Infusions

I've been infusing up a storm all summer long. Oils, that is. Rose petals, mint, comfrey, lavender, chamomile and lots and lots of calendula. In olive oil, rice bran oil and grapeseed oil. 

[The former Math teacher in me feels compelled to note that with six different herbs/flowers and three different oils, there are eighteen different combinations - just in case you were interested.]

Why, you might ask? Soap! Salve! Luscious, skin-friendly cream! Plus two delightful afternoons with the three completely charming girls (ages 8, 10 and 12) who live next door: one spent picking leaves and petals and cramming them into a jar to infuse with oil, and a second spent turning the oil into this salve.

The jars have looked so beautiful on the verandah in the sunlight it's almost a shame to use them.

Herbal intensive

A nice, big dose of serendipity landed on my doorstep - or rather, in my vegetable garden - about two weeks ago. Some folks were visiting our neighbours, and as often happens, one stopped to talk to me over the fence as I watered the garden.

"Are you growing lambs' quarters?" she asked, pointing to the quinoa. It turns out that lambs' quarters and quinoa are both members of the buckwheat family, and look amazingly alike (which explains why I was, to my puzzlement, seeing quinoa sprouting all over my garden - it turns out it was lambs' quarters!). It also turns out that the woman asking the question (Lorene is her name) is a master herbalist who lives on the next road over.

I was thrilled. There are many herbs growing here at Mucky Boots, a couple of which I have identified and used, and many of which I have no clue about. When I confessed to wanting to learn more, Lorene told me she would be giving a four day intensive on herbs the following weekend.

Serendipity indeed!

So of course I went, and it was amazing. We spent the Friday afternoon learning about the medicine wheel, which categorizes medicinal plants according to their natures and functions, using Lorene's own specially planted garden to help us. We tasted everything, learning what mucilaginous and astringent herbs feel like in our mouths, and how bitter some herbs can be. We studied diagrams of different leaf shapes and margins, and different flowering and branching patterns, and then we each chose a particular herb to study that night for homework.

Saturday, Sunday and Monday were spent learning how to make different herbal preparations: infusions and decoctions, a salve (much like the one I made last year), a tincture, a glycerite and a tinc tract. We discussed the difference between using fresh herbs and dried ones. We made an herbal vinegar. Some of us snuffed an herbal snuff, others got poultices for sore muscles or wounds, and I got to try a steam treatment with essential oils for my sinuses.

It was a wonderful way to get started with learning about herbs - I have a framework now and some preliminary knowledge, plus a whole bunch of enthusiasm to learn more.

One of the best parts was finally identifying some of the mystery plants here at Mucky Boots. Some of them are residents of the perennial gardens, like malva (a demulcent, soothing to the digestive and respiratory systems and the skin) and motherwort (stimulates and tones stomach action, and is good for respiratory congestion and symptoms of menopause). . .

. . .and others are weeds I have spent the last two years trying to eradicate, like broad leaf plantain (great to chew up and use as a poultice on bee stings or poison ivy), sheep sorrel (an excellent source of Vitamin C and delicious in salads) and purslane (an excellent source of omega 3 fatty acids, also good in salads).

And there were others, like wood sorrel (which looks like clover but isn't), and prunella vulgaris, (also called heal all) whose flower looks a little like French lavender.

That's in addition to the plants here that I already knew about, like borage, chickweed, cleavers, comfrey, dandelion, horsetail, lady's mantle, lavender, lemon balm, nettle, oregon grape, peppermint, raspberry, red clover, sage, spearmint, thyme, woodruff, yarrow and yellow dock.

Mucky Boots is a veritable medicine chest, just waiting for me to clue in!

Tincture

As my near and dear ones know all too well, I suffer from...well, snot issues. I am the world's leading producer, and single-handedly keep the Kleenex company in business. If I could find a way to invent a super glue from snot, or a way of using snot to power internal combustion engines, I would have enough money to end world hunger.

Chronic sinusitis and rhinitis are pretty minor as health issues go, but still, they're a bit of a pain. My sinuses are so clogged I sound like a labouring steam engine when I sleep, and sometimes my poor nose gets weary of all the blowing.

I have spent years trying to find a cause, and a solution. If I can stick to a diet free from gluten, dairy, sugar, eggs, some nuts, caffeine and alcohol, it makes a difference. But man, is that hard.

Some of you may remember my herbal experiments from last year: I used comfrey, calendula and lavender harvested here at Mucky Boots to make a salve for insect bites, scrapes and burns. That got me interested in the idea of growing and using more medicinal herbs. I'm going to try out some new herbs in this year's garden, and in the meantime I have been reading lots of books about growing and using medicinal herbs. And didn't my eyes light up when I read that elderflowers and elderberries are good for reducing mucous production. Just what I need.

So about six weeks ago I put about 4 ounces of dried, organic elderflowers in a big mason jar and covered it with 100-proof vodka. I have faithfully stirred and shaken it every day since then, and finally, a few days ago, I decided the tincture was ready. I strained it twice, once through a fine colander and once through cheesecloth, then bottled it in a dark-coloured bottle to protect it from the light. A dose is supposed to be an ounce, but I see that as a bit of a problem: taking a few doses a day of 100-proof vodka could amount to a drinking problem. Especially since I'm not supposed to be drinking booze at all, never mind booze made from grain. So I'll stick with one or two eye-droppers as a dose instead, and see how that goes. While I see how that works, I'll investigate how to make a tincture without alcohol.

