Monday I put the Clover and Strawberry wine recipe up, as well as the Lemon Balm Wine. I have more ideas, just not enough carboys, so I’ll have to wait for some of my previous experiments to be finished fermenting so that I can bottle them and reuse their carboys. 

The garden is humming along splendidly. 

The Capucijner peas are so beautiful and I love the snap of the Golden Snow Peas. If you want beautiful food in your potager then you have to plant these next year. We mainly eat peas fresh in the garden but if there are enough one of these days I may try freezing a batch of the snow peas for stir fries etc in the winter. The Capucijner will be left to dry because I want to try these peas in their own gravy business. 

The Dakota Tears onions are in full flower now and hopefully will be pollinated so I can save seeds to spread round next year as both a vegetable and ornamental. 

Our Black Hungarian pepper plants are loaded with fruit and so pretty. I thought they were ready at a certain size, like the Padron Tapas, but they have to ripen fully to a shade of red-purple so I’m patiently waiting to taste them. 

I also came across a Serbian Weeping Spruce at a garden center while toodling about with my sister. Be still my beating heart - it has purple cones!!! 

I remember the first time, as a child, that I saw conifer ‘flowers’ - red cones - I thought them wondrous. 

Weirdly enough I have never thought to research them in more detail. But down the rabbit hole I went and there are so many spectacular cones to be found here and abroad. (12 Amazing Conifer Cones, by the American Conifer Society.)

Things I never knew till today: “Ontario is divided into 38 ‘seed zones’ under the principle that a tree seedling will grow best when planted in the same zone that its seed came from – the area to which it is genetically adapted. [When helping gather seeds] it started in an undisclosed location. If you’re wondering why a seed collection site would be shrouded in secrecy, here’s the thing – seed collectors get paid according to the volume or weight that they collect, and what they collect needs to be top-notch quality. They are in competition with one another, and their best spots are oftentimes handed down from generation to generation. By keeping historical collection records, they get to know where the forests conceal their secrets.” From The Secret World of the Seed Collectors by M.J. Kettleborough

Now I want to help the seed collectors. And possibly possess a Serbian Weeping Spruce. 

Tuesday I continued work on a new project - The Botanicus Janvrin.

I wanted to make a spot on our website where you could do a ‘quick’ search through all of the things we’ve ever grown or had here on Crofting. I divided it into three main sections: Apothecary, Potager, and Wild. This way there’s beneficial, edible or flowers and native species all mapped out - how they taste, what they’re good for, ethnobotanical uses and so on. I love research and finding new and beneficial ways to utilize what we grow. It’s what stops me most times from buying a new plant or tree when out (ie. the Weeping Serbian Spruce) - if it’s not truly useful and beautiful it's not worth my money. Not that I don’t love beautiful plants ... but I could literally buy all of the things and that would never work with my budget. 

Sidenote: For some reason I thought the William Morris quote required both, but it does not…

“If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

― William Morris

I require and!

Wednesday continued work on the Botanicus. In latin in means ‘the world of plants’. I had first seen a derivation of the word in a book title that I will one day own. It is a book by Cathy Willis that “is a wonderful feast of botanical knowledge complete with superb cross sections of how plants work. With artwork from Katie Scott of Animalium fame, Botanicum gives readers the experience of a fascinating exhibition from the pages of a beautiful book.” One of these days I’ll get it, for now I’m making my own. If I was a better artist I would do my own illustrations but for now …

I also found an absolutely incredible page from the Missouri Botanical Gardens - I tell you their database is splendid!

“To improve access to scientific literature, we have created Botanicus, a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of digitized historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. We have been digitizing materials from our library since 1995, focusing primarily on beautifully illustrated volumes from our rare book collection.

The project undertakes four aims:

1. Develop a model for digitized scientific literature: a universal data structure and metadata schema that will define how scientific disciplines, museums, or individual scientists use and configure available digitized literature on their subjects to initiate or support a research project;

2. Program and test an extensible reference system based on the scientific literature model and universally applicable to all areas of natural history;

3. Capture a robust, targeted subset of systematic botanical literature as images and associated defining metadata for those references, and employ automated OCR and XML markup protocols to convert the image to text and embed links to external data sets;

4. Provide a Web Portal to the scientific literature system that will facilitate research and intensify the vital work on science-based conservation of the world's biological diversity through an interactive, intelligent interface to systematic botanical literature.”

To check out this prodigious masterpiece in the making click here. 

Thursday I had identified the strange mintish plant in the northwest border of the Potager as Motherwort (Leonurus cardiaca). It is from the mint family Lamiaceae, genus Leonurus(lion) - or lion heart (cardiaca). Don’t confuse it with an herb called lion’s tale (leonotis leonurus), even though they interchange common names sometimes. 

