Last Saturday afternoon I went to our local herb club. I hadn’t been before and wasn’t sure how they worked and what they did as a group. It took a while to find the group as they were meeting in a park area where there were lots of other people but when I tracked them down they were a group of about eight older people who have a passion about herbs.

We started with a formal meeting where we discussed the program for the next six months with the visits we were going to make to other herb gardens and then we had a talk from one member about taxonomy of plants – all about the naming of them.

We finished with a very enjoyable amble about the herb garden in the park we were visiting. Apparently the herb group has permission to take small portions of the herbs and seedlings as they helped to provide them in the first place. As a result I came home with three tiny aloe vera plants and small rooted pieces of mint and lemon balm. These have been added to my herb border, with the mint and balm in the cooler end and the aloe vera in the full sun.

Overall an enjoyable meeting and I intend to go back this month.

There is little discussion about the place of nutritional herbs in our current diet. The discussion around diet has been hijacked by the health promotion people who focus on encouraging us to eat more vegetables and grain products. While I am in full agreement that we should eat more vegetables nutrition is much more than eating just the main food groups.

Our bodies are incredibly complicated chemical organisms and we often forget that we are what we eat. Our bodies can only use the raw ingredients we give them in our food and drinks. For excellence in nutrition we need to offer our bodies much more than broccoli and apples, wholemeal bread and chicken, good as they may be. We need to provide the goodness which comes from a large variety of herbs, as most cultures around the world have for thousands of years.

We forget that for generations before modern medicine all cultures used herbs both to prevent ill health and to promote recovery from disease. Now there are whole medical journals whose focus is to publish research which goes to prove (and sometimes disprove) what herbalists have known for years. Some herbs are particularly potent for some conditions.

However it may not be helpful to get caught up in the magic bullet theory of treating disease. Herbs shouldn’t only be thought of as the alternative to pharmaceutical drugs, and provided by the drug companies. It is better that they be routinely incorporated into a healthy diet and lifestyle to prevent disease in the first place and to ameliorate early symptoms.

As an example, Rosemary is reported in a medical journal to be (and feel free to jump over the big words) anti-inflammatory with peripheral antinociceptive activity. Traditional herbal texts say rosemary is an antispasmodic, analgesic, antirheumatic, carminative, cholagogue, diuretic, expectorant, and antiepileptic effects. In other words, rosemary is known to reduce inflammation and pain and promotes good brain function, good digestion and elimination of what needs to be eliminated from the body. What more could a person want? It makes sense to add rosemary to lamb and to other recipes, and to use rosemary aromatherapy essential oils when feeling unwell.

Thyme, peppermint, ginger and a multitude of other herbs can be used similarly. A little of a large variety of herbs just might provide for the state of health that we all want.

Technorati Tags: Herbs remedies, Nutrition herbs

It is now the first week of winter and getting cooler. It is time we plant as we expect some rain to come and it is cooler. I made the mistake of just putting my herbs in wherever I had a space and while it worked reasonably well in the short term it wasn’t what I had in mind when I first started my garden.

I am completely reorganising my garden. The parsley, basil and chives are going into a narrow border down the side of the house so they will be sheltered from the greatest of the summer heat next season. Thyme and sage are going have been put into full sun a little further down the same border and hopefully I can get them to a reasonable size before summer comes again.

Strawberries have been put so they can dangle over the path and reduce the number which are eaten by the myriad of insects I have in the garden.

The sand which passes for soil here in Western Australia is an ongoing challenge. I’ve added a lot of mulch to some areas of the garden and that should be giving food to the plants there. However they are not looking good and I’m wondering if it is due to the lack of water (the expected autumn rains were only on a couple of days) or to the lack of nutrients in the mulch. I am currently hand watering twice daily to build up the dampness of the soil and if I don’t see any improvement over the next week will have to add more of the mushroom mix

Technorati Tags: Growing herbs

We had a difficult patch in our garden. It was a narrow (acute) corner, raised above the rest of the garden and a sun trap. It was subject to months of 40 degree celcius temperatures in summer. In addition the soil in our district is pure sand. These are not easy conditions for most plants.

I decided I wanted a ground-cover rosemary having heard that rosemary is one of those plants known to develop a microclimate, reducing the searing heat by a few degrees. Unfortunately the plant, bought as a ground cover variant was not a ground cover one, despite its label. However I decided that it wasn’t a bad thing as the rosemary plant was particularly vigorous and seemed to be suited to the impossibly difficult situation.

