The Chatelaine's Keys

admin May 19th, 2011

Ornamental edible gardening gets a lot of attention right now.  Consider a new book  _The Edible Front Yard_ by Ivette Soler that The Peak Oil Hausfrau has just reviewed.  I did a post a while back on ornamental perennial edibles, and I wanted to do a companion piece on ornamental medicinal herbs.  If you are looking for something to put up front, your medicinal herb garden is a really choice.  Not only are many of the plants useful, but they are also drop-dead gorgeous.  And just as perennial edibles run “under the radar” - meaning that neither zombies nor your local zoning board are likely to even realize that your garden is  (gasp!) useful as well as purty - medicinals do the same.  Just as I did in my perennial ornamental edibles post, I’m going to give you gardens for both sun and shade.  Obviously, this will be most useful to people who live in my climate or something like it - hey, if you can grow saw palmetto or chasteberry, go for it.  I can’t, but there are plenty of gorgeous options here.  Oh, and a lot of them are highly scented as well - even better!

First, let’s do a sunny border with a lot of general-purpose medicinals, useful in most households.  I’d suggest you throw in a handful of low-growing sunny annuals as well to add some brightness - calendula perks everything up, and german chamomile makes a great, cheerful understory plant.    This is for a site of ordinary soil, with ordinary moisture levels.

First, large backbone plants.  You’ll definitely want Valerian, which is a beautiful plant with vanilla-scented flowers in bloom.  It gets huge, so give it plenty of room.  Valerian is a reliable perennial, and can be dug and divided when you harvest the roots.  The roots smell like dirty socks, but tinctured they are one of the best relaxants out there, and a natural sleep aid.  Valerian does like some moisture, but will grow in ordinary garden soil.

All the mallows have roots with soothing properties - particularly good for coughs or irritated urinary tracts.  Marshmallow, above, is a beauty with pink flowers, but you can also use Malva sylvestris or garden hollyhock!

Angelicas are cool and weird looking.  They umbels with dark stems are odd, but beautiful.  Carrot family members, they attract insects like crazy and also attract visual attention.  If you have anyone female in your household, I’d recommend growing A. sinesis, also known as Dong Quai.  It is used for both menopause and menstrual cramps, as well as to gently help regulate high blood pressure.  It is not a safe herb for pregnancy, however, as it increases the risk of miscarriage.

You either love elecampanes or you hate them - I love them, huge and strange looking sunflowerish things that they are.  They were a common ornamental during Victorian times, but they’ve fallen out of favor - and I can understand, but I find them structural and cool.  Their roots are used for bronchitis and persistent coughs, but a grad student in Ireland has also found that extracts of elecampane in alcohol kill MRSA, which is certainly a non-trivial usage.

Moving up to the middle of the border, an obvious candidate, one that does well in almost all gardens, are the coneflowers.  Generally what you want are Echinacea purpurea or augustifola (shown) as the easiest to grow, but if you can grow one of the rarer species, please do - they are often endangered and very beautiful.  The medicinal qualities of the ornamental hybrids are probably lower, so stay away from those.

Meadowsweet is one of my absolute favorite herbs for its tidy foliage, beautiful sprays of creamy white flowers, wonderful fragrance and medicinal usage as both a painkiller (this is the plant from which salicytes were originally isolated) and a stomach soother.  It does cause hayfever in some people, however  and those with asprin-sensitive asthma should not use it, but unless I was terribly allergic, I’d have this plant around - it is just too useful. Its flower heads have also been used to flavor ales and jams - it imparts a slight sweet almondy taste!  The roots also produce a black dye.

You have to be careful with tansy - in some of the drier parts of the US it is an invasive pest and can become weedy.  You also have to be careful with internal use of tansy - not for kids, pregnant women and I personally wouldn’t take it internally unless the benefits outweighed the risks - but it is a great worm killer for internal parasites.  Best of all, however, are its natural insect repellent qualities, its delicious fragrance and those cheerful bright yellow buttons.  Tansy just begs to be mixed with reds and oranges, so it is a great companion to calendula!

Pretty mounds of tidy leaves with lovely wands of purple flowers - I’m surprised that Betony (stachys officinalis) doesn’t make it into more gardens.  It is great for headaches, and the leaves taste pretty much like black tea - and has similar antioxidant qualities.  This is a fond favorite plant in my garden, and you can never have too much of it!

I’d have feverfew in my garden even if it wasn’t a medicinal - but it is, with good documentation on its ability to affect migraines.  The flowers are just gorgeous - and they come in double forms as well.

Yarrow if a favorite of mine as well, and it tolerates almost any conditions, from dry as a bone roadsides to damp spots in my garden.   The flowers are used to treat hayfever and allergies, the aerial tops for colds and the leaves can be used as a styptic to stop bleeding.  Yarrow looks like a lot of umbelliferae, and some people have occasionally mistaken poisonous plants like water hemlock or cow parsnip for yarrow, which is all the more reason to grow your own!  You want the true white yarrow, not the ornamental colored species, although the chinese species A. asiatica, which has lovely pink flowers, is also extremely ornamental and used for fever pains and arthritis.

I can’t grow the traditional Arnica montana in my garden - elevations aren’t high enough and my soils aren’t naturally acidic enough - but A. Chamissonis grows well for me, and the bright, low growing flowers are easily tinctured or added to salves to ease sore muscles and bruising.  This is an external use only herb - but it is heavily overharvested in the wild, so growing your own becomes imperative.

Lady’s bedstraw is a lovely, low growing, incredibly fragrant plant that ought to be in more gardens.  Besides its use as a natural curdling agent for cheesemaking, a decoction is also used for urinary tract issues, and the roots produce a red dye, while the leaves produce a pretty yellow one.  But the honey scent and the way it flavors cheese would be enough for me!

