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.

Probiotics at the vet

My dog Rocco developed haemorrhaegic diarrhoea. Normally I treat my dogs with herbal medicine, but in this instance I decided a diagnosis from the vet would be necessary, because I needed to be sure that it wasn't biliary causing this. Luckily it wasn't biliary but the faecal swab didn't help with a diagnosis. The vet offered me antibiotics and probiotics. I tried to explain to him that I was going to treat him myself, but I think he was very alarmed at this. He thrust the box of probiotics at me and urged me to at least take them! Unfortuantely for him, I was firm in my refusal, but I promised to let him know how Rocco was doing the following day.

Now I've got this "thing" about probiotics. I don't think that they are going to be effective if the gut is raw and inflamed. So in my opinion it is preferable to soothe and heal the gut first. This I did with oats and slippery elm, which had the extra effect of binding the stool and stopping the diarrhoea. If the patient has seldom or never had antibiotics, the gut should repopulate with microflora very naturally, as long as there is a good base for them to adhere to. Hence first putting down the "soil" or prebiotic in the form of slippery elm and oats. Brewer's yeast is a valuable help in treating diarrhoea as it is anti pathogen and supports the good bacteria. Luckily dogs love it and once Rocco got the first tiny bit of appetite he ate some. And for those sceptics that read somewhere that brewer's yeast is not good if you have candida, according to reasearch it is actually anti candida. (German Commission E Monographs)

I recently read a statement in a health magazine that probiotics are essential - as if one will never recover without them. I am immune to such advertising and am very anti products in general. In my view it's all a money making racket. Unless one is severely immune compromised, the gut flora will recover nicely. But the diet must support healthy flora. A bad diet will support "bad" bacteria.

Anyway, bless the vet. He did his best. Rocco has made a good recovery.

Pruning the olive trees

Organic growing

Growing organically is so much more than not using herbicides and pesticides. I have about 1000sq metres of garden, of which about half is for herbs and vegetables and the rest is ornamental. There is also a lawn, which is as small as possible. Over the years I converted most grassed areas into low maintainance areas filled with hardy perennials. My one rule for the entire garden is that no poison whatsoever is used anywhere. The two chickens have done an excellent job over the years getting rid of most pests. And because I have several ponds, frogs have helped with this job. Occasionally there is a plague of something like hairy caterpillars or flea beetle, but I just wait until it's over. I have been making some sprays using tinctures like tincture of Tagetes minuta (otherwise known as Khakibos) and combining various left over or expired tinctures for stubborn things like scale and sooty mould, with some success. One does need to be regular with treatment!! And I'm not always good at that. Somebody developed a glue that is non toxic, which I use as a barrier on the trunks of trees to stop the ants from travelling up and down and adding to the disease problem. This glue is available at hardware stores (in SA) and is called vastrap. It's really excellent.

We have very few commercially available organic traps and devices to prevent coddling moth etc here in SA. I have tried home made bait, but have yet to pick a perfect apple from my tree! The glue will probably help, but the challenge will be to be regular with the application, as it does wear off over time.
So for me it's a balance between allowing nature to sort things out, and trying various herbal remedies. My aim is to leave this patch of earth in a good state when I finally move on. And hope that the next owners would do the same. But that I think is a vain hope. Most people seem to spray every little weed. When I go for a walk and have to smell the toxic fumes from someone spraying, they get a dark look from me. I haven't got to the stage where I evangelise yet.........

In my herb garden

Here in Cape Town it's winter now and most herbs have died down. There is a carpet of leaves from the apple tree and generally the soil is well mulched. My two chooks tend to scratch the leaves away, but they are feasting on any insect eggs or larvae that would otherwise produce greedy monsters in the spring. This time of year the chooks do their best work and I allow them much more freedom. It is a bit annoying that they always poo on the pathways, but at least the poos are the sort that you can pick up and throw into the beds, not like duck poos which are just a squirt!
Herbs that are thriving at the moment are Marrubium vulgare, from which I make a cough syrup; Alexanders which have no remarkable medicinal value and which self-seed rather alarmingly, but look very nice when their seed heads form. One is supposed to be able to use the seeds like pepper, but I'm not impressed with them. The Southernwood is sprouting nicely after being cut back and stinging nettles are simply thriving. But they are so useful that I am very happy that they are in abundance. Not only do I use a lot of stinging nettle in my practice, but also as a green manure and a stinky liquid manure in the garden. One can never have enough. The chooks have stripped my yarrow. It must keep them very healthy because they love it and are both very healthy and lay well, despite being 8 years old at least. I've lost count of how many years they've been a very sweet part of my life. I really adore them both, unless they eat my seedlings. But that would be my fault anyway, and generally I use enviromesh to keep them and insects off my crops.