This is why knowing the Latin name is very important when making an identification or you can research the wrong plant by mistake and then make some bad choices based on the information. 

Leonurus cardiaca, so named because of its historical use as a heart stimulant, is not native to North America but has spread widely. It’s native range is Scandinavia to northern Spain, Italy and Greece. ‘Wort’ is often used to describe any plant with a medical use and ‘mother’ because of its use in treating female medical disorders related to childbirth and menstruation. 

Along with being a purported tonic for the heart it has appeared to help with anxiety and nerves. 

This got me interested because with my arrhythmia and P.O.T.S. my heart could use some help and because of life we all deal with stress. 

So I decided that I’d try a tincture with mainly the flowers and some leaves. 

In no way am I suggesting that this is a good idea for you to do this. 

I’m not a doctor, I have no training and no credentials, real or internet granted. 

I have no problem with natural options and have found some to be very beneficial. But that doesn't mean that they will work for you or that they are a good idea. 

Just saying. 

A tincture is easy peasy all you need are your clean, bug free herbs and alcohol. I use brandy or vodka, depending on what I have on hand. 

Start with a small amount of herbs - why waste good vodka on something if it doesn't work?

Maybe a jam jar or even smaller would do. 

Place your clean herbs in the jar and top with alcohol to submerge the herbs by an inch or two. 

I have weights for fermenting that I placed on top of mine to keep everything submerged but you don’t have to. Then let it sit in a cool dark place, and shake it once every day for a week. Strain and bottle. 

I have little glass bottles with droppers and I take a few drops at a time, increasing until I find the amount that works for me. Everyone is different. Some will notice benefits with a couple drops, some will use a dropper full. 

With the mullein tincture I make every year, out of the flowers, I take a dropper full a couple times a day any time I start to feel sick, or haven't slept a couple nights in a row - that’s when it always happens, when you're worn down. 

I haven’t had a chest infection since the bronchitis I got pushing through a cold on our move up to Cochrane in 2012. Josh had pneumonia as a kid and had a chest infection every year like clockwork and would be out for months. The first couple years of our marriage I tried everything and then someone finally suggested mullein and now he hasn't had a chest infection either since we’ve been using it. 

The beauty of medicinal plants. 

If you’re interested in making up your own Materia Medica (link to free print out for pages)  - kind of like the Apothecary section in my Botanicus - Herbal Academy has great pages to use to start and a bunch of courses. I haven’t taken any of them, and am not getting paid for this ‘plug’, I just use them a lot in my own research and have found the site super helpful for research. 

Friday and over the weekend was a little bit of this and that. 

I used my new scythe on the Tallgrass Prairie to get all of the non-native grasses out and let the sun and heat get at the earth to warm it and allow the native grasses to grow better. 

We have Blue Vervain (Verbena hastata) growing along the fence that I had transplanted from the Potager last year. Not really a prairie plant but it is native. From the family Verbenaceae the genus name comes from a Latin name used for some plants in religious ceremonies and also in medicine. Hastata means spear-shaped, in reference to the leaves. I didn’t realize that it had medical uses so now that's another plant to add to the Apothecary when I do my research. 

Just a snapshot from Herbal Academy: “The bitter flowering tops relax both physical and emotional tension, especially for type A control freak list-makers with a susceptibility to neck and shoulder tension and headaches. Just a few drops of the tincture will ground and relax most people. It has a long history of use for many health issues and deserves an herbal renaissance of recognition.”

Sounds like a good plant for me. I’m not type A, but I do have way too much neck and shoulder tension. 

I didn’t understand the religious significance until I read this on Mountain Rose Herbs: “Several of the names for vervain (Herb of the Cross, Herb of Grace, Holy wort) refer to the legend that the wounds of Jesus were dressed with vervain when he was taken down from the cross. This is disputed among biblical scholars as it is not referenced anywhere in modern bibles. It was also used as an ingredient in pagan love potions.”

So you see how there are substantiation issues oftentimes when it comes to herbs. Just because it says something, somewhere, doesn't make it true. It could be half true, kind of true, a smidgen of truth clouded in legend and myth, or simply true for that person, but not for you. 

Common sense, my friends, and practical wisdom is essential. 

DO YOUR HOMEWORK! 

Take nothing for granted or at someone else's say so. 

I also continued edging out the Rose Garden. It’s so difficult knowing that I have to wait until December 6 to order my plants. Only a few are available onsite at Palatine, but I may not be patient enough to wait and may have to drive down and at least pick them up and get them in the ground this fall. 

I was able to transplant the lilacs and lilies and peonies that were blocking the spot where the arbor will cut through and my Mum painted it, so now all we have to do is put it up. I’m trying to figure out the best way to secure it with all of the wind that we get here. Probably t-stakes, they seem to work the best. 

So endeth the week.