Add in calendula, california poppy and german chamomile in the front of the garden, and you’ve got something no one will ever believe is useful!  If you are looking for more of my herbal writings, check them out here.

Ok, next time - the ornamental, medicinal shade garden!

Sharon

• garden design , herbs
• Comments(15)

admin March 16th, 2011

Note: This is a re-run from a few years ago, but I was thinking about the beginning of the herb season (starting with cleavers, dandelion and witch hazel, right soon now…)  and thought it might be worth a repeat!

For me, the most fascinating part of my whole self-sufficiency project is the plants – don’t get me wrong, I love the skills, I love animals, but I think I like best the project of getting to know plants.  The joy of herbalism is that it requires an intimacy that I really delight in – the more I learn, the better the results, and the more pleasure I take from my garden plants.

When I first started planting culinary and medicinal herbs, I pretty much treated them all the same way  – when I wanted some, or when it was a convenient time for me, I went and cut what I wanted.  But gradually I’ve learned a lot more about harvesting – when and how, and how to make best use of the plants.  Some of this is most important if, like me, you are hoping to sell dried herb, but harvesting at the right time will make anyone’s plants more medicinally active – we all know that there’s a world of taste difference between a green tomato and a red, ripe one dripping from the vine, between a tender, delicate new 6 inch zucchini and a three foot, seedy monster.  Well, herbs also have windows in which they are at their best.

Still, there’s something to be said for the “just go out and pick the herb” strategy – and for most fresh uses, I think this is probably still a good one.  There will be times when you want the most chemically active possible plant, but if your kid has an upset tummy and you have a dill head lying around, there’s really no reason to spend a lot of time wondering if you should have picked it on Friday or should wait until the seeds are fully mature.  By all means, try and harvest at the best possible moment, but don’t make yourself nuts, unless you are trying to sell your herbs.

There’s no real rule of thumb that allows you to completely avoid getting to know the plants themselves more intimately (and after all, this isn’t really something to be avoided), but there are some general principles that can be applied usefully.  Generally speaking, if what you harvest is the flower (say, chamomile or red clover) you want to harvest it just as the flowers open, as close to opening as possible (being pollinated can reduce the medicinal qualities of the flower, as in the case of clover).

If what you harvest is “aerial parts” (say, as in scullcap or feverfew) then you generally (there are some important exceptions to this) want to harvest the top foliage and flowers just as the flowers open.  If what you harvest are the young leaves (like nettle or raspberry leaves), harvest in spring, or keep cutting back or succession planting to ensure a harvest of young leaves.  Seeds (such as milk thistle and burdock) are harvested when the seeds are ripe, that is fully dry. Berries and fruits (such as cayenne peppers or elderberries) are harvested when ripe, or just shy of ripe.  Roots (such as dandelion or echinacea) are best harvested in fall after die back, or in very early spring, before heavy growth is put on.

Barks, (like willow or crampbark) are a winter crop - and in fact, I wonder that more northern farmers don’t consider adding a few bark crops to add to their other winter work with wood – cutting firewood, pruning, etc…

There are some oddities among the herbs – Gingko leaves, for example, are harvested not when young, but when they begin to yellow.  Comfrey is gentler and safer after the first spring flush – the first crop can be cut for compost or animal feed.  Rosemary is more fragrant and active after flowering, rather than during it.  Some roots need several years to develop, others are at their best the first fall or winter.  Again, you’ll want to look at recommendations from several books, since people’s opinions vary a lot on this stuff.

What if you want to combine two herbs with different harvesting periods in, say, a tincture?  You have two choices – you can harvest both plants as close to optimally as possible, say, picking the late flowering clover and digging the burdock before frost to create a clover-burdock root combination, or you can double tincture – tincture the clover at its peak, strain, and then fill the jar again with burdock root, and tincture it again.

The two easiest methods of preserving herbs are folk-style tincturing and drying, and that’s all I’m going to talk about in this particular post.  Again, the books you use will have recommendations for how to handle these plants – and I’ll write future posts about creams and oils and other methods.  But for today, we’ll assume you are going to either tincture the herbs or dry them.  You should look to see how the plant works best – as all of us know from culinary herbs, some herbs dry beautifully, some lose their essence. The same is true of tincturing – I’ve heard herbalists say that alcoholic tinctures are the best way to preserve herbs flatly, but some plants have constituents that don’t precipitate out in alcohol – marshmallow, for example, is valuable mostly because of its mucilaginous qualities, but that mucilage is not alcohol soluble, so an alcohol tincture isn’t the best way to preserve it.

Tinctures involve preserving herbs in alcohol, vinegar or glycerin.  Glycerin has the advantage of being sweet and easy to give to children, vinegar something everyone can tolerate, alcohol’s biggest advantage, besides pulling many plant elements out, is that tinctures last forever.  That way, if you are trying to preserve an herb you can’t grow, or don’t expect to have access to forever, tinctures are really valuable.

Either way, take a quart mason jar, and chop the herb parts up finely (for particularly dry or encased parts, like woody roots or hard coated seeds, you may need to grind them up some in a mortar).  Fill the jar to the top, and add alcohol (100 proof vodka is the easiest, although you can also make tinctures in fortified wine, or in a high proof alcohol that you enjoy sipping – no reason you can’t enjoy, say tequila-lemon balm or gin macerated with elderberries – for your health of course  ), glycerin or vinegar.

Put the tincture in a cool dark place and shake it daily for a month, or more.  Strain through cheesecloth and press or squeeze out all liquid.  That’s your tincture.  Store in a cool, dark place, clearly labelled with both ingredients and with warnings if necessary.  Glycerin tinctures store 1 year if made from at least 70 percent glycerine and kept very tightly capped (they suck water from the air otherwise), vinegars last 1-2 years at room temperature, alcohol tinctures last indefinitely.