It has thrived with only a little animal manure and mulching the first year and a drip feed watering system that I use for the rest of the garden. The tips of the plant now reach above the six foot (180cm fence) and it also drops to the ground three feet (90cm) below. Now, after five years, it fills the difficult patch nicely.

Now… What do I do with the excess rosemary?


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Last night I used a recipe passed on to me by my mum in my early married years. I had needed some fast food and had little money.

Mince patties
300-400g lamb mince – or grass fed beef or probably any red meat mince
1 egg
Salt to taste (about half tsp)
Fresh herbs, usually a handful of parsley, a 6-12 sage leaves (depending on size and strength of taste), thyme

Strip the thyme leaves from the woody stem, cut sage and parsley finely. Add to mince, egg, salt and mix. Make into patty size and fry over a medium heat till cooked through.

I know it is not fashionable to fry things any more and the fat police might have a fit. If frying bothers you then put the mix into a loaf tin and cook in the oven.

Technorati Tags: Cooking herbs, parsley, sage, thyme

One of the cooking herbs that has survived better than expected has been my chives. This year a few seedlings took root outside the planting bed on the path, and despite the terrible conditions have survived. The ground under the crushed stone is pure sand. These plants must be tucking their roots under the plant bed to receive some water and nutrient.

A little later in autumn I will transplant my herbs into a new bed where I will be able to go and collect them in my bare feet. At the moment I have to have some protection when I walk over the stones as they have very sharp edges.

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It is that time of the year again when I get back into the garden. We have long hot summers here in Western Australia and it is too hot to grow much from December until the end of March. We have lots of days with a temperature over 35 degrees Celcius (about 90 degrees Fahrenheit). The odd day with high temperatures is not a problem as long as intervening days are below 28 degrees (82 F). However when we have weeks over 32 degrees C (85degrees F) my cooking herbs wilt and many die. Even my sage leaves look decidedly unhealthy. Almost all my parsley has either died or gone to seed. What is left is decidedly sad.

I spent much of my life in southern New Zealand which has quite a different climate. There the temperature seldom rises to 27 degrees C (82 degrees F) and summer is usually 10 degrees below that. There I was growing herbs in a cold wet climate on clay with a water table that was at ground level in winter and about 5 centimeters below ground level at the height of summer. My problem there was to encourage my herbs to survive through winter and to find drier spots for those that didn’t like the wet feet. Come to think of it the sage did look similar at the end of winter than it does here at the end of summer – rather worse for wear.

I used to have hundreds of different herb plants in N.Z., including cooking herbs, medicinal hebs and herbs for scenting our acre of garden. Here I have just a hundred square metres of dry sand I am working at improving the soil enough to see my herbs through the hot, dry, summer months.

Technorati Tags: Cooking herbs

At a time when mass information is available through the internet, when modern transportation makes it possible to have a full variety of foods available almost anywhere in the world sites on the internet report we are eating less and less variety. Most of the food eaten around the world comes from just a few types of plants. Wheat, corn, and rice lead the pack and drive the total food industry around the world. Here on the herbs online site we’ll discuss some of the issues.

We are starving ourselves of variety and with that starvation comes a whole lot of consequences for health and behavior. A lack of variety of herbs in our nutrition means we have a lack of variety of the building blocks for the cells of our bodies and this is reflected in poorer immune systems, more chronic disease and poorer moods with epidemic levels of anxiety and depression. As the saying goes, we are what we eat.

This is a time when few people have the time or inclination to have gardens and grow their own food. The skills for growing are fast being lost. The opportunities for gathering are all but gone in cities, and probably in rural areas also.

Back in the old days – a time stretching from the 1920s back to the stone-age – people used to grow and gather a very large range of herbs. My mother used to gather the new growing tips of the May tree hedges (Crataegus) on the way to and from school. She said their mother encouraged them to bring some home and they called it bread and butter. (Nowadays that behavior would probably be called vandalism.)

For our health and sanity’s sake we need to bring back a much larger range of herbs into our diet. These herbs can make our food so much more interesting by adding a variety of tastes so enjoyable to our palates. This herbs online blog will document the journey towards increasing the amounts of herbs my family uses, including growing, making use of home grown herbs and probably supplementing from external sources when needed.