Herbs - Medicine for the Rest of Us

When I took up growing mushrooms, the thing that most attracted me to them was their potential health benefits, i.e. their medicinal value. My preferred delivery path is eating or drinking, often in combination with other tasty ingredients, rather than pill form.

Now that our reishi mushrooms are growing on log totems, I'm looking forward to drinking plenty of reishi tea. While I'm at it, dropping a green tea bag into the pot will be an easy way double the immunity boosting power of the brew and help ensure against prostate cancer. Drinking several cups a day will be easy in this climate.

After realizing the magic in mushrooms to cure and prevent major ailments, I also realized that I've foregone potentially significant benefits from herbs as well, merely because our FDA and medical establishment steers us down the prescription drug path. It would be great if my wife and I could cut our pharmacy bill by growing medicinal herbs and cook at least part of our medicine into meals we eat.

Photo by Eugene Birchall

There is a new continuing education class being offered by the College of Southern Maryland this October on using medicinal herbs. I'm hoping to enroll. You pay $100+ for lab fees, but get to take home maybe ten herbal potions that they help you to concoct.

Self Preservation

The University of Maryland Extension has me doing a lot these days. The little commitments you make to get into these volunteer roles turn out to require big allotments of time when you count all the self-directed projects and tasks that come from knowing how to do something. Even the free classes, given under the banner of "Garden Smarter," can alter your lifestyle by launching you into home-based activities you may have never undertaken otherwise.

In my case, it was the Garden Smarter series that acquainted me with the Master Gardener program and also taught me how to safely can produce. Prior to taking the free class on Home Food Preservation by our local extension educator, I was on pretty shaky ground with canning (though I still managed to win a blue ribbon in the Calvert County Fair for bread and butter pickles). Now, in our second year of canning per the Ball Blue Book (available at many hardware and farm goods stores), we are becoming somewhat proficient, having already canned homemade barbecue sauce, ketchup, tomato paste, and taco sauce using our bounty of biochar-farmed tomatoes, peppers, and onions. Even with all the canning, I've been picking more than enough to sell 15 lbs of heirloom tomatoes per week to a local restaurant. Our green beans are doing so well this year that, just to keep up with the harvest, we are freezing instead of canning them.

When you put so much work into growing your own food, you darn sure aren't going to let it go to waste. The reward comes when you get to savor all the real food flavor that the corn syrup laden commercial versions leave out. There is also the assurance that you are getting more nutrition and avoiding harmful chemicals with each mouthful. If you need convincing, I would encourage you to try home canned items bought from a farm stand, made yourself, or here at our place. We have a good year of eatin' to look forward to.

Nature Skills

I was pleased, yet dismayed, to come across someone's short-lived wildflower patch on the side of a less traveled road in my community. It inspired me to think that guerilla gardening like this could be done in many other places, with no permitting needed. I just wished that the native plants could have out-competed the countless weeds that had come to dominate. Perhaps, with the right soil preparation, the best plants for the location, and attention to plant spacing, it could have looked something like this without much follow-on maintenance. 

Photo by Richard Ashley

Even with the array of information easily available on numerous native plants to consider for various purposes, the art of garden design requires first-hand detailed knowledge of plant appearance and behavior. For example, I can see that a Great Blue Lobelia might be a lovely addition to a butterfly garden, but how well does it play with others in its root space? The answer is not easily found in documents, and is probably best discovered through consulting more experienced gardeners and naturalists.

Master Gardeners should be able to design gardens and use available online tools and references to make informed plant selections. Yet, it wasn't until I was trained as a Master Watershed Steward that I got exposed to enough of this material to feel confident in garden design. I have also come to realize that even both of these designations won't fit me to single-handedly design conservation landscapes or many other planting schemes. It's going to take collaboration.

Master Naturalists are skilled in wetland restoration, among other things, so they could be good resources for rain garden plant selection. There are many Master Gardeners who seem to have a good amount of native plant knowledge. +Kurt Reitz operates an outdoor native plant nursery at the Elms Environmental Education Center and would be one of the first people I'd ask, partly because he will give away plants for public gardens and restoration projects.

Let's face it. Most of us who take on these volunteer roles are amateurs. However, maybe one-third have had careers that make them extraordinarily valuable sources of information in their particular area of expertise. If you want to make your conservation landscaping or other restoration project have lasting value, asking enough of these kinds of folks until you find the expert on the matter in question could be critical to your project's longevity.

Healing the Land

Restoring habitat is not limited to wilderness preservation. Significantly more biodiversity can also be had by improving landscapes around our built environments. Many private residences are prime opportunities for owners to boldly transform lawns and lots into small wonderlands teeming with beneficial and beautiful beings. Conservation landscaping is a discipline that encourages such transformations and offers tools and guidelines to empower practitioners.

Photo by Jayscratch

The suburban living experiment has left occupants with half-finished properties. Having met human needs for shelter and infrastructure, builders leave restoration of the remaining devastated environment largely to homeowners. Planting turf is but a temporary salve on a bare wound. The soil under turf will not be anywhere near as healthy as it once was or could be again if covered with deep-rooted plants.

Turf, as much trouble as it can be to maintain, can also be very comely. More often, unfortunately, lawns are a less attractive mixture of weeds and uneven patches of turfgrass. Conservation landscaping doesn't call for eradication of lawns, but discourages their dominance on a property. Over time, homeowners are encouraged to transform the less fecund areas of their property with plantings that can supply many functions such as insectary, water infiltration, and curb appeal.

For those living in the Chesapeake Bay region, some tools that are available to make garden design and plant selection fast and fun are the Conservation Landscape Design Tool of the Anne Arundel Watershed Stewards Academy, or for a more step-by-step design approach, try the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay's version (also available through the Chesapeake Native Plant Center). I did a design, and wanting a more comprehensive set of native plants to select from, alternated between the tool's suggestions and those plants that met my more precise specifications at the Ladybird Johnson Native Plant Database. If nothing else, the exercise has helped me recognize a few more native plants.

Habitat for Non-Humanity

Where do we start in preserving biodiversity? Over half our world's lands have lost enough species to jeopardize the future of life on earth. Life includes plants that we cultivate. It should not surprise us, then, that agriculture, rather than urbanization, is the human activity behind most of the species losses.

Even as a gardener, I would like to eliminate some members of certain species, such as the groundhog who doesn't respect my fences or the deer who don't appreciate the beauty of my roses. Unlike the animal lovers who volunteer at my neighborhood's Orphaned Wildlife Rescue Center, I chase deer away and endeavor to kill varmints that steal the fruits of my labor. Perhaps they need to rescue orphaned wildlife because of the likes of me, but first they are going to have to rescue their organization against allegations of animal cruelty, e.g. attempting to save creatures that should have been euthanized.

If we let our hearts win out over or heads, saving mammals and other larger animals may be how we attempt to preserve wildlife. Yet, is it not natural to regard like creatures as competitors in the food chain, if not outright enemies to our species? The mistake we have made in horticulture is not only did we carry out armed conflict against nuisance mammals, but lesser phyla are treated with almost no care at all, save plants we wish to grow. Arthropods and microorganisms, for example, are so innumerable that industrial farmers don't mind applying pesticides that kill beneficial species more than the relatively few harmful ones.

Just as important as our poisoning of the environment is our elimination of natural habitat that supports biodiversity. Habitat is largely formed by physical structure, so insects become significantly more diverse in a canopied forest rather than a cultivated field. Likewise, soil biota flourishes in the fractally constructed caverns of a biochar particle. Nature enables wilderness to grow into rich structural forms at all trophic levels, providing habitats for a most diverse set of plants, animals, and fungi. Revered biologist E.O Wilson offers the prescription for our global biodiversity crisis that we should set aside half the planet as wilderness. He even tells us where we stand the best chances of success.

Photo by Pete Warner

Wilderness necessarily excludes development. We have many forests in Calvert County, Maryland that, if appropriately joined, could constitute wilderness to contribute to the half-Earth goal. Fostering more growth and development won't help. "Keeping Calvert Country" isn't about nostalgia. It's about supporting mankind's survival.

Losing Native Naivety

Our walk to the Elms Environmental Education Center's pond last week was preceded by a slide talk about the importance of using native plants in watershed protection projects. The point was made by +Kurt Reitz, our gracious host, that the reason we want native plants is for the insects.

Photo by Tim Hynes

It takes a while to pull that thread, but what it amounts to is that plants feed insects and insects feed animals and native plants are evolutionarily adapted to the food chain of their area.

I become a little indifferent to the native plant appeals when I recall that I have a food chain that currently doesn't rely on foraging and hunting. In the expectation that this could change rather quickly, I am endeavoring to establish a food forest around my home, but not strictly using natives. Planting natives is a very helpful environmental practice, but environmentmental restoration still takes a back-seat to survival. However, as our fossil-fueled supply chain falters, rejoining the local food chain may become essential to survival.

The more I garden, the more I take pleasure in growing ornamentals. Yet, future reliance on agroforestry for a multitude of resources that will no longer be derived from or made using fossil fuels deters me from planting lots of native ornamentals mainly for environmental preservation.

There are some edible natives, however, that deserve a place in my forest garden. These include: Paw-paw, persimmon, gooseberry, black raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, and elderberry. I already have everything but the first and last of these. They aren't all that I wish to grow in the way of edibles, so non-natives will be in the mix. Then there are the less edible plants that provide other key functions in support of cultivated trees, including the insectary role. The time it takes to harvest, preserve, and consume or distribute the perennial bounty will ultimately determine where my forest farming ends and ornamental gardening begins.

Oh, How the Phragmites Have Fallen

In our Watershed Stewards Academy class visit to Elms Environmental Education Center, our host, +Kurt Reitz showed us a freshwater pond that was walled in halfway around with deep stands of phragmites australis (the common reed), an invasive shoreline plant so tenacious that it requires herculean efforts to eradicate it. Typically, eradication requires cutting, spraying with glyphosate, burning the stubble, and repeat treatments a few years later. The toil and trouble associated with this regimen deters most attempts at restoration, so owners and environmentalists have essentially acceded to allowing phragmites to rob our ecosystems of their natural biodiversity.

These tenacious phragmites will weather this storm, no problem (Photo by Kurt Reitz)

The way phragmites dries up in the fall makes it a tempting target for conversion to biochar. Controlled open burns of phragmites risk turning into conflagrations that could touch off fires in surrounding areas. I wonder, though, if it may be feasible to avoid much of the cutting and spraying and make very hot fires out of phragmites stands by applying traditional charcoal-farming techniques.

Biochar could be made with phragmites similar to the Ankara system. One of the problems we have in the Chesapeake Bay area is that phragmites grows out of dredging deposits, but by using dredging spoils as the covering material for the Ankara-style burn, we would be able to kill the in situ phragmites and the seeds and rhizomes in the dredging material, as well. Open burning has been an ineffective way to eliminate phragmites since the deep rhizomes often survive and come back with a vengeance. With the Ankara approach, heat is concentrated and conducted down deeper into the soil, so there is a better chance that the rhizomes would be killed.

For phragmites, the way to apply this approach might involve cutting three-foot strips about every 12 feet, flattening the reeds in the 12 foot rows and adding the cut pieces, digging out the rhizome-filled soil from the cut areas and spreading it on the flattened reeds, adding dredging spoils (from nearby projects) to create a casing over the whole biomass, making vent holes at the ends and in the top of the ridge as necessary to maintain some air flow, lighting the biomass at both ends and keeping it going by opening or closing air vents while it cooks for several days. After it cools, it can be tilled and planted with winter hardy native plants.

Potential advantages of this approach are its economy, rapidity, sequestering of carbon, creation of a biochar nutrient filter along the shoreline, and improved soil properties for replanting.