Drying herbs is pretty simple – in a dry climate, you can hang them up in a warm, dry place with good air circulation and no exposure to sun, or lay them on screens and just let them dry until crispy.  This method doesn’t work at all for me in my humid climate – plants keep absorbing humidity, and turn grey and dull.  A solar dehydrator doesn’t work for this – bright sun is not good for most medicinals.  So we turned our mudroom (which has a lot of windows and gets very warm in the summer into a drying room.  A humid-climate solar dehydrator with a dark cover also works fine, as does an electric dehydrator if you’ve no other choice.  Generally speaking, you want to dry your plants as quickly as possible – within 1-4 days, and at a temperature between 80 and 100 degrees.  Once they are dry, place them whole  into an airtight jar or crumble them if you prefer (they last longer as whole leaves), and put them away from light.

How do you decide whether to tincture or dry?  For me, it is often a matter of aesthetic pleasure – any herb I enjoy drinking as tea, I might as well dry.  What’s the point, say, of peppermint tincture, when peppermint tea is so delicious?  On the other hand, valerian doesn’t taste that good anyway, so I might as well cover it in cheap vodka  .  Also, if you have kids, I find it a lot easier to get them to drink a cup of tea than to swallow anything alcoholic, so either that or glycerin is preferrable.  Books will have good recommendations about whether to tincture or dry, and some of it may depend on what you want to use them for.

The three books I’d really recommend starting with are James Green’s _The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook_, Richo Cech’s _Making Plant Medicine_ and for those growing their own, Tammi Hartung’s _Growing 101 Herbs that Heal_.  It should go without saying, btw, if you are not cultivating these herbs, but wildcrafting them, you are doing so completely ethically – not taking more than a fair share of any stand, encouraging them to expand their range, not harvesting endangered plants.  Wildcrafting is best used for plants that are weedy anyway - St. Johns Wort, for example, is a real pest in my friend’s pasture, so we help her out - and me.

Happy harvesting!

Sharon

• herbs
• Comments(4)

admin September 28th, 2010

In the first part of this essay, two posts down, Commenter Brandie asks what I think is a really good question:

You say the using of herbs is well-covered territory, but I’d actually love some recommendations on that. All the books I’ve read contradict each other and list totally different plants for specific ailments, and much of it is vague and seems less than scientific. In my own experience, the effectiveness of the few herbal remedies I’ve tried hasn’t been all that convincing. I’d love to see some simple, straightforward information “for the rest of us” about using medicinal plants that require minimal processing (i.e. no expensive equipment) and are actually effective for specific medical needs.

I started to answer her question in comments, and then realized it actually deserves its own post.  Unfortunately, what I don’t have is a really good answer for Brandie about what kinds of herb books might be most useful to her. And the reason for that is that I think a lot of this has to do with personal taste.

Brandie is looking for books that are science-based and specific, and I have some real sympathy with this desire.  As we all know, by day I’m a science writer and a farmer (ie, hands on science).  When I first started investigating herbalism, I came to it with a “I don’t want me no unscientific bullshit” attitude.  I was fairly hostile to what I saw as a ”new-agey, unscientific” quality in many herb books myself.  But the more I read, the more I began to understand the complexities of wanting to apply scientific knowledge to herbalism.  It isn’t that it is a bad idea - it is that in many cases, the science we have isn’t very good.  In others, what is being examined isn’t the same as what herbalists are actually doing.  In still other cases, there isn’t any science, except for the ethnobotanical knowledge that has emerged over centuries or millenia of use - there simply hasn’t been any real investigation.

All of this makes finding good and “scientific” herbal knowledge challenging.  Some herbs are well investigate, some aren’t.  When they are well investigated, they tend to be investigated for one or two purposes - and herbalists may have other traditional uses that haven’t been explored.  Sometimes herbalists may be passionate advocates for treatments that actually don’t stand up to scrutiny - and that’s true of allopathic medicine as well, as we all know.  In some cases, as in the discovery of liver damage from Pyrrolizidine alkaloids in plants like Comfrey, Wild Ginger and Coltsfoot, only good scientific analysis over populations could actually reveal the dangers of long term, extensive use of these herbs.  In other cases, research that is narrow, weak or involves the extraction of a single plant constituent to evaluate the merits of a whole plant is used to discredit things unfairly.  And there’s really no good way to know which is which without a lot of reading and investigation - it is neither true that research reveals nothing useful about herbs nor is it true that you can read the headlines about herbs and know what you need to know.

The other issue is that reasonable people can reasonably disagree.  One herbalist or doctor might counsel complete avoidance of PA plants - another might feel that their merits justify limited, short term use.  This is also a consideration in allopathic medicine - and indeed many of the “toxic” herbs we are talking about have far fewer toxic reactions to their credit than many of the medicines you keep in your medicine cabinet - Tylenol has done in more livers than PAs ever will. At the same time, avoiding things that will hurt your liver seems like a good idea to me - but then I don’t have a condition that is only helped by a PA-rich plant.  And for that matter, I’m not sure it is such a good idea for me to take tylenol - and yet that decision is left up to us.

To make things more complex not every study uses plants in the same way - and some don’t use plants at all.  For example, it is common for science to identify one or two chemicals in a plant as the “active constitutents” and sometimes that’s true. In fact, that’s how a vast number of synthetic drugs were derived.  But it is also true that most plants have dozens or hundreds of constituents, and it isn’t always clear that a reductionist approach can get the same results a more complex worldview can.  For example, there’s a reason we don’t take spinach capsules - we eat spinach. If we could reduce our nutrition to its basic constituents and get better results by popping a pill, we would have done so - but we can’t.

