful when harvesting mint, my guests may not. I was tidying up that patch and thought I’d relocate the three nettle plants to the nettle patch (out of the way in the back of the property, behind the fence).

Tip: just wearing gloves and a short sleeved shirt is not ample protection.

I got stung badly on the bare arm and then, through the glove, on a finger. The blisters and the itch formed immediately. I ran out back to our “lawn” (more like a clover patch) and picked some plantain leaves, crushed them in a mortar and applied them as a poultice.

Instant relief!

If memory serves, the blisters and itch can last many hours. The itch was abolished instantly, and the blisters were gone after 5 minutes of applying the leaf.

*

Just over the weekend a friend and I were talking about herbal medicine. He didn’t quite “believe in it”. Turns out that what he doesn’t believe in is that plants can have a beneficial effect. That some are detrimental and poisonous, or that their malevolent effect can indeed be instant – e.g., Stinging Nettle – he had no problem accepting.

When I pointed this out it was a revelation. All our trust in the benefits of plants has been taken away by the pharmaceuticals. All that remains is the other side of the coin. A weird coin it is now, hanging there in people’s minds, in our culture…

I have been thinking for a while now to grow Ginger (Zingiber officinalis).  I finally had two pieces of root that seemed like good candidates. They were quite old and had already sprouted in several places.

I cut them up, making sure each part had two or three buds or eyes, and into the dark, rich soil they went, inside an old wine case (I figured the rhizomes grow horizontally, so a container that is wide and not too deep seems ideal). I drilled holes in the bottom.

Ginger, being a tropical plant, likes shelter, filtered sunlight and warm, moist, rich soil. It can’t stand frost, so I’ll have to bring it inside to overwinter.

I reserved another such wine box for a turmeric root, which I’ll pick up from the Indian store today.

Dried Feverfew (flowers and leaves)

Dried Golden Chamomile (flowers)

Badly dried Golden Chamomile (flowers)

Amie and the comfrey

Today Amie helped me harvest the comfrey and feverfew. She helped me string up those big, fat comfrey leaves. “It’s like stringing fish!” she said. I asked her where she got that idea? She couldn’t remember, but she was right. She loved the smell of the feverfew flowers – they look and smell like chamomile, but the plants are not related. I was amazed at her patience, taking them from me, standing around in the hot sun.

As we were harvesting, she suddenly said how she loves it that I am a beekeeper, and that she asked her friends at school and it turned out that no one else’s mom was a beekeeper. (I did a little beekeeper talk for her class recently).  We also talked about how not many people make medicine out of plants, and about the difference between pharmaceuticals and plant medicine (and that each has its place). And about the generosity of the plants, how important it is to take from them only what we need, only what is ready, and leave most of the plant to to thrive.  ”Like when we rob from the bees,” she says.

Yes, dear child. How I love doing this with you.

Amie garbling dried mint

I made a page inventorizing the herbal medicines in my apothecary, and I thought I should  also have a page with all the herbs growing in the garden. Of course I first have to identify them! I’ve succeeded (I think) with these:

Feverfew (Tanacetum parthenium or Chrysanthemum parthenium)

Fleabane (Erigeron)

Golden Chamomile (Anthemis tinctoria)

Yarrow (Achillea millefolium)

Last week I splurged on Wildcraft, a cooperative board game for kids (and adults) developed by HerbMentor, one of my favorite places for herbal instruction. The idea of the game is to make it up the mountain to the huckleberry patch, gather huckleberries, and make it back down again to grandma’s house before nightfall. And not to perish.

In the official game there’s not much chance of perishing. When you land on a cross you get a trouble card – a hornet sting, sore muscles, hunger, or stomach ache. But you start out with four remedy cards and gather lots along the way. It’s usually an easy walk. Usually.

Amie loved the game from the very first. She has played it several times, with us or by herself. She’ll skip around the house telling her doll they should find some Plantain for that bee sting, Echinacea for the sniffles. It’s sweet.

Then yesterday she came up with a variation. She set up the board and invited me to play, but wisely kept the rules to herself until I had committed (you spin that wheel, you’re committed). The variation was this: only trouble cards, no remedy cards.

Painful, to say the least! Our conversation ran thus:

- You’re killing me!

- Don’t blame it on me.

- Well, you’re the one who invented this game.

- Blaming isn’t nice. Oops, now you’ve got diarrhea. Too bad!

She weighed  ailments (diarrhea would be the worst one) and inflicted pain (gleefully handing out the cards) all in the playful and safe setting of a game. She also explored endurance and the extent to which the human body can handle pain and discomfort. At the end of the game, when we finally made it back to grandma’s house, Amie gathered she must be near death. Like so:

Notice the tongue sticking out, a sure sign of near death.

The cards near her head, by the way, were her trouble cards. The long line near her feet, those were mine! She invited me to come lie next to her and be really dead.

I declined, stating someone had to take the picture.