In a Nutshell...

The growing season nearly killed my inspiration and my blog this year, but alas it's time I turned the wheel and got back into gear.

Signs that hope is in sight:
1. Last year's Horizon catalogue was out on the table a few nights ago...I must be dreaming of spring!

2. I repotted my houseplants just so I could get my hands in some dirt.

3. I actually got my garlic in the ground this year on time. So satisfying!

At the end of summer my garden was looking to be a sad sight. The weeds were winning the space war, the slugs were making a comeback in the heat of summer...I didn't even know that was possible by the way...and the projects I had planned for this year's garden were not even a glimmer in the near future.

My peppers were skinny and small, my eggplants flowered but never grew fruit, and my squash were looking very malnourished. My tomatillo budded out into thousands of cute little starry flowers with fruits the size of grapes. In the end, it was my tomatoes that saved the day and made a beautiful comeback. I think it may have been those tomatoes that got me out into the garden this fall for the garlic planting. I needed some kind of motivational kick in the bum after all those let downs.

Herbally, there was much more sweet satisfaction to be had this year. After all, this is my attempt at being a vegetable gardener, but I cant say it is where my heart truly lies. The calendula was off the hook. I made more calendula oil then I know what to do with (although I am sure it will come in handy, it already has), dried some, and made a big ass tincture of it. Definitely my biggest success of the summer months...or I should say, thank you Calendula, she did all the work! Monarda and valerian grew more than I realized was possible in one season. I also made a lot of new herbal friends this year; boneset, grindelia, blue vervain, agrimony, chamomile, and hops. So, all was definitely not lost.

Since we did not get the fall garden in or even much of a cover crop, the work to get things going in spring will be much more than I want to face. We feasted on Jerusalem artichokes the same day we planted the garlic and that felt like a nice pat on the back from the plant spirits. They are looking out for us!

We are only weeks away from the Winter Solstice. Longer days and more light are only a stone's throw away and then there will be spring. This is our time to rest up and dream about the possibilities before the sun forces us out of our shells. Make the most of it!

Mostly Medicinals Score!!

We have a wonderful little plant nursery here in Portland called Mostly Medicinals, which carries a range of natives, Eastern and Western medicinal plants, as well as interesting, out-of-the-way plants that are fun to check out. It's run by a lovely fairy sprite named Laura and her assistant Sharin. They know their stuff when it comes to growing plants and making medicine and they both have a great way with the plants.

Laura likes to keep the energy flowing so they usually have great semi-annual sales that clear out a lot of their inventory which is also great for people like me...the plant addicts of the world! She will make some serious discounts as well as start a free pile.

Some of the gems she had out at the sale included: 3 different kinds of sage (golden, white, and black), 3 different kinds of Tulsi, Ashwaganda, Codonopsis, Maca, Skullcap, Elecampane, Echinacea, Monkeyflower, Partridge berry, California Spikenard (what?!), Blue Vervain, Blue Cohosh, Rue, Motherwort, Agrimony, Wood Betony, Arnica, Tobacco, Spilanthes, Tea, Soloman's Seal, and so much more!!

If you are into medicinals and have looked for them at plant nurseries then you know how hard it is to find ones that aren't used in landscape design or as culinary herbs. That is why Mostly Medicinals is so awesome, there just arent that many places to get these plants.

On a somewhat side note...A lot of our medicinal plants that are found in herbal commerce have been overharvested from the wild (American Ginseng, Black cohosh, Goldenseal, and many more), losing habitat due to deforestation (partridge berry), or are dying out from disease or insect infestation (slippery elm). Ethically, herb stores are not supposed to buy endangered herbs for commerce from wildcrafted sources, but I'm sure it still happens. I feel that if I am going to be using these herbs for my own health then I should be prepared to find a way to grow them myself.

I managed to walk out of there with 2 flats of plants for $12.50. No joke. This is a seriously awesome place to get plants that does not get the notoriety it deserves. Even if you aren't a total plant nerd, there is still much to be gleaned from getting to know the actual plants that you are using for medicine.