What’s active in the constituents of a plant changes a lot too, and we don’t know very much about how soil, temperature, water levels and season change most herbs - that research is barely begun.  We know, for example that the primary “active constituent” if you want to call it that, of peppermint changes several times - it is one thing before flowering, another thing at flowering and still another after it.  We know that comfrey has lots of PA’s in its root all the time, and that it had varying concentrations of them in the leaves at different seasons - a lot in the spring, not so much in the fall.  So you can harvest the comfrey plant several times during the season, use the first couple of batches as mulch, and then feel more comfortable using it, if you think it is warranted.  Or maybe you’ll never feel comfortable about that.

If your experience with herbal remedies consists mostly in purchasing such remedies at a drug store or natural food store, that can lead to a lot of poor success.  Consider spinach as an analogy again.  We know it is good for you - but do you think that spinach dried at fairly high heat and then powdered and kept on a shelf for a year is going to do as well as the fresh stuff from the farmer’s market?  But that’s exactly how many supplement manufacturers treat the herbs in question. 

It might be easy to look at elements of constitutional medicines, like Traditional Chinese Medicine or Ayurvedic medicine, and see them as woo.  Allopathic medicine recognizes that the same treatments don’t work for everyone - that one person’s diabetes or heart disease can be controlled by one medicine while it fails miserably for another person’s - but they rarely attempt seriously to figure out why that is, or group people who respond together.  Indeed, modern medicine has only in the last two decades even begun to recognize how men and women respond differently to conditions and treatments.  I haven’t the faintest idea how effective TCM or Ayurvedic medicine are - but I think the project of constitutional analysis isn’t necessarily nonsense - and that it would be an interesting process to apply in allopathic medicine.

This is a long subject, and a complicated one, and I’m not going to do it full justice here.  What I want to point out is that the reason there’s no one best “science based” approach here is that different people evaluate things differently.  Different people have different tolerance for ambiguity, or for different technique. I think it is important to recognize that empiricism has a real hold in allopathic medicine as well - and that ethnobotany and empirical experimentation also have scientific merit.  That doesn’t mean they are everything, or that I’m opposed to controlled and double-blind studies, but I do think it is important to recognize that not everyone who takes the ethnobotanical approach seriously is crazy.  I admit, I have a low tolerance for some stuff - I find I turn off when someone like Matthew Wood, who comes from the intuitive, ethnobotanical end of the spectrum starts talking about healing energies - that’s just not a language I respond to. At the same time, I don’t dismiss everything Wood has gleaned from his long practice as an herbalist, and I try to recognize that some of this is me.

All of which is a very long way of saying that just as there is no one or two gardening books that I can  tell you have what you need, there isn’t a single approach to studying herbalism that I can recommend.  Different people have different approaches and different tolerances, and I think realistically the only way to get a decent understanding of herbalism is to read a lot of books and do a lot of learning about plants and how they work.  Different people will have to take different risks into account.

 But Brandie wants a book list, and I swear I’m going to give it to you.

First, a very basic book I like a lot - Joyce Wardwell’s _The Herbal Home Remedy Book_.  She focuses on basic, simple remedies using 25 plants that are generally extremely safe.  It isn’t possible to do any harm to yourself with alfalfa or burdock root or plantain unless you work hard at it, and offers a nice, “soft” way of getting into herbs. She’s very balanced - she’s very clear on the merits of allopathic medicine as well, and her whole approach is, I think, very good.

For someone who is most comfortable with a hard-science approach to herbalism, I think Steven Foster’s _Herbal Renaissance_.  Foster has a lot of good information here - I think he is sometimes unnecessarily conservative or dismissive in his relationship to some herbs, that conservativism will probably endear him to some people.  His scientific knowledge is excellent, and while he’s a little dry sometimes, I like his writing.  I find his books extremely useful, set against herbals that sometimes elide issues and risks.

James Green’s _The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook_ is,  I think, a wonderful guide to making remedies, and he offers both equipment intensive and non-intensive alternatives.  It is not an herbal - that is, it isn’t a book that covers the merits and risks of individual herbs, but it does cover Brandie’s desire to know what books will help her learn to make remedies.

For an actual herbal, I really, really like Penelope Ody’s _The Complete Medicinal Herbal_ - while I own a number of herbals, this is my favorite. 

For recipes for remedies, I think Rosemary Gladstar’s and Susun Weed’s books are very good - they tend towards the more intuitive, but they also do something that I think many herbalists don’t - they offer up recipes and combinations of herbs freely and openly. 

If you can afford it, or can get it through a library the hefty and highly technical _The Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy_ by Mills and Bone is a very well done and highly technical - in a good way - analysis of the connections between allopathic and herbal medcine.

These books, I think, will get you started. From there, however, I think you will find you want to study more and more, and that’s as it should be.  Once you get beyond “peppermint for indigestion, valerian for sleeplessness” the complexities of this are worth consideration - and that’s as it should be. 

I should add, I’m not an herbal practitioner, and I don’t know if I ever will be one. I have considerable experience using herbs with my family, I’m a passionate researcher when I’m interested in anything, and I’m fascinated by plants in general, and their uses, but I think of myself primarily as an herb grower and plant expert, rather than an expert on how plants work on human bodies.  I have a lot of medical experience - my years as a paramedic and medical assistant mean that I’d probably like to gain the skill set of clinical herbalism, but so far, I haven’t had time, with the exception of one short class.  Others may have different recommendations, and you might want to take them more seriously than you take mine.

Cheers,

Sharon

• herbs
• Comments(8)

admin September 27th, 2010

The last two years have been an intensive exploration of medicinal plants at our farm - we started out with the general sense that beyond the medicinals we were already growing, we wanted to add more herb plants that were suited to our local environment.  We were responding to two things - first, local practitioners who struggled to find good sources of local herbs, and second, the fact that our wet soil supports many native wetland medicinals without requiring unusual inputs. 