I've got another herbal experiment on the go: an elderberry "elixir" made with dried elderberries, brandy and honey. This one is beautiful - deep purple and a bit syrupy. It's not ready yet, but once it is I might be tempted to forget about its medicinal benefits and just serve it over ice cream. Soy ice cream, that is.

Anti-ouch ointment finished!

A few weeks ago I began infusing oil with some of the plants growing here at Mucky Boots, as the first step in making a skin-healing salve. Today I decided the brew had been steeping for long enough and made the ointment. Here's what I did.

As you might remember, I began with about 2 cups of sweet almond oil (you can also use cold-pressed olive oil) and 1 ounce each of calendula petals, lavender flowers and comfrey leaves, all smushed together in a jar and set outside to gently warm in the sun. That lasted a day before Frankie decided it smelled promising and knocked it to the deck of the verandah. Kim was there in a flash, but not before half the oil had leaked out, leaving a messy (but quite nice smelling) oil stain on the wood planks. Rats. So I topped up the oil, capped the jar firmly, and set it on my seedling table behind the fence in the orchard, out of Frankie's reach.

Today, almost three weeks later, I strained out the vegetable matter, squeezing out as much of the oil as I could. Then I melted 4 ounces of beeswax in a double boiler on the stove (I used a bar of natural beeswax, rather than the white wax beads you can buy) and gently warmed the infused oil in another pan. When the beeswax was melted and the oil was about the same temperature, I gently poured the wax into the oil, whisking as I went, and then added an ounce of vegetable glycerin (to make the salve a bit creamier) and a few drops of lavender and rose geranium essential oil. Then I poured the mixture into the assortment of containers I had assembled and left them to cool and solidify. Easy as pie!

The resulting salve is rich and creamy, and feels very nice on my skin. I can't speak yet for its healing properties, but I've smoothed it into a couple of insect bites and a healing blister, and will see how it does.

I enjoyed doing this - it was easy to do, and I liked that it was such a gentle process: no mashing and bashing the plants, just a warm oil bath to coax them into releasing their scents and healing compounds. I like the end product: it's a gorgeous colour (like a cafe latte) and very silky in feel. I like the thought of making something good for me, instead of what I usually make (brownies, which aren't so good for me). And it has made me curious about the other non-food plants growing here, and what I might do with them. Most of the other herbs are already flowering, which means I have missed the optimal time for harvesting, but it's nice to think about what I might do next year.

Anti-ouch ointment

I've been cruising around the Internet looking for things to do with some of the herbs and flowers growing here at Mucky Boots - in particular, ideas for using calendula, which I grew from seed this year and which has just started to flower.

Calendula is good for helping skin irritations, abrasions and burns heal, so some kind of salve or ointment seemed a good bet. Comfrey is good for the same thing, and it's growing everywhere here. The recipe I eventually found used both, plus lavender.

The first step is to put an ounce each of calendula blossoms, lavender flowers and comfrey leaves in a jar and cover them with about two cups of sweet almond oil. That's what I did today. It's going to sit in the sun for about two weeks to infuse, after which I will strain out the vegetable matter. The infused oil will be gently heated with some beeswax and the result, when cool, should be a nice salve to use on all of the bites, scrapes and burns I seem to accumulate.

Mystery herb

I need some help. Please. I can't identify this herb that is growing in the vegetable garden. There's a lovely, healthy clump of it and at first I thought it was chamomile, until I grew some myself and realized they look very different.

The flowers are about an inch across, and the plant itself is about two feet tall. The leaves taste unpleasantly bitter, so that can't be the part of the plant you use!

Any and all suggestions welcome...

Also flowering in the herb garden is a clump of sage - how lovely!

Herbs

You may remember that one of my gardening resolutions for 2010 was to be more diligent in harvesting and drying herbs. Never one to procrastinate, I launched the first harvest yesterday.

It was prompted when I offered our visiting neighbour Nick a choice of teas, and he expressed a preference for something we had grown. Fortunately I had the one measly baggie of dried mint that was the sum total of all the herbs I harvested last year - and very nice tea it was, too. And it got me thinking that I better get going, or I'd be forced to serve Nick tea from a box the next time he was over.

So out to the garden I went. I had my eye on a beautiful, rounded mound of lemon balm, and an incredibly vigorous patch of oregano, both growing in the herb bed in the vegetable garden. These two herbs are everywhere at Mucky Boots - I think one of the two previous gardeners of the property divided them repeatedly and used them to fill in empty spots in the perennial beds. There are probably half a dozen mounds of lemon balm and about four times that many patches of oregano here and there. There's even a bunch of oregano growing out of the rock wall near the workshop.

Three minutes was the scissors was all it took to cut enough to fill a really big colander to overflowing. The stripping of the stems and tying of the bundles took longer, but it was a nicely meditative thing to do while sitting on the verandah. I ended up with a dozen bundles which I washed and then tucked into paper bags to protect them from dust and bugs. Kim is going to fasten an old garden trellis horizontally to the ceiling of the verandah so I can hang the bundles for drying.

Mint is already making itself seen in the perennial beds, so some bunches of that will soon join the happy herbal hangout. Once it's dry, I'm thinking lemon balm and mint might make a nice combination for tea, maybe with a few of the lavender flowers I saved from last summer thrown in. The Mucky Boots Blend is born.