Working dogs and working chickens

 The dogs are very adept at catching mice and rats and keep themselves busy on the lookout. The odd dove has also succumbed!

Luckily they respect the fact that the chickens are mine and ignore them. Rocco the brown one with the long tail, is just two years old, and I don't quite trust him yet so if I go out for the day I make sure the chickens are safely locked up. The chickens of course volubly protest about this and grumble for most of the day - but then I'm not able to hear that. I hate having to keep them away from the garden - but rather safe than sorry! Now the chickens would you believe it, (and if you own chickens you will know this) also are very capable of catching mice. It is quite a sight to see the tail hanging out of the chickens beak. These chickens of mine are bantams, so a mouse is quite a struggle for them to swallow!

self seeding in action

Eat and medicate from your garden

Have you ever wondered how you would survive if you couldn't get to any shops or if supplies ran out and there was no food available? In the area where I live there is very little to be had by the way of edible plants in the surrounding countryside. Most of it is in the form of vineyards and wheatfields. There's also very little to eat in areas where indigenous bush is, apart from guinea fowl and francolins.
If I have to play "survivor" in my garden, number one priority would be laying hens. With a few eggs and some greens you can prepare a very nice meal. I make the most of the greens in the garden that seem to thrive during the cold of winter, before the summer veg is available. Rocket and nasturtium leaves are so abundant that I don't need to buy lettuce. They are packed with vitamins and minerals and have very good antibiotic properties too.
I think the leafy greens make up for the lack of fruit in winter. I do have a lemon tree and now a kumquat tree which bears fruit, but the other citrus tree bears a very sour little orange, which is only good for marmalade.

Greens are not very filling, so it's important to have a good lot of root vegetables. What can be easier than potatoes and sweet potatoes? Another very generous root vegetable is the Jerusalem artichoke. The yellow flowers are so beautiful and striking. The leaves have slight antibiotic properties and the bulbs are very abundant.
Red cabbage does well in my garden. It's hardy and less prone to disease than white cabbage. It makes a good staple for cooked or raw meals. I make a nice meal with cabbage and mixed greens from the garden with linguini.

Quite a few weeds are perfectly edible, often having a slight bitter flavour. It's worthwhile getting a book on weeds to identify edible ones. I tend to have a nibble to see whether they are tasty or not. So far I've survived!
The bitter flavour of dandelion and chicory leaves is very healthy for the liver and adds a nice flavour to a meal as long as it's not overpowering. We westeners tend to be real sissies when it comes to bitter flavours, which is very sad because bitters are so good for health. I reckon if we were starving taste would not be so important!

It seems to me it's a real luxury to have just an ornamental garden, and I like things to self seed in amongst ornamental plants because self-seeded plants always seem so healthy and happy. I had cherry tomatoes in between shrubs of all types last year, and they produced loads of tomatoes without any disease.

From the garden

Returning to my garden after two weeks in Europe was like being in a European garden - stinging nettles and Alexanders up to my shoulders - rather lovely. The vegetable seeds I had sown before I left had all germinated nicely and will soon be ready for planting in the veggie patch. The olive trees that I pruned so severely in July are loaded with blossoms - it will be interesting to see if they turn into olives. So far only the mission tree has ever had olives. Also the apricot tree and plum trees are in bloom. While I was in the UK, shopping in my favourite places - the garden centres, I came across plum maggot traps and codling moth traps as well as grease bands for the fruit trees. These were rather expensive when one converts the currencies, but in my pursuit of an organic fruit harvest, I bought them. This means that if I have a harvest it will be the most expensive organic fruit I've ever had. But I've found it almost impossible to grow fruit organically. I have never tried any other way because poison is banned in my garden, but all the fruit is affected by one or other grub or bug. So far I haven't found any organic traps for fruit trees here in SA, and have tried making my own with no success at all. I tied sticky fly paper around the barks and filled bottles with a molasses and vinegar mixture to trap the various moths. I used a non toxic glue around the barks as well, all in an effort to stop the coddling moth grubs from getting up to the flowers. Nothing has worked. Let's see what these latest efforts yield!!
This is the time of year where the quick growth of weeds brings a welcome lot of greenery to the compost heap. Later on it gets so dry that there is little to offer, so I make the most of this abundance. The wonderful nettles are looking extremely healthy and will be used to make smelly but nourishing nettle tea ( I just soak the fresh nettles in water for a few weeks and then use the "tea" to fertilise the vegetables), and I'll be using some in soups too. Nettles are extremely good nutrition as well as medicine.