We had always used herbs at our home for culinary and medicinal reasons, but we started out with a small number of  common herbs, and bought anything unusual.  I have an insatiable curiosity about plants though, and every time I bought something from somewhere else, I wondered if I could grow it. It turns out that I can in many cases.

The list of medicinals grown at our property began to increase.  And then I had something of a revelation - a friend of mine who is a nurse practitioner was complaining that she was telling her clients to go buy elderberry syrup at Walmart that was imported from China - because she didn’t have a reliable local source.  I thought “Lord knows, I can grow elderberries.” Our wet soil is ideal for them.  So I decided to plant more elderberries.  And in that process I began to seriously research wetland medicinals and the markets for them.

I have no interest in supplying the wholesale market, however.  Our farm, which is small scale and includes no tractor is not the place, I think to plant whole acres of any plant.  What I’d like to do it two things that bring good plant medicine to people. First, I’d like to work with both local practitioners and people who take charge of their own health to provide the plants they rely on.  With that goal in mind, we’ve spent much of the last two years not only exploring what we can grow, but also working to make sure that we produce the best quality dried material.  I think the difference between my herbs and the powdered capsules one buys at a drugstore are night and day - rather the difference between eating spinach and buying spinach capsules.

The other project I’d like to do is to make sure as many people as possible have a functional medicinal garden at their homes, to help them take advantage of the things they can do to serve their own health and also as a backup (as well as an alternative) to existing allopathic medicine.  Towards that goal, I plan to see herb plants from my home and possibly by mail.  There’s not nearly as much information out there on good herb gardening as I’d like there to be, and for beginners, wondering what to put in their gardens, or even more advanced players struggling to sort out which plants they should and can grow, it can be challenging.

Many medicinal plants are overharvested or endangered in the wild, and there are compelling reasons for people who rely on them to begin growing them for themselves.  There’s also a security to providing for your own basic needs.

A lot of people offer good guidelines for basic herb gardens - Susan Wittig Albert, the author of many wonderful mysteries about herbs has a lovely essay about what a basic  medicinal garden should look like that I think is just perfect.  What I’m hoping to do is more specialized - I’d like to offer a number of gardens that are directed to specific situations, along with basic ones.  A pregnancy and nursing garden, for example, or a garden for people with heart issues.  I’d also like to help people begin to customize their own herb gardens, with an eye towards the future and times where they may need to rely on them.

That’s how we began.  Our medicinal herbs included the general herbs that one wants for ordinary things - colds, digestive upsets, children’s ailments.  And gradually we began to get more specific.  Eric has a minor heart irregularity that he treats successfully with motherwort and hawthorn, so those were added to the garden.  The goats get an herbal wormer, and I added the ingredients for that to my garden.  Everyone in my family develops osteoarthritis sooner or later, so herbs for joint ailments went into the mix.  Now that we are thinking more about marekts and less just about our own needs the variety gets even greater - to my deep happiness, since I love playing with plants.

I have to say, I have more fun working the herbs than almost any kind of gardening I do - I’m not sure what it is, but I look forward to the days I get to go out into the herb beds even more than going out to the veggie gardens.  Maybe it is the sheer, huge diversity of medicinals - I don’t know what it is, but it is so much fun.

So where do you start if you want to learn to grow your own medicinals and use them?  The using end is pretty well covered in the book department, it is the growing that can be challenging to learn about. Those books aren’t nearly so plentiful or so famous - and yet, they are a central part of the project.  Herb books that start without any thought about where you will get  your herbs, or that recommend people rely mostly on remedies from far away, do us a disservice.

So let’s focus on the grower books - in most cases, the expert growers are people who are already growing great herbs for sale, so if you live near them you should consider taking advantage of their knowledge. I’ve included links to as many home sites as I can find.

I’ve been recommending Tammi Hartung’s wonderful _How to Grow 101 Herbs that Heal_ for some years as the primary reference I have on this subject, and it is a very good book.  One of the things I like about it is that it breaks down the herbs into the kinds of natural environments they like, and helps you group them - so plants that like to be near water or have wet feet are put together, plants that like alpine or mediterranean conditions are grouped together.  This is very helpful when people want to figure out what will grow naturally in their region.  The book has good sections on using the herbs, and a nice section on incorporating medicinal plants into your food, but the meat is the guide to growing. It is a great starter book on this subject.   My only caveat is that I’d like a little more detail about growing techniques.

If you want lots of details from the person in the US who knows the most about growing the widest variety of medicinals, you’ll want Rich Cech’s _The Medicinal Herb Grower Vol. 1_.  This book is probably best for someone who has already grasped the very basics, and it isn’t a plant-by-plant guide.  Cech started Horizon Herbs, the single best source of herb seeds in the US, and my suspicion is that Cech just knows too much about too many plants to give us herb-by-herb info.  Instead, he focuses on the general knowledge you need to figure out what plants need.  The book is incredibly useful an enlightening - his observation, for example, that woodland herbs often don’t like animal manures, and require leaf duff as fertilizer is wonderful.  The book is also fun to read in the same way his wonderful _Making Plant Medicine_ is - full of stories and illustrations with a comic touch. If I have any criticism, it is that the book is just a little disorganized for my taste - again, I think it would be a tough book for a beginner to sort through.  But the very fact that Cech offers his growing knowledge is so incredibly valuable to me that it seems churlish to criticize at all.

If you want to move up to the commercial scale, or are looking for an herb-by-herb guide that gets more specific than Hartung’s you might want to add Lee Sturdivant’s and Tim Blakley’s book _The Bootstrap Guide to Medicinal Herbs in the Garden, Field and Marketplace_ - Blakley wrote the grower guide, while Sturdivant covers the market.  The market information is some years out of date (published in 1998) and I think of limited utility anyway for many people, since Sturdivant didn’t go very far afield in his profiles of companies - nearly all are right near him and they represented a somewhat limited picture of growers.  But the meat is in the herb-by-herb growing information and that is valuable.  The emphasis is on high-return herbs and on farm-scale production, but there’s valuable information here for home growers as well.   

