meansoybean

Calendula officinalis. To some it’s a pretty flower to admire, to me it’s a powerful herbal medicine. I’ve only scratched the surface on medicating oneself herbally, but the stuff I’ve read about the benefits of Calendula are remarkable, especially in regards to the skin.

After a lot of research, I had started 9 seedlings indoors about a month before the last frost. Since the first blooms appeared in late June, I collected orange flower heads, dried them and carefully plucked the petals off. I eventually had enough to fill a 500 ml canning jar and recently covered the dry mass with olive oil. It now sits on a window sill as I impatiently wait. This is the folk method of making an oil infusion, from James Green’s book, “The Herbal Medicine-Maker’s Handbook: A Home Manual”, where no measuring or weighing of ingredients is involved.

The plan all along was to use this calendula oil and blend it along with both shea and cocoa butters to make a whipped body cream. Though I really wish I had more petals. I would have liked to make a tincture or infusions for over the germ-riddled winter season. My only excuse is that I had gotten lazy near the end and let many flowers go to seed. The advantage to my laziness is that I collected a lot of that seed. I spread it over various parts of my land, hoping for “volunteer” plants to pop up next year.

Next season, I plan on keeping the entire dried flower head for medicine-making en lieu of just the petals. I noticed that the heads contain a lot of sticky resin that’s full of the healing properties calendula flowers are known for. I’ll also reserve a small jar of dried petals in the kitchen to use as “poor-man’s saffron”.

Check these write-ups on Calendula:

- Calendula: Plant Sunshine (PDF), by The East-West School for Herbal & Aromatic Studies
- Calendula – aka Superherb, from Whispering Earth
- July is Calendula Month!, from the Urban Herb School
- Calendula, University of Maryland Medical Center

But it’s not just about what these flowers can do for us… Calendulas are bright, cheery and simply a pleasure to look at.

Disclaimer: It should be said that, if you’re planning on delving into herbal healing, you should perform your own due diligence and research the hell out of whatever it is you intend to prescribe to yourself or others.

Don’t mind the battered and well-loved cookie sheet:

I took advantage of the today to get some stuff out of the garden: Tiny Tim and Early Girl tomatoes, jalapeño peppers, ground cherries, eggplants, lemon thyme, pole beans, coriander seeds and a tiny Spanish onion I accidentally pulled out.

I now realize that I need to bone up on succession planting in preparation of the next growing season. Had I been more knowledgeable on the topic, I’d still have pole beans coming in. I’ve taken the seeds from some of the dried-on-vine pods and threw them back into the bean row. Though it’s merely a test, with no added inoculant, it’d be neat to get an extra crop before it gets too cold.

One of the successes of the 2011 garden (my first ever) so far is the garlic. The cloves were taken from a CSA basket garlic bulb and put into the ground last Novemeber. After much anticipation, the resulting bulbs were finally dug up during two weeks ago and have been drying ever since.

I was torn between cutting the scapes and letting them form bulbils (flowers with baby cloves), but I decided to go with the latter. Many people insist that the bulbils zap energy from the garlic bulb, making it smaller. I suspect it might be true. What I should have done is tested this theory on half the crop. Oh well, next year.

So, I have a bunch of bulbils now. I cooked with two of them since they’re essentially teeny tiny cloves of garlic. The others have dried, and I’ll probably plant them this Fall in the hopes that they get bigger. Bigger cloves means I’ll get bulbs the following year. Yeah, garlic is complicated. I’m also going to sacrific half of this year’s garlic yield, and half of what I get from the CSA basket, so I’ll have more cloves to plant. I’ll select the best of the best to ensure I get nice-size garlic next Summer.

Local garlic is really pungent, fresh and tasty — unlike those cheap grocery store bulbs from China. I’ve read that local garlic is hard to find, and I suppose that’s true. But I think our globalized food system is partly to blame because it’s altered the our food shopping habits (and created unreasonable expectations when it comes to out-of-season variety and exotic foods). If you’re into breaking that habit, now is the time to stock up on garlic from farmer’s markets. Not just a few bulbs, but rather enough to keep you going until next year’s harvest. I hope to grow enough of my own garlic at one point to achieve this.

In the meantime, why not visit this nifty-sounding event a visit?
The 5th annual Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue Garlic Festival on Saturday, August 20, 2011 from 9am to 2pm. I might swing by to check out some potential additions for the garden.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll know that the large tomato plants suffered a bit damage caused by the recent wind and rain. They’re about 8 feet tall, caged in, what I realize now is, a rickety support structure of bamboo and chicken wire. Next year I’m going to up the game and put in two rows of Florida Weaved tomato plants on either side of the yard — I’m still trying to get a privacy fence going to block out the neighbours.

Despite that, I’ve harvested a few, very beautiful, Early Girls. However it should be said that this one tomato plant was an impulse buy at the hardware store. I didn’t know anything about it but now I kind of regret the purchase. Turns out that the patent for this hybrid is owned by Monsanto. Not a company that I wish to have in my garden. In any case, I definitely won’t be saving any seed from these tomatoes.

Now, the Brandywines are either slow to flower and fruit, or just aren’t. I’m thinking it’s more of the latter than former. There are a few green tomatoes but not many. Given how many Brandywines I have (six?) I think I should have more tomatoes. On the bright side, I have a huge fruit that’s almost ripe and, fingers crossed, I’ll be able to pluck it without incident. If I’m able to get my hands on it, I’ll definitely save the seeds to refresh my stock. The original seeds came from a CSA basket tomato several years ago, back when I was still living in an apartment.

The two Tiny Tims are doing pretty well, though they seem way too big for their spot in the raised bed. They’re way bigger than the 12 inches promised on the seed packet and I “blame” the hoop house for that. I think the warm conditions really helped the Tims (and everyone else) grow larger than average. This development caught me off guard so I was late in trying to stake them. It was very difficult and I wasn’t able to get all of the branches off the ground. Still, I love how quickly the little fruit mature on these plants.

I’m already starting to think about next year and am looking for other heirloom varieties to try. I want to get into canning so Amish Paste looks like a good candidate. But I’m open to suggestions, got any?

As the cats explored the back this past Sunday, I tended to the garden and gathered this:

It had been two weeks since I last did a basil cutting and I ended up with an impressive 268 grams (more than half a pound) of basil. I can only imagine how much that would cost if purchased from the grocery store. As usual, this batch will be turned into pesto for freezing — great for those days when I just don’t feel like cooking. My goal is to have enough pesto in the freezer to last me until next Summer.

The Japanese and Fariytale eggplants will probably end up in the freezer, unless I can get more from the garden in time to make something right away. Last week, I made an eggplant ziti recipe by Snarkyvegan that was excellent and everyone should try. I used a combination of Melanzane, Fairytale and Japanese eggplants — the three varieties I’m growing this year.

The oregano and thyme were set out on drying screens. More on my yet-to-be-finished drying rack later.

The tomatoes and jalepeno pepper went into a salsa with some leftover corn from the farmer’s market. It goes like this: finely chop three medium tomatoes, a bunch of cilantro, mince two cloves of garlic and a green onion and combine in a bowl with a splash of olive oil and white vinegar. Stir in kernels from one ear of corn (mine were cooked), then salt and pepper to taste.