If you are interested in getting involved, she hosts a plant group on Wednesdays from 2-5 and they are generally in the nursery on Fridays and Saturdays. If you want to learn more about Mostly Medicinals, check out their website!

www.mostlymedicinals.com

Raspberry Love

Raspberries are my all time favorite berry. Huckleberries and Blueberries are tied for second and then Blackberries and Marionberries. There are lots of other berries that grow here in the Pacific Northwest (gooseberry, thimbleberry, salmonberry, serviceberry, elderberry, etc.) which I love for other reasons, but when it comes down to it I still love Raspberries the best.

Here are just some of the ways to enjoy these luscious berries:

Raspberries raw straight off the plant...enough said. Yum.

Raspberry Smoothies...that is, if you can actually can make it into the house with enough to put into the blender.
My smoothies are usually dairy free, if I do include dairy I use a glop of yogurt. The rest is up to your imagination, but I like to use a banana for the base, then in this case lots of raspberries, some honey, and maybe a dash and a half of cinnamon. Drink on the back porch and share with worthy friends!

Raspberry Jam
I wont go into the details of making jam here, but this is my favorite jam to make and they make lovely Winter Solstice presents, who wouldnt want a jar of summer love in the dark of winter? If you want to make the jam fresh all at once, you need a LoT of raspberries at one time so that is something to think about.

Raspberry Infused Balsamic Vinegar
Makes a sweet and sour deliciousness that is lovely mixed with olive oil for salad dressing.
Fill bottom 1/4 of half-pint mason jar with raspberries. Cover with balsamic vinegar and put lid on. Shake and infuse with the magic of midsummer. Infuse over night and feel free to use the next day. Its vinegar so will keep infusing as long as you let it and the raspberries eventually disintegrate.

Raspberry Infused Vodka
Very easy and becomes delicious very quickly. Fill quart jar 1/4 of the way with raspberries. Cover with vodka to the very top. Cap it and let infuse for 4-6 weeks. If you cant wait that long, feel free to give a taste test along the way!

Raspberry Crisp/Tart
Just made the tart tonight and made the crisp a few weeks ago. I am officially high on raspberries after tart completion. For the tart filling, I used a raspberry jam that I made last year and covered the top with strawberries fresh picked from the garden. Yowza. Really good and relatively easy.

Raspberry Leaves
This year for Summer Solstice I harvested raspberry leaves to celebrate. The leaves are every woman's best friend, especially women in the "childbearing years", but really all women can benefit from this plant as it is an excellent source of Vitamin C, E, A, and B complex. Also it contains calcium, iron, phosphorous, and potassium (Weed, 1985). This is the best tea to drink during pregnancy. It tones the uterus to ease labor and speed delivery...I drank raspberry tea throughout my pregnancy and was in labor for four hours...was it from the raspberry or something else I dont know, but if I ever sign myself up for that one again I'll be drinking the raspberry tea! Continuing to drink raspberry tea throughout the postpartum time continues to support uterine health and keeps the milk flowing. For mamas, it really is the best!

Harvesting the leaves is very easy. Ask the plant's permission first and if a yes answer is given, get to snippin'. Snip the leaves close to the top and toward the middle where they have not been made tough by the sun or eaten by bugs. The leaves come in threes and are connected by a stem which leads to the main branch of the plant. Snip the entire group of three and skip around as most raspberry patches are quite big. Give back to the plant in the form of saying thanks, then leave some of your hair, tobacco, or corn meal as a way of continuing the connection of energy between you and your medicine.

At the time of this writing, the raspberries were beginning to wane in the garden. Not something I want to think about, but it has been a good run this year! We went out to Sauvies Island a week ago and they were still looking gorgeous on the vine, but very plump and ripe. Get out there and pick before you have to wait a whole year to see them again!!