I had the opportunity to take a workshop with Dr. Jeanine Davis at the Monticello Harvest Festival (due to my speaking schedule and family obligations, this was the only workshop I got to take, but boy was it worth it) on growing woodland medicinals. Dr. Davis is an expert on medicinal herb farming, and provides support to a host of growers through Cooperative Extension.  Any of you who live close enough to N.C. state should definitely consider taking classes with her  - I learned a lot, and this is not new material for me.  She gave me excellent advice on practices for my climate as well.  Her website, linked above is a great resource, and so is her book, co-authored with Scott Persons, Growing and Marketing Ginseng, Goldenseal and Other Woodland Medicinals. I’ve just finished reading it, and my immediate reaction was “where have you been all my life?”

There’s a lot of good information in Thomas DeBaggio’s _Growing Herbs from Seed, Cutting and Root_ - the emphasis here is on propagation techniques, and that’s very valuable since so many herbs grow best from division or cutting.  This is not an organic book, and it isn’t necessarily the one I’d use to help people begin to grow out plants sustainably - he emphasize soilless mixes and heating mats and this is not an organic agriculture, but it is a very useful book.

Nancy and Michael Phillips’ _The Herbalist’s Way_ (formerly k nown as “The Village Herbalist, which I think is a much better title, frankly) is a great book.  Its focus isn’t on growing particularly, but on all the things one needs to do small farm herb growing and herbal practice, from recommending books to talking about credentials to many other things.  But the book contains a number of small farm profiles and a lot of information on growing, harvesting and drying herbs that is enormously valuable.  They have a section on appropriate technology for small farms and recommendations classed by region and environment that are very helpful. 

I hope this helps more people begin to get their own herb gardens up and running!

Sharon

• Uncategorized , herbs
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Sharon May 13th, 2010

I recently got an email from a couple in their 40s who asked me if I would advise them on the very basics of gardening.  They mentioned that they want to do this, but that gardening is a completely unknown world to them, and that they’ve been reluctant to even take my garden design class, because the word “design” seems so overwhelming when you are looking at dirt seriously for the first time in your life.  They wondered if I would be willing to advise some absolute newbies.

And indeed, I am - because realistically, that’s more of us than anyone would like to admit.  It was me once - my first balcony garden, grown in college, failed because I didn’t realize you actually had to fertilize your plants - I dumped potting soil in pots and left them there, watering occasionally.  I’ve done every stupid thing you can imagine in a garden. 

So I’m delighted to offer some very basic gardening guidelines.  The couple asked to remain anonymous, so I’m referring to them (with their goodnatured consent) as “Ms. and Mr. Grasshopper” and will be answering their questions throughout the season.

The first one is what to read about gardening.  They went off to the local library and bookstore and came home with a bunch of books.  But, they admit, most of them are either too advanced or too confusing.  And they say such contradictory things - who should they believe?

And this does point up a real and serious problem in gardening - that in fact, most garden books do give wholly contradictory advice.   You’d think that someone who spends as much time as I do thinking about gardening would have a pile of just absolutely perfect authors, whose wisdom I agree with 100%.  in fact, I don’t have any such thing - the majority of garden books contain some good and useful information.  They also contain (in my opinion) some uninformed nonsense and some things that are helpful to some people, but wrong or pointless or irrelevant to people dealing with different pests, weeds, climates, soils or conditions. 

This is true even of gardening books I like.  And I assume that it will be deemed true if I ever write a gardening book.  The old joke about Jewish folks “Two Jews, three opinions” is even more true about gardeners.

So unfortunately, I can’t actually suggest to my Grasshoppers that they buy the one or two most useful garden books.  This would be very helpful to them, but instead, what I suggest is that they begin acquiring (or borrowing from the library) a range of books that will help them, remembering, also, not to take as gospel anything anyone says - including me.  This is much harder than giving the one true answer.  But anyone who says they have the one true answer in the garden is a liar or a fool.

So here is an opinionated, annotated list of the garden books I’ve found most useful. It is somewhat changed from the lists provided in _A Nation of Farmers_ and _Depletion and Abundance_, as I’ve read more books and changed my thinking some.  In each, I try to note what the book is actually good for, and if I can remember, where it is wrong.  I’ve included books that my Grasshoppers might not be ready for yet (and pointed out where this is true) in the interest of appealing to a broad range of readers.  But first we’ll start with absolute beginners:

Beginner Books

Mel Bartholomew’s _Square Foot Gardening_ has done more to make gardening accessible to more people than perhaps any other basic garden book out there, and is well worth the investment.  I actually think the older version of this book is better, because it emphasizes purchased inputs less than the more current one.  I think he uses more chemicals and purchased components than I like, but the basic method is very clear, very straightforward and very helpful. I don’t really think anyone should ever have just one garden book, but this wouldn’t be a bad candidate to get started with.

I wasn’t that excited by the title, but _The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening_ is actually excellent.  Written by a father-daughter team, she a Garden writer, her father a retired Plant Biochemist, it somehow manages to get just the right balance of information.  The book is clear, it focuses on the food crops most people will want to start with, it covers everything you need to know from design to soil biology in very clear terms.  This book and Bartholomews are as close as I can come to imagining a small but comprehensive garden library.  It is good enough that the book will be a good addition to moderately experienced gardeners as well.

Robin Wheeler’s _Gardening for the Faint of Heart_ is more idiosyncratic and less comprehensive than either of the above, but is a nice supplement to them, and is about the most accessible and friendly of all garden books.  Think of it as a chatty companion with lots of information. 

