Wednesday, September 23, 2009

The Urban Homestead Series: Wordless Wednesday







4 comments:

Tony R. said...

Did I read on one of your post that you have a tea-teacher? if so, thats awesome! I really want to learn to make my own teas from herbs we grow in the garden...I'm thinking mint, catnip, dandelions... Do you have any books/websites you recommend?

Anonymous said...

I love your blog! Just thought I'd recommend the movie The Age of Stupid. Just finished watching it. Hopefully it will make people sit up, listen and take action.

Amber said...

Hi Tony! Well, I'm studying with an herbalist and one of the essential elements of herbalism are infusions, which is when you allow quite a bit of fresh or dried plant material to infuse into either hot or cold water for at least 4 hours to extract out nutrients, chemical constituents, volatile oils etc.

This preparation is a little more medicinal than your standard pot of tea and can be used therapeutically to provide nourishment and treat imbalances in the body that affect health and well-being.

Mint, catnip and dandelion are lovely and quite common, so you probably won't have to try too hard to find and encourage them to grow!

Mint and catnip are wonderful for digestive troubles, catnip being the stronger of the two. Both make a great tea.

Dandelion is great for the liver and is wonderfully nutritious. I would suggest eating dandelion fresh or making an apple cider vinegar infusion rather than a tea.

As for book and online resources, I don't know of any that are specific to making tea, but if you're interested in learning about herbs in general I can recommend a few things.

I really love The Medicine Woman's Roots, even if much of her writing about herbalism is still way beyond my capabilities, and though she doesn't update very often these days, The Herbwife's Kitchen is a wonderful site to explore.

Check out this post from the Medicine Woman's Roots, on herbal books for the beginner.

Based on that post, I got the Herbal Home Remedy Book by Joyce A. Wardwell and love it.

I just got the book, The Herbal Medicine-Makers Handbook by James Green, from the library today. He goes into quite a lot of depth which you may or may not want to delve into, but it also seems quite good as well. Parts of it are available to view on google books here.

I haven't read Backyard Medicine: Harvest and Make Your Own Herbal Remedies by Julie Bruton-Seal & Matthew Seal, but have heard a good review of it.

Not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but you'll definitely learn about the herbs you mentioned and more!

Enjoy. :)

Amber said...

Anon, I've seen the trailer for the Age of Stupid and am just waiting for it to come to a theatre near me! I think it's really cool how they use real footage of actual events to tell the story of climate change.