Kitchen Skin Care Basics

From time to time I pick up shifts at a day spa specializing in skin care that I used to work at a few years ago. Over the time I worked there I learned a lot about the things that make skin look pretty.. oh and the things that make it not so pretty (late nights, partying, stress, diet lacking in fruits and vegetables, etc). They have expensive creams with all organic ingredients and high tech products with all kinds of acids and micro-this and that. Totally unaffordable items that an employee discount doesnt even put a dent in.

At the same time, I am a follower of Rosemary Gladstar wisdom. She makes skin and hair care products solely out of items found in her kitchen, old world style. I guess it depends on your kitchen, but I have made some interesting skin care tools from the items in my fridge and cupboards that make my skin feel better than anything.

Some of my favorites:
Honey masque (the old crystallized honey left in the jar works really well too)
-rub honey on skin
-leave on for about 5-10 minutes
-gently wash off with washcloth, massaging skin as you go
Honey will hydrate, smooth, soften, and stimulate your skin giving you a soft, glowy look! Trust me, a once a week honey mask will do wonders.

Yogurt masque
-Spread a Tablespoon or so on your face.
-leave on for a few minutes or 10 minutes...or more!
-wash off gently with a washcloth
The probiotics in yogurt does great things for the gut. For your face, it will help "undigested" oils move through to heal your skin and make it feel really soft. Yogurt contains lactic acid which helps the body produce new skin cells, in other words it moves out the old to bring in the new!

Brown sugar exfoliating scrub
-dry brown sugar mixed with a little water makes a great exfoliation for the skin
-First wash face with a cleanser
-Mix about a tablespoon or so (depending on how big your face is...)
-Rub onto still damp skin...this feels really good!
-Wash off after you have given your face a good rub down.
-Continue with skin care ritual (i.e. masque or moisturizer)
Skin needs to be exfoliated regularly to keep it looking healthy and to make way for new skin cells especially if you have oily, "problematic", acne prone skin...

Toner
-Essential oils and water make great toner (lime, lemon, or orange work great for oily skin)
-Drop 10 drops of Essential oil into a spray bottle
-Fill up with water...spray liberally after cleansing, before moisturizing or really anytime of the day you need to freshen up.
-Rosewater is great for dryer complexions.

I have yet to make my own cleanser. If anyone has a good recipe for that, let me know!

I'm a big believer in regular facials. I used to think they were decadent and frivolous, until I got one and now they have become essential to self care for me. At home skin care is important to do as well, but sometimes there is only so much you can do without a professional stepping in every now and then to take care of serious skin matters. Acne is like an infected clogged pore- gross, I know. And if you get acne over and over in the same place, then its just going to keep coming back until those top layers of skin are exfoliated off...Im speaking from experience here :)

If natural beauty products interest you, I highly recommend Rosemary Gladstar's Herbs for Natural Beauty. There's loads of easy recipes along with tons of useful information that I promise will make you into a Rosemary follower!

P.S. I have yogurt on my face right now!

Next Metro Club

Wendy's next Metropolitan Buying Club is scheduled for July 11th. If you are in the NE Alberta/MLK neighborhood stop by and say hi. There will be lots of goodies for the taking! Please email or call me if you would like directions.

Fava-licious!

We planted fava beans (they are actually a legume in the pea family) as an overwintering cover crop back in September. Over the course of the fall and winter as they grow, favas will pump nitrogen back into the soil so by the time planting time comes around, the soil will be rich and ready to go. Little did I know that by the time springtime rolled around I would be head over heels in love with this plant!


The idea is to till the plants back into the soil when planting spring crops and these guys will bring even more nitrogen in that way. By that time though, the favas had begun to bloom these pretty little black and white pea blossoms. I couldnt bear to till them in so made space around them to plant my seeds and starts. They continued to bloom and grow quite a bit taller and now are producing beans.