Most gardening books are really regional - unless they are so general as to be useful only to the beginner.  The best of these are honest about who they apply to.  Bob Thomsen’s _The New Victory Garden_ is a superb basic book for people living in the Northeast, Northern Midwest and northern Mid-Atlantic - its advice is perfect for those regions, but since my Grasshoppers do live in the Midwest, this will be a good addition to their list.  One of the best things about this book (based on the old PBS tv series available cheaply, but don’t get the old Crockett’s version, which is heavy on the pesticides) is that it will tell you what to do in each month to get your garden started.

My Grasshoppers see the proper beginning place for them as a fairly conventional annual garden of popular vegetables, but that isn’t necessarily the only or best way to go.  I’d like them to think at least a little about permaculture and designing a space that does more than produce annuals with a maximum of effort. For that, I think the single best “help people see the basics differently before they get locked in” book is Toby Hemenway’s wonderful _Gaia’s Garden_.  I recommend this for every household, even if you don’t think you want to know about permaculture.  You really do - and this is a superb book that will get you thinking in the right terms.

These five books, put together are a very good start for most beginners.  Those in other regions of the world will want to find an equivalent basic regional book for their area.

Containers:

My Grasshoppers have a moderate sized yard, but they have most of their sun in the front, and want to add some containers to their plan - but they don’t know what grows well in containers, how to fertilize or take care of them.  So the next category of garden book I’m going to recommend are books on container gardening - which is tricky, since most container garden books focus on just a few edible plants and mostly on flowers.  I like four books, personally. 

First, there’s _McGee and Stuckey’s The Bountiful Container_ - which covers a really nice range of container plants, soils, fertility and how to grow them.  This is really *the* comprehensive reference on the subject, and if you had to pick one book, this would be it.  I don’t think they spend quite enough time on soils and micronutrients but otherwise, it is good.

I like DJ Herda’s new book _From Container to Kitchen_ quite a bit, in part because he really includes some suggested interesting crops - I’m excited by his section on growing dwarf bananas in pots.  But rest assured, he also takes good care of basics - beans, cucumbers, tomatoes.  He’s an opinionated guy, and I disagree with a few of his recommendations - but in some ways opinionated gardeners (especially when their opinions are leavened with humor, as his are) are the best - because all gardeners are opinionated, but some conceal it under a veneer of scientific expertise, implying that there is only one true way. I like that Herda comes out and makes the case for his way.  It isn’t quite the Bible that the Stuckey and McGee book is, but it add something to the other.

If you are growing serious food in containers, sooner or later you’ll want to investigate self-watering containers, also known as earth boxes.  Because water and fertility stress aren’t the constants they are in most standard containers, this is a great way to up your container yields.  The standard book on the subject is Edward Smith’s _Incredible Vegetables from Self-Watering Containers_.  The problem I have with the book is that there really isn’t enough content in it to make a real book - it is stretched out with irrelevancies and huge pretty pictures that only emphasize that this good and valuable information really could have been contained in a pamphlet, rather than its own book.  It is a helpful guide to this technique, however, so it is worth reading. I’m glad I own it, mostly, although I think most of us could glean the relevant parts from a single borrow from the library.

_Fresh Food from Small Spaces_ by RJ Ruppenthal is a great book for urban folk or others with small spaces that want to maximize what they can do even in the city.  It isn’t wholly a gardening book, much less a container gardening book - it covers bees and chickens, fermentation and sprouting as well.  But it is a terrific book, and has some great ideas for using vertical spaces and found containers, enough that I’d add it to the list.  It is readable and passionate sounding, which alone makes it more fun than many garden books.

Weeds:

Being a Gardener means being a weeder - we pay lots more attention to planting and harvesting, but a lot of the day to day reality of gardening is simply keeping ahead of the weeds.  There are lots of strategies for doing this, and this is one place where folks get more opinionated than not.  My opinion comes down to two things - don’t let them get away from you, and mulch the crap out of them.  So that informs my books.

The first book you definitely want is a guide to your weeds - the more you know about weeds, the easier they are to manage.  My personal favorite is a pricey book that I bought some years ago, but have never regretted called _The Weeds of the Northeast_ (this kind of book doesn’t seem to lend itself to innovative titles ), but you will want whichever weed book best applies to your region of the world. I don’t know where most of you live, so I can’t offer a suggestion - call your cooperative extension agent and ask them.

The two other books I recommend on this subject basically both take the same approach, and you can easily get away with just one, depending on your tastes.  I like Ruth Stout’s old _How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back_ for the entertaining essays and Lee Reich’s more concrete and analytic approach in _Weedless Gardening_ for the nitty gritty.  Mulched gardening is not rocket science, and you can learn it from either, but the two together make a wonderful combination.  Weedless Gardening is also a pretty good basic book on gardening as well.

Seeds

My Grasshoppers are purchase transplants for everything they can’t direct seed this year, because they are getting a late start, but eventually, they will probably find it financially friendlier to start at least some seeds in advance.  They may also find that they’d like to save seeds, and cut down on their seed bill for next year, as well as building local adaptation into their plants.  So once they get that far, they’ll want a couple of books on seeds, and maybe the very basics of backyard plant breeding.  I know that sounds overwhelming now, but again, it isn’t rocket science, and you go from raw beginner to expert, aching for a new challenge pretty quick in gardening.

For beginners who haven’t gotten to seed saving, I like Nancy Bubel’s _The New Seed Starter’s Handbook_ which has tons of specific information about every variety of vegetable, herb and flower you  could want, laid out very clearly. 

The best seed starting and saving book, however, is Suzanne Ashworth’s superb _Seed to Seed_ which covers the whole cycle of seed saving and spreading for a huge range of edible plants.  If you can only have one book on this subject, this is it.

In addition, even if it sounds intimidating, I love Carol Deppe’s _Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties_ - it is readable, entertaining, compelling and useful, and a great book.  It makes it clear that the work of creating new food plants that can adapt to changing conditions will not be left only to plant scientists - it can’t be, because we are the ones who know what we need. I recommend everyone read this book (once you get past the starting stage) even if you think you’d never do it. You won’t regret it.

