Valerian Flower Tincture

I had something of a valerian-related Eureka moment last night! I finished typing the previous post yesterday evening and thought I'd just have a quick check of my email before signing off the computer. And there in my inbox was Susun Weed's weekly ezine, and one of the things she talks about this week is ... drum roll, wait for it ... using the flowers instead of the root for making valerian tincture!

How's about that for 'coincidence'? For me, personally, there's no such thing as coincidence on this scale - I truly believe (and have always found) that if you put stuff out there in the Universe, it will respond .. you will recieve what you need. So all those years I was letting valerian happily set up shop in the garden and thinking hmmmm, I'm not sure why I'm giving it space because I can't use it, and now I can keep it and love it and use it.

If you're interested you should go read Susun's information for yourself but the upshot is that tincture made from valerian root, which is probably the strongest and best known herbal sedative, unfortunately has the opposite effect in a certain proportion of the people who try taking it, stimulating rather than sedating them. I've seen that proportion given as anything from a tenth to a third - so its significant, and I guess you don't know if that's you until you give it a go. Apparently, the flowers give a much gentler effect and have been used successfully by people who were stimulated by the root.

So there I was this morning, snippers in hand, trug at the ready, harvesting those sweet-scented blooms to make my own tincture. I find there is nothing quite like picking and processing a herb to really get to know it. You get the feel and fragrance of the plant as you handle it, and really see the little details closeup. You get to see what the flowers look like just before and just after their best and learn how to tell when they're coming or going. You get to see what busy little creatures like to live, work and play in the plant. I met some rather impressive tiny spiders this morning, so completely green as to be invisible when sat on a floret. And a couple of ants farming aphids and a teensy tiny little beetley thing. By-the-by, with chives it was earwigs (be warned, potential scone-makers!!). So anyway, its not something to do if you've got a bus to catch, but though it took a while to pick the flowers from the heads it felt like time well spent.

Making the tincture is easy, you just fill the jar up to the top with herb and then fill it up to the top (again) with vodka. Then you label it and leave it for six weeks before straining it. Just one thing to mention, a tip which I wished I worked out a bit sooner(!) .. you can't tell really how much herb you're going to end up with, and you do need to fill the jar right to the top with herb. So collect glass jars of all sizes, not just jam jars - its a good idea to keep pesto jars, dried herb and spice jars etc and even those little mini individual portion jam jars that everyone buys each other in gift sets at Christmas. That way you won't kill yourself trying to collect enough plant and also, for general home use, how much of the medicine will you actually need in a year?

So the little bottle in the middle is the Valerian Flower Tincture made this morning, to the left is a little pot of rose petals in oil (will post about that soon) and to the right the Chive Blossom Vinegar I was telling you about the other day here. So now we wait .. I will be really interested to see how effective it is. Sleeping has never been a problem for me thus far in life, I'm one of those lucky souls who falls asleep the instant my head hits the pillow. And any slight excitement before bedtime can easily be sorted out with a mug of Ovaltine and ten minutes engrossed in a novel to switch my brain off from the day and any outstanding mental to-do list. But I've noticed of late a few nights around the same time each month I am lying there unable to sleep for some reason. This is highly annoying if its actually a night where the little'un sleeps through, as you can well imagine! Its always when I'm experiencing other symptoms of hormonal upheaval, so perhaps is a sign of things to come given my age.. so what a helpful thing to have in the cupboard. I'll keep you posted!

I know you guys that visit Earth and Tree often will already know this, but I just want to remind anyone interested in these posts to:

Please be sure you have the right plant before you use it

Consult a professional herbalist and/or doctor for health problems

Find books giving full instructions for making and taking home remedies safely

** I'm not a qualified herbalist .. what I do here is share my enthusiasm and experiences in the hope that others might get excited too and find resources for learning more and getting started**

Chives

I've got a feeling the titles for all the posts this month are going to start with the same word! We are dealing with an abundance of chives at the moment, following the stormy weather end of last week which horizontal-ised my lovely tall vertical flowering chive clumps. So what do you do with a forest of chives? Well you may ask! I've been scratching my head all day and here's what I've come up with so far..