Herbs for holidays

As I'm on holiday at the moment, and just beginning to unwind from the stress of the preparations, I was thinking  of how invaluable herbs are to me when I travel. I literally couldn't manage without them. You won't find any other medicine in my luggage than herbal medicine. Naturally we all take the type of medicine we think we are going to need when we go on holiday, and this depends on what we are most prone to get when away from home. In my case the most likely problem would be getting a cold after the long flight from Cape Town to London. I never get a cold, but I'm guaranteed one if I don't take my own immune booster which contains Echinacea and a couple of other South African herbs which act synergistically. This I take before, during and after the flight. Stress and anxiety were a problem for me this time so I added a good dollop of Valeriana. This worked very well.
I took a couple of tea bags for the flight, one of green tea and one peppermint tea, both herbs are good for the digestion and refreshing in comparison to the teas on offer. It's good to have a supply of your preferred tea for hotels too.
Tummy upsets can be a problem for many of us. The change in diet as well as travel itself can wreak havoc with one's digestion. For me Ginger is an excellent remedy to take along, either in tincture form where it can be added to green tea for a soothing digestive remedy, or in the form of ginger sweets. I like Gingerbon sweets. They are really strong and can even help for travel queasiness. For those who suffer from migraine headaches, they may be very helpful for the nausea too.

Most people take water with them where ever they go, as it is very easy to dehydrate when on holiday. However, even with the best precautions dehydration does sometimes occur, and can trigger a nasty bout of cystitis in those who are vulnerable. A bottle of Buchu tincture (Agathosma betulina) is a very good medicine for this and can be used prophylactically if dehydration occurs and you want to nip things in the bud.

Obviously there is no jet lag between Cape Town and London, but as this is about herbs for travel, I'll include  the medicine I formulated a few years ago when I travelled to New Zealand. I used Valeriana and Vitex agnes castes in equal parts and filled the last bit of the bottle with Liquorice root tincture. I took this mixture before, during and after the flight and had no jet lag whatsoever on either journey (there or back). Maybe it just worked for me, but it's worth a try. I'd love to hear from others who try it.

If you have a sensitive stomach and easily get diarrhoea on holiday then it makes sense to take along a bottle of Potentilla tincture. This will settle a case of diarrhoea. Take Echinacea with this for fighting any infection that    may be causing the problem. And some chamomile tea for soothing the GI tract.

Don't forget to pack your tinctures in the main luggage and have just one for the flight in your hand luggage. And do get your medicines from a phytotherapist. They have the best tinctures. Those you buy in the health shops are often not very potent and come in very small bottles. Bon voyage!

Herbs for fever

Most of the mums who bring their children to see me for the first time have been indoctrinated with the concept of suppressing a fever. Apart from giving medicine I see my job as one of helping people understand their bodies and how they work. Understanding fever is very important, because suppressing it is working against the body's defence mechanism. Fever is there to help kill the bugs that have invaded the body. I'm often asked why the child has a fever. Quite simply any pathogen which enters the body can cause a fever, and it's often difficult to diagnose. The main thing is to work with the body and not against it.

I encourage my patients to phone me if their child has a fever and I'll help them through it. We allow the fever to rise as much as possible (this would depend on how healthy the child is and how well I know him or her) and then give certain herbs to "break" the fever which induces sweating. Keeping the child warm is part of this process. The herbs help the body to eliminate the problem by encouraging kidney and liver action and promoting perspiration.

Herbs that I commonly use are Melissa (lemon balm) which is soothing as well as a good herb for fever, Elder flower, and Yarrow. I like to add some Echinacea, Chamomile and Peppermint. I might use all or some of the herbs mixed in a tea, and encourage as much tea drinking as possible!

A child with a fever will commonly have no appetite! Again many mothers ignore this and try to get the child to eat. This is also going against natural instincts, and will slow down the healing process. Fluids are most important at this time. Once the child starts to improve, the appetite will return ( a sign that the child is recovering.)

A child's immune system needs help to develop in a healthy way, and modern medicine mostly suppresses the body's natural responses.

Getting ready for Spring

We have had a very warm July (which is essentially the middle of winter) which has fooled quite a few plants into thinking that it's Spring. Recently I got stuck in to pruning the olive trees, opening them up like a "vase" as I saw on several videos on You Tube. Some of the sites one can visit, transport you into another world, like a mini holiday.
Anyway, no sooner was the pruning over, when the trees burst into blossom. And there's a lot of winter weather on the way ..... I"ll hope for the best. But if the manzanilla trees have olives this year, it will be a miracle. They have never borne fruit yet. After the pruning I gave them all a good feed - organic of course, and today we had a wonderful lot of rain to seal the deal.

In the veggie patch I've put a thick layer of home made compost on the beds and covered these with thick straw in preparation for planting in a couple of month's time. This should give the earthworms time to do their stuff, not to mention the microbes. The soil in this garden was once so hard you could not get a pick into it. It has taken 30 years of loving care to get it friable and nurtured. I like to see the soil teeming with life, and am still not happy that there is enough of it yet. Ants and centipedes are not the sort of life I want to see.

This weekend has been earmarked for seed sowing, so hopefully it will be sunny later. Tomatoes, peppers and brinjals must be sown now, otherwise they won't have a long enough season later. I learned that the hard way last year, when the brinjals and peppers only started bearing in autumn.
It's time for my Sunday lunch. I've cooked lamb and orange sweet potato. Some of those sweet potatoes will go into the soil (not the cooked ones obviously), as I really like them, and I'm sure they have better nutritional value than the white ones.