More than Just Veggies

What happens when my Grasshoppers are ready to go beyond the most common fruits and vegetables and want to get into new plants?  Well, then they need some guidelines to less familiar plants - perennials, fruits, herbs, etc…  Depending on their interests, they may want some of these specialized books - and indeed, I will encourage them, once they’ve gotten their hands into the dirt for the first time, to add perennial and woody plants to increase the food they can produce.

If you want to grow medicinal herbs, there’s really one definitive book - Tammi Hartung’s excellent _Growing 101 Herbs that Heal_ - everyone may want to add basic medicinals or specific to conditions they or their family are dealing with, and while there are many herb books that focus on how to use the herbs, books that really emphasize how to grow them are few and far between. This is a wonderful one and I consult mine regularly.

What about grains?  Most of us rely on grains to provide staple calories, but few of us grow them, which is a pity, since most grains are grasses and very easy to grow.  Thankfully, Gene Logsdon has finally re-released the definitive and wonderful _Small Scale Grain Raising_ which was out of print for decades.  Revised and updated, it is an essential for anyone who wants to grow even a tiny patch of grains.

Michael Phillips’ _The Apple Grower_ is the modern definitive book on organic apple growing, and is wonderful - and much of what he says applies to other tree fruits grown organically.  Gene Logsdon has an out of print book _Organic Orcharding_ that is also excellent, and covers a wider range of fruits - I’m hoping that will be his next re-release.

If you are going to grow unusual fruits, I come back to Lee Reich, whose _Uncommon Fruits for Every Garden_ will help you sort through fifty different kinds of faux-cherry in your catalog and whether you want to grow Medlars. 

Eric Toensemeier’s super _Perennial Vegetables_ is also well worth the investment - he’s done the hard work of sorting through unusual and funky, even unknown vegetables in order to give everyone access to a range of crops that come back every year without effort.  Familiar rhubarb and asparagus are here, along with the unfamiliar, and it is worth having and considering.  This is another one I go back to year after year.

Getting More Advanced

Believe it or not, at some point terms like “soil ph” and “cruciferae” and “woody perennial” will turn from mystifying bits of an alien language into the ordinary terms of your day to day life.  You will know that blueberries need acid soil and not to set your peppers out until it gets warm and what damping off disease is.  A few seasons under your belt and you’ll recognize your seedlings from the weedlings and while you won’t stop making garden mistakes, you will probably go looking for some new and creative ones to make.  That’s when you need these books - the ones that help you take the next step on, whether it is market gardening, season extension or serious forest gardening or just a greater degree of self-sufficiency.

Eliot Coleman’s _The New Organic Grower_ is *the* book for small scale market producers, but larger scale home gardeners will learn a lot from it as well.  The discussions of green manures, undercropping, appropriate tools and technologies, soil building, etc…are past the level of a beginner, and for people who are really ready to get serious about gardening.  Like all of Coleman’s books, it is a well written and thoughtful tome

Also by Coleman are the two bibles of Season Extension - _The Four Season Harvest_ and _The Winter Harvest Handbook_ - the two build on one another, and talk about ways of extending the garden season year round in cold climates.  This book will be less valuable for folks in hot places, but for those in cold and moderate temperate climates they are indispensible.  If you had to get one, I’d get The Four Season Harvest.

Dave Jacke is a brilliant man who has written an enormous two volume book on Forest Gardening in temperate climates.  These are amazing books, and incredibly useful references even if what you are doing isn’t officially forest gardening - his plant information is astonishing, and the tables alone are worth the price of the book. I don’t, however, recommend them to beginners - or even folks who are still in the first few years of gardening, unless you really like anality.  The thing is, Jacke is so focused on doing it right - hundreds and thousands of pages of doing it right… that I think it is simply overwhelming to beginners who want to deal with smaller spaces.  Jacke knows his stuff cold, but by the time you finish reading all the steps in soil prep and design, you probably will have decided that this whole thing is far too overwhelming.  But once you’ve gotten past that, and are actually doing, they are wonderful books - very expensive, but worth the price.

I’m not a double digger, and I actually don’t think that highly of double digging as a technique - I know too many people who set out to use the techniques in _How to Grow More Vegetables…_ by John Jeavons and were knackered by the construction of the garden beds, and never did end up growing much.  If, however, you have many unrebellious teenagers to use as slave labor who need to sublimate sexual frustration, or you like double digging, you could build a large garden of double dug beds.  Or you could actually derive all the good and powerful knowledge in here about crops but maybe give yourself a little bit of a break.  I do think that outside of California, the yields are probably overstated, but even doubling their expected space gets you a lot of food in a small place.  Ecology Action also publishes a number of culture and climate specific garden pamphlets “A Complete Mexican Diet” “A Complete Kenyan Diet” that may be useful in many places outside California.  Their work is wonderful and the book enormously valuable, even if I don’t think you actually need to sit around and sift your soil through screen to two feet deep.

Finally, I have a particular taste for Terry and Mark Silber’s _Growing Herbs and Vegetables from Seed to Harvest_ because they are doing  so much of what I want to do.  This is a largely idiosyncratic choice, and if you aren’t trying to grow herbs and flowers along with vegetables, you might not find this book that interesting.  But it shows what they do on their farm to grow an extremely diverse range of crops, and I find it a very useful supplement to Coleman and the others, as well as doing a good job of actually illustrating what they are doing, rather than just showing garden porn (not that I don’t like garden porn, but pretty pictures aren’t everything.)

There you have it, Grasshoppers, your reading list.  More to come!

Sharon

• Grasshopper's Garden , container gardening , cool season gardening , garden design , herbs
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