Chive Vinegars
I had already made a fair-sized bottle of chive vinegar using an earlier harvest end of April this year, as part of a learning assignment on the Susun Weed course I'm taking. But since I'd bottled it, I'd seen somewhere to make a vinegar with the blossoms. So I have a large bottle of blossom vinegar brewing now too. Herbal vinegar takes 6 weeks to mature, most places say, so my end of April batch was about ready and I strained and tasted it this morning. Its good! And I think we can probably use plenty because its good as a general purpose vinegar for liberal use on your fish and chips for example, rather than just for salad dressings.

Chive and Lemon Butter
Ok, so flowers taken care of. Now a good sort of the stems - young, fresh, newer ones can be preserved as herbal butter. My favourite one which I use lots of is just grated lemon zest and finely chopped chives. This is fantastic on the new potatoes we're eating at the moment, but is also really nice for a jacket potato in the autumn or for roast chicken (push the butter up underneath the skin, so it oozes out and bastes the bird while its in the oven).

All you need to do is mush the herb and lemon zest into the butter and just squidge it all about until evenly distributed. It helps if you remembered to get the butter out of the fridge a while beforehand (note to self!) and you might want to dice it to speed things along. Now you can do one of two things with your buttery mixture. Where I've followed recipes for herb butters in the past, they always tell you to place a dollop of mixture onto clingfilm or tinfoil and roll it into a sausage shape. You can then just twist up the two ends and you have a convenient parcel for storing your butter in the fridge, just slicing off segments as you need them, or in the freezer for longer term use.

Maybe its just my lack of finesse in these matters, but this method often leaves me struggling to extricate bits of tinfoil or worse clingfilm from my nice little butter rounds. Its alright for storing in the fridge, but if I'm going to freeze the butter I now always use the second method which is...

.. ice-cube trays. This is something I learned when making batches of babyfoods for the little'un when he was weaning. If you freeze things in ice-cube trays, then once they are frozen you just pop them out and into a freezer bag or container and they stay in handy little portions. You can then just take as many or as few as you need out of the freezer. I have to confess to having one little tray of heart-shaped cubes - this always goes down well if you have guests and want to put a little butter portion on the side of each plate or in a little dish on the table. But this pleasing little touch is entirely lost on my boys in everyday situations.

The more robust stalks I chopped finely and decided to just freeze in a bag - I will try adding to soups, to get that delicious onion flavour, where they will be cooked a nice long time so that they become tender. So now I'm left with bunches of stems that are somewhere between these two extremes - time to get baking! I've got a really nice recipe for savoury muffins which I'll share with you next time.

Chive and Marigold Scones

Well its June today, and officially summer! I've never really tried the edible flowers and petals thing before, but this seems as good a time as any to give it a go. And time to do something with the vast quantity of chives I have overflowing the veg patch (standby for more chive recipes to follow!).

A big thank you to Debs at Herbal Haven for this fabby Chive Flower and Marigold Petal Savoury Cheese Scone recipe which me and the little'un donned our aprons to try out this morning.

I'm a great cheese scone fan in general (hence the extra bit of grated cheese to top several of the scones!) and love the onion taste of chives, which I use to make Cheese and Chive muffins, but I've never used the actual flowers before. In previous years I've used the stems then let the plants flower and collected the seed to use in future. But since I took to digging up and dividing chive clumps I have achieved a chive forest and the flowers are everywhere, such a shame not to try and use them.

Because they are practically golf-ball sized, I pulled the petals out - this was fiddly until I got the knack of how to hold/pinch/squeeze to remove the green parts of each little floret. Still the marigold petals couldn't be easier - picked a flower straight from the plant by the back door, gave it a good shake and my assistant helped pull the petals out (nice and easy).

Here he is mixing the dough - look at him go, that spoon is just a blur!

And, voila! Savoury Scones.














Its a really good recipe: quick and virtually idiot-proof, but delicious. Although the colour of the chive petals vanished in the oven, you could really get the onion flavour coming through in every bite. We'll definitely make these again and next time use much more herb - the bright colour of the marigold petals looks really attractive, sunshine on a plate.

Share your herby recipes here ... especially chive ones, lol!

Growing

I last posted just as April was arriving, but here we are just about to bid her farewell .. what's been happening in between? A lot of rain, and some very high winds (but then you knew that, right, if you're in the UK?!!) and a lot of growing!

All the wet has really exacerbated my problems with the little munchers who have been wreaking havoc in my growhouse .. this week I finally decided to bring in the peas, beans, sunflowers and courgette plants that had been seriously gnawed and were more hole than leaf :-( They are all perking up considerably back behind glass on the sunny recovery windowsill.

To make room on said sunny windowsills for the beleagured ones, I've put out my unexpectedly enormous quantity of baby tomato plants, as the slugs and snails don't seem as interested in tomatoes. This was a little experiment of mine, because I'd (inadvertantly) left out the last of my Ildi tomatoes on their plants in the growbags on the flat roof outside bedroom window last season - and there they hung all winter come wind, snow, storm or whatever. And there they were still in March, and several people told me to squish the dried out fruits onto kitchen roll and see if I could grow them. So I did! I put differing amounts of compost beneath and above (not really knowing what I was doing) inside eggbox lids not really expecting much .. and you've never seen anything like it. Germinated all over the place and what's more, every single one I transplanted (into its own little loo roll holder of compost) has taken. I have about 60 babies in trays of 5 or 6, all over the house!

Here are some in the coldframe, which seems to have fared better in terms of the illicit munchers. Also baby dill and marigold plants. And the start of a box of salad (against all the odds!)

They are a wonderful tomato, pretty little yellow plum-shaped cherry size fruits and really heavily laden plants. You can put them in hanging baskets or grow them up canes. I hope I will be able to find them all good homes to go to. Meanwhile, my 'proper' tomatoes, which I sowed in February, are busy flowering, would you believe .. a bit of regular nettle infusion has done wonders!

Also flowering at the moment are the strawberry plants outside, and we'll soon have the lovely chive blossoms too.

I've done better with the sweetpeas this year, soaking them helped and getting them enough light quickly enough and pinching them out at the right time (thanks to my wonderful neighbour who is expert at these things and doesn't mind a bumbling novice's barrage of questions!) Previous years they've been really leggy, so I'm quite pleased that I'm starting to get the hang of it. Won't risk these outside till the weather sorts itself out condsiderably.

April showers are magical .. every year it amazes me just how much everything GROWS in just a few weeks! Usually in March I look at the herb garden and think there's lots of gaps and I'll need a few more plants to pop in here and there. Then by the end of April everything is burgeoning. And although I love to see the flowers, there is something super special in April about all that lush bright green growth, unsullied and full of promise and newness and freshness. Every day this month I've stood by the back door looking out at the garden in the rain and its kind of visibly grown in front of my eyes. Fantastic!

Indian Summer

Glorious sunshine, not a cloud in the sky! A good chance to have a look at what's happening in the garden.

Most of the vegetable patch is long over, but it is still home to a bumper patch of rainbow chard and a thriving row of chives. I planted calendula and nasturtium seeds in the little strip of soil between the veg bed and the path and have been pleased with the colourful display.

I have had masses and masses of calendula flowers for making oils, salves and tincture and drying for teas and the more you cut it the more it comes again (everything in my part of the garden has to be useful as well as beautiful and beautiful as well as useful, if you see what I mean!)

Bees

The herb garden is at its finest, with a whole host of flowers opening and doing their thing. We had glorious sunshine yesterday afternoon, and the bees were busy working away on all the blossoms.. I've never seen so many. And I'm glad I put a pot of chives on the kitchen windowsill, because I get to see the many bee visits at close quarters while I'm cooking or washing up!











Also, this year, the valerian and sunflowers are about eye-level height.. so I can get a really good look at the bees (who don't seem to mind as they are so busy in the flowers!). I've seen big fat bumbles, but also longer narrow bees and I've decided to try and find out a bit more about the different types of bee that might visit an English garden.

Buds

There's a lot of budding going on in the Hedgewitch herb garden right now! And as we go from May to June (and from Spring-ish to Summer-ish) it feels as though we are also changing colours: in May the garden hosted purple blooms, the sage flowers and chives, then more white appearing with the elderflowers and valerian. The thyme is currently in flower with pretty pinky-white blooms and the yarrow is fit to burst, too.





Now, as the daylight hours approach their maximum the yellow flowers are opening to greet the sun: the calendula blooms are opening, the rue buds are turning from green to yellow, and it won't be long before the St John's wort flowers to mark the longest day.

Garden Update

Just in case anyone is under the impression I never have any problems in my little garden... I present evidence to the contrary!



I think a little slug got into the cold frame. One day there were happy sweetpea seedlings, the next day .. there weren't!! (Its OK, I had a couple more which I rescued in time.

Otherwise, everything in the garden is doing well, as far as I can tell. I really like the variegated apple mint foliage, the chives are just opening and the herbs are generally verdant.

Gardening

Despite the weather forecast for extreme cold and possible snow even as far south as London this weekend, yesterday found me on the roof in a tshirt in glorious sunshine!

This was my first visit to my garden this year.. and I spent several very happy hours making a tour of inspection, tidying up, and re-aquainting myself with old and valued friends.

I was so excited to see nearly everything looking green and verdant and full of life and potential. I lost my rose-scented geranium and my thyme this winter, but that was entirely my fault as they should have been got in .. they're not hardy enough to tough it out up there.

I also had a great time building my self-assembly mini-growhouse which I got very marked down in a sale at B&Q! I'm usually pretty DIY in my garden, making cloches and cold frames out of anything to hand rather than spending money on purpose-built things (watch out for my shower-cap wearing carrot troughs later this month!) But I'm glad I rescued this from the 'unloved' shelf at B&Q .. I'm so please with it and it means I can put out my taller seedlings for acclimatising. One of the problems of gardening on the roof is that it can be pretty blowy.. I'm continually amazed how some of my taller herbs stand up to it! But the new guys need a little help ... so my sunflowers and dwarf beans are zipped up safely in their new home.

I was particularly pleased with the lemon balm and yarrow and have been able to get some really good leaves for ceramic impressions. I'd never had much luck with getting yarrow to grow before last summer, so I was so pleased to see it looking healthy .. and I found its little babies everywhere too! And Lemon Balm is a big favourite of mine because its a lovely tea, you can put it in cooking and I make and use the tincture, which is invaluable.

Another lovely surprise was finding that the little clary and sage seedlings of last spring are now enormous healthy plants. I'm a proud mama! I can't believe how well they've come on and they are both in bud. The clary is a particular favourite of mine .. I only grew it once before, from a plug plant I bought at a herb stall. It just took off!

It had these amazing huge leaves and then threw up a great strong spike which was covered in purple flowers which exuded the most incredible scent (its where the essential oil Clary Sage comes from, which is a favourite of mine). I have really missed it from the garden, so I tried growing some seed last year and am really pleased I did.

I noticed a ladybird on the clary when I went up into the garden, and later discovered loads of little baby ladybirds (or I should say BIG baby ladybirds, because the grubs are a lot bigger than the adults, which always amazes me!) So they must like this plant and this bodes well for the year, as you can never have too many ladybirds in a garden.

When I first go up into the garden each spring its always nice to find the rosemary in flower to welcome me. I like how there's always something happening and something new flowering and this is the first thing in the chain. I was also happy to discover little edible things! The kitchen garden area was looking pretty good and I should be able to put together a nice salad with chives, garlic chives, sorrel leaves.. I also appear to have a life-time's supply of parsley .. don't understand it, because I can never keep parsley alive for longer than 5 minutes in the summer, but found 4 pots of it looking fresh and appetising. Think the judicious use of drip trays may have helped enormously.












This morning I had the great pleasure of going up first thing and seeing how it was all looking (I always have a quick chat with my plants and ask them how they're doing!)... happy Hedgewitch.