When you are hot, dry, and irritated, it’s time for Marshmallow!  Not the puffy white confections we toast over a fire, but the plant whose roots and leaves are full of soothing medicine. 

Let’s play with chamomile. We will learn about the difference between a beverage and medicinal tea, how to take a bath in tea, a great teething soother, a colic remedy, and how to cook with these delicate blossoms.

Poultices can be very helpful for healing skin issues from bites and scratches to eczema and psoriasis. Learn how to create and use a poultice for your skin health needs.

IBS is a painful condition of the digestive tract. Have you been recently diagnosed and wanting to understand the condition better? Do you suspect that you have IBS and need to know about getting a diagnosis?

Gentle yet effective, chamomile is a wonder herb when it comes to issues of the nervous and digestive systems. Don’t let it’s gentleness fool you, chamomile works!

Now that we have gotten to know these herbs a bit better, let’s head to the kitchen to cook up some great recipes that are also tasty medicine!

My Summer has been filled with harvesting and processing herbs.  Leaves, flowers, and seeds are all great summertime harvests.  Most of these herbs are easy to dry and store for use later in teas, tinctures, compresses, powders, vinegars, oils, and salves.  Some like St. John’s word should be used while fresh.  If you are interested in growing, gathering, and making your own herbal medicines, knowing how to harvest them, process them, and store them is almost as important as knowing how to grow them.

Breathing in steam is a time tested remedy for clearing the skin and the respiratory tract. When we add herbs to the hot water, we can add even more powerful action to this treatment.

For minor injuries and even mild infections, herbal remedies can help. We can use these medicines to heal, reduce scarring, ease pain, and prevent infection.

Some of the most common herbs you can find in any kitchen can be used to make a tasty spaghetti sauce. Most of them are also mint family plants making them easy to grow guests in your garden whether it is in your field, yard, balcony, or window sill. All are quite aromatic showing a high essential oil content making them great antimicrobial allies, and they are tasty and nourishing, making them safe for regular consumption in your daily diet.

Are you sold? I know I was. Let’s dive in and meet a few of these herbal allies!

Here are a few of my favorite recipes for using California poppy.

Sleep problems are very common in our society for many, many reasons. When you are having trouble sleeping, herbs can be fantastic allies to help you get deep, nourishing, and healing sleep.

Pain is an ever present part of our lives. It’s also what sends most of us looking for medical care or natural remedies. Enter any natural food store, and you will see shelves and shelves of pain relief options. How do these work, do they even work? Where does one start on a search for natural pain relief?

In times when pain, anxiety, and sleeplessness plague us, California poppy offers us gentle relaxation and slumber. This member of the poppy family is much gentler than it’s cousin opium poppy and makes a great ally for your medicine cabinet.

Now that we have spent some time getting to more about nettles, let’s wrap this month up with a few tasty recipes.

The pain of arthritis can range from nagging to unbearable. Treatments and their side effects can as well. Counterirritation (rubefaction) can increase blood flow thereby decreasing inflammation and pain. Nettles have been used for this purpose for as long as we can remember.

Allergies affect around 20% of the US population and can range from irritating to life-threatening. Let’s learn more about allergies, what they are, how our bodies react, and what we can do to address them naturally.

Nettle is a potently nourishing Spring tonic that has some surprising uses. As medicine, nettles help with allergies, inflammation, increasing a mother’s milk supply, increasing energy, and decreasing the size of a swollen prostate. People have been using Nettle for food, medicine, and textiles for a very long time.

Now that we have spent a month discussing lemon balm and some of her uses, let’s have some fun and dive into recipes including kitchen sink medicine making.

While I love and appreciate herbs and their abilities to help us heal in many ways, they can only do so much. It is up to us to make sure our bodies are capable of mounting a correct immune response. There are issues of genetic inheritance that do make real difference, but how we live our lives, what we eat, and how we invest our mental/emotional energy can change how our genes work. This is the field of epigenetics and is a fascinating topic to study. We will also be incorporating some of the concepts of psychoneuroimmunology in today’s topic.

The summary of what we will discuss today is as follows:

• What you do matters!

That’s really it. In a world which at times can feel out of control and random, there are things we can do that can make a difference. Let’s jump right in shall we?