The beans are a bit labor intensive to cook, but well worth it. They require two peelings; first peel the outer pod then you have to pop them out of the inner peel that encases these lovely little beans. Blanching ("to make white") them for a few minutes in boiling water makes the second layer easier to remove. The first ones we cooked were very young and tender and we ate some still in the white casing without realizing that was the second peel. Then we peeled some and ate the tiny bright green bean found buried inside this little gem. The first trial batch was such a hit none of them made it into a recipe or even seasoned for that matter. They are so good, even a picky toddler named Sorrel who rejects all things green ate them and loved them. (Exhibit A: blue plate that once contained favas found empty on serving tray.)



We cant wait for the rest to ripen! They are hard to find in the grocery, possibly easier at the farmers market, but best of all they are probably the easiest crop Ive ever grown. At the time of this writing, the beans arent totally ripe yet and the plants have grown to be about five feet tall. Since they wintered over, they tolerate the cold and with our Oregon winters I never actually watered it myself once!

As a bonus for men and the women who love them, it has an affinity for men's reproductive health. Which, if you notice the way the beans hang off the plant, the "doctrine of signatures" is quite obvious on that one. Jason and I read in James Duke book, Herbs of the Bible, the stems of the fava plant were used for prostate health in Biblical times. How bout that?!

It's Crisp time!

Our community garden has a bad track record when it comes to attendance and lately its been really bad due to the rain. Even the gardening obsessed gardeners haven't been willing to spend too much time out there. Today I decided to brave it. Despite the rain, we still needed greens!

I was rewarded the moment I walked through the gate. Waiting to be picked, there were 4 beautiful luscious dark red raspberries that had just ripened up. The first raspberries of the season. What a treasure. Anyone who has ever had fresh raspberries right off the plant knows they are best that way. They seem to start losing their zest moments after they have been picked. There were a few more on the other side of the bush so I gave myself a few and saved the rest for the man and child...I know I'm much too nice to them!

The rest of the garden was abundant in greens. The greens are just about the only ones that have been loving this weather. For some reason even though the slugs are out of control, they haven't been attacking the lettuce, just everything else. The peas were going off as well and I picked about a pound and a half of them. YES! The first major harvest from pea plants I seeded directly back in February. Some of the plants are from seeds I saved from last year as well, second generation pea plants. They are looking great and have tons of purple, pink, and white blossoms. I also walked away with two plastic produce bags of greens (red lettuce, romaine, baby chard, the last of the spinach, and sorrel). Salads for days!


On my way out I found a smallish, ripe rhubarb and a few strawberries. I also had a fresh pint of strawberries at home in the fridge and some grocery store bought pears. A strawberry-rhubarb crisp was in the making. If you have ever had rhubarb before, it is very tart, you do not need a whole lot, and you usually need another sweet fruit to balance it out. The stalk was very small and there were going to be more strawberries than anything else in the crisp so it was going to be perfect.

The recipe I used came from the "Feeding the Whole Family: Cooking With Whole Foods" by Cynthia Lair. I got the book when Sorrel was born as a gift and it has the easiest, healthiest, and best tasting recipes ever. The author was a faculty member at Bastyr University (a naturopathic college located outside Seattle) so she knows how to make food that's good for you and tastes really good...and the artwork on the cover is by Nikki McClure a fabulous artist from Olympia, bonus points. Most of the recipes include foods that can be set aside and adjusted (pureed, steamed, etc.) to give to baby. Major bonus points.

I subbed maple syrup for the delicious Hood River honey we got last weekend and kept the rest of the recipe the same. Lets just say I'm glad I took a picture of it before I put it in the oven because it disappeared soon after I took it out. To quote Jason, "It's crisp time! I hope there's some vanilla ice cream in here!" And there was along with four red raspberries set aside for garnishment. Viola!

Slug Drama

I hate it when my garden turns into slug food. Unfortunately, that has been the theme this year with all this rain. If it seems like a break in the rain is imminent I run out to the garden, but when I get there I'm often just assessing the damage!

Finally Ive caught on to their survival strategies (i.e. eat everything young, tender, and succulent!) and have gone on the offensive to try out some of my own survival strategies. In the past, I can get by with picking the little boogers off and throwing them over the fence. Labor intensive and somewhat cruel, but it seems to work in the short term.

The level of destruction this year is unbelievable. The marigolds we put out were stripped down to stems in nearly one night and the bush bean sprouts were attacked almost as they came out of the ground. A lot of my herbs were decimated in a rather short amount of time as well. I can say that I honestly have not dealt with slug destruction like this before.

I tend to avoid the "beer trap" strategy as it seems too high maintenance especially with rain on the horizon. The beer gets washed out when it rains and its really gross when the slugs die in them. It does get expensive when you have to keep changing the beer out and the check out person at the grocery store is starting to wonder about me, the woman with the baby buying endless amounts of Steel Reserve.

Finally, I broke down and bought the slug-bait-for-organic-gardeners. Kind of expensive and I had to go to two different stores to get it!! I guess I am not the only one in Portland having to bust out the big guns. I will cross my fingers and pray for all this slug drama to be over. In the meantime I will try and think of what the slugs are trying to teach me. Perhaps a lesson in perseverance because I know it's not a lesson in pacifism!

Local Loco-ness

Last Saturday, a mom friend of mine kicked off a great idea she has been brewing...a community supported farmer's market at her house in NE Portland that provides fresh foods and meats to neighbors and friends. Wendy did the research of finding the goods and she goes out to the farms to fetch them after people make their orders . Ethically treated animals, only organic produce and eggs, raw milk, yogurt, kefir, and kombucha were just some of the things she was ordering for folks. On her store-front porch she had available to buy dried herbs and herbal infusions, wildcrafted Morels, canned jams and fruit, dried fruit and fruit leathers (nothing added), locally roasted coffee, and the best honey Ive ever had in my life (no joke). She also managed to round up some potted plants as well and put those out. The honey and some of the dried fruit came from her mother-in-law that lives in Hood River, which is still pretty close to Portland.

In the future the idea is that it will morph into a larger at home market where friends and neighbors can bring the things they've been making to share and sell to others. This person isnt doing it for profit, she simply wants to create a space for people to build community and get to know their neighbors through the abundance of good food that is grown here.

Jason and I went home with a quart of honey for $12, which we thought was very well priced and (I'll explain this later) a potted comfrey which Wendy was more than happy to see go. When we got home, Sorrel and I tried out the honey by-itself-spoon-style and it was amazing. I eventually had to cut ourselves off, but the rest of the night I found myself sneaking back in the kitchen for more hits of honey. It made me realize that this is what honey is supposed to taste like and Im not so sure anymore about that other honey we've been eating.

The funny thing about the comfrey is that I had actually been looking to acquire some to use herbally. Gardeners know it well as it can be quite a pest when it pops up in the garden and it spreads like crazy in recently tilled garden areas. If you try to dig it up and just a small part of the root gets cut off, up pops another plant. (Dont even think about rotatilling it!) I'm keeping mine in a pot of course and I have lots of ideas for it. The fresh leaves make a potent green salve and the tea is great as a nutritive hair tonic. I'll also tincture the leaves and dry some for teas. This winter during cold season, comfrey will make a great addition to cold care teas as it aids in the healing of tissues damaged from illness. Think of it as an all around awesome tissue healer with a really bad reputation for mayhem. It does serve a purpose in the garden too, the bees love the blossoms and the leaves are mineral rich so you can cover the compost with them. In the picture above, comfrey is looking kind of sad and still adjusting to pot life, but will come back to health in no time.

I'll keep you posted on Wendy and her "Metropolitan Buying Club". It changes month to month and seasonally of course so she let us know that there will be more to come for next month like blueberries, strawberries, and perhaps some raspberries...did I mention berry season is my favorite time to be in the NW?

Staying Connected

Welcome! This is the first entry in my seasonal guide to DIY sustainability